Ottawa rejects Taliban’s bid to staff its consulates in Canada
Offices still run by staff of former government
Ottawa has rebuffed the Taliban’s attempt to take control of Afghanistan’s embassy and consulates in Canada, a federal official says.
The Trudeau government, in fact, did not even respond to the Taliban’s 2022 letter, said Global Affairs Canada spokesman Jason Kung.
“Canada does not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, and will never do so,” said Marilyne Guèvremont, another Global Affairs official. “Canada will not receive or accredit any foreign representative appointed by the Taliban, or develop formal relations with the Taliban de facto authorities.”
The cold-shoulder reply underscored both this country’s refusal to recognize the rights-violating regime that seized power militarily in 2021, and the unique status of Afghanistan’s Canadian Embassy and consulates in Toronto and Vancouver.
More than two years after the government they represented was overthrown, diplomats of the previous, elected regime continue to staff the missions in Canada.
An unnamed embassy spokesman said by email that the diplomats have had no contact with the current Afghan government since August 2021. They have neither asked for nor received funding from the Taliban, the official said, meaning they’ve had to reduce staff and rely on fees from consular services provided to the growing Afghan diaspora here. That includes, for instance, issuing driver’s licences needed to obtain one in Canada.
The Taliban has asked other countries to admit its diplomats, too, but almost all have refused, said the spokesman.
“The Taliban lack national and international legitimacy. They seized power unconstitutionally. In addition to this, the Taliban’s approach to many critical issues such as inclusion, women’s rights, education and international relations is fully incompatible with our shared values and international norms.”
Non-government experts, meanwhile, disagree on whether Ottawa should continue keeping its distance from the Taliban government. Some say engagement is the only way Canada can hope to influence what’s happening in Afghanistan, while others say that the new rulers are unshakable in their brutal, misogynistic ways and any official contact would only legitimize them.
It is less well-known that after toppling Afghanistan’s government, the Taliban actually contacted Canada, one of its enemies in a bloody, years-long insurgency that cost 165 Canadian lives and countless Taliban dead. The group is officially labelled a terrorist entity here.
The Taliban-appointed chargé d’affaires at Afghanistan’s embassy in Qatar wrote the government a letter on Nov. 21, 2022, asking that Canada accept new personnel for the country’s missions, Global Affairs Canada’s Kung said in answer to queries from the National Post.
“No response to the letter was rendered, consistent with the Government of Canada’s policy of non-recognition of the Taliban de facto authorities.”
Ottawa’s denial of diplomatic recognition echoes the response of most countries in the world, as hopes that the Taliban would soften its harsh governance style have evaporated. The regime keeps girls from middle school, high school and university and bans women from most fields of employment. Public executions and floggings have returned, while Taliban gunmen have assassinated former security officials and other perceived enemies, human rights watchdogs report.
Canada would gain nothing if it set up diplomatic ties with Kabul now, says Chris Alexander, who served both as Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan and deputy head of the United Nations mission there.
“They are the most repressive, misogynist, terrorist regime to have taken power in any country in living memory,” Alexander, a one-time Conservative MP and cabinet member under prime minister Stephen Harper, said by email. “We should be sanctioning their leaders, their sponsors in Pakistan and their partners like Qatar, while finding ways to deliver grassroots humanitarian support and to back armed resistance.”
But other experts would like to see at least some engagement as a way to help ordinary Afghans.
Canada should have a presence on the ground in the country to investigate what’s happening and set the stage for more development aid, Arif Lalani, Canada’s ambassador in Kabul from 2007 to 2008, told a Senate committee last fall. He stopped short, though, of recommending entering diplomatic relations with the government.
“Essentially, the Taliban seems to have taken hostage an entire society, and our response has been to neither use force nor to use diplomacy,” said Lalani. “If we’re not going to fight, if we’re not going to arm those who are trying to fight the Taliban, we must come to terms with the fact that the Taliban exists.”
Canada was one of the elected Afghan government’s most important allies under both Conservative and Liberal governments. It had troops in the country from 2001 onward, most notably in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar from 2006 to 2011, at an estimated cost of about $18 billion. And it spent more than $2 billion on development aid.
The last Canadian soldiers left in 2014 and the embassy in Kabul was evacuated shortly before the Taliban rolled into the capital in August 2021.
In a bit of geopolitical optimism, the Global Affairs website says operations at Canada’s embassy in Afghanistan are still just “temporarily suspended.”