Arise, all women who have hearts!  Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!  Say firmly: ‘We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies, our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause…

In 1872 Julia Ward Howe — mother, abolitionist, poet, and suffragist — envisioned that for one day each year the women of the world would call for peace.  She named it Mother’s Peace Day.  This year, I want to honor the mothers of Afghanistan by calling for a renewed commitment to a democratic and peaceful Afghanistan built by women and men on equal footing.  The news has come in from Kabul, Karachi, and Kandahar about the resilience of girls and women in the face of fundamentalist violence.  Girls sprayed with acid defy terror daily in their perilous journey to school.  More than 500 women rallied in Karachi to protest the flogging of the burka-clad teenager.  And despite the heckling of angry men, 300 women marched two miles to the parliament building in Kabul to resist a new law that permits marital rape.

In spite of their courage, mine wavers.  My fear of Taliban terror tempts me to trust in the myth of redemptive violence.  If ever there was a time to solve a problem with military force, this is it.  I imagine a nuclear armed Taliban and another generation of girls robbed of education and health care, exposed to violence in every sphere of their lives.  The horror of misogyny disguised as religion compels even a peacemaker like me to proclaim that all options should remain on the table for dealing with such unjust violence.

But what is best for the girls and women of Afghanistan?  What do they want for their future and, in their experience, what is the best pathway to a just peace that welcomes them to fully participate in public life?  In a recent poll, just 18% of Afghans support a troop increase. According to Gilles Dorronsoro of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan are “the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban.”  And with those forces pushing insurgents into Pakistan, risking further destabilization of a nuclear-armed state, military escalation could prove disastrous.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, argues that the “militarization of U.S. foreign policy” has not achieved security.  In fact, the RAND Corporation issued a report last year stating that only 7% of terrorist groups were brought down by military force.  Highly militarized societies, however, almost always produce bad results for women.  Kavita Ramdas of the Global Fund for Women claims, “Yes, Afghanistan needs troops — but it needs troops of doctors, troops of teachers.”  While nations such as India have provided Afghanistan with doctors, the world has grown weary of the only American boots on the ground belonging to those in the military.

In honor of the Afghan women who so courageously resist fundamentalist violence and in memory of Julia Ward Howe’s audacious proclamation of a Mother’s Peace Day, I lift my voice for peace this Mother’s Day.  Join me!

…Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.  We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’ –Julia Ward Howe

Rev. Amanda Hendler-Voss is the faith communities educator for Women’s Action for New Directions.  WAND’s Faith Seeking Peace curriculum, including the study guide “Women and War: the Survival of Hope,” can be downloaded for free at www.faithwand.org.