National Post (National Edition)
WHERE IS CANADA?
OTTAWA `JUST STANDS THERE, GAWPING' AS A TRAVESTY UNFOLDS IN AFGHANISTAN
When historians look back on the surfeit of reckless indecencies U.S. president Donald Trump committed in the course of immolating America's reputation and standing among the nations of the world, uppermost in the enumeration will surely be an especially disgraceful concordat his administration entered into on Feb. 29, 2020, in Doha, Qatar.
The agreement bears an unwieldy title: Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Which Is Not Recognized by the United States as a State and is Known as the Taliban, and the United States of America. It has not brought peace to Afghanistan and it will not bring peace to Afghanistan. That is not what it's for.
The point of the agreement was simply to procure from the Taliban a commitment to be nice to the remaining 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan — among a force of roughly 10,000 soldiers from 36 countries in a complex stabilization initiative authorized by the United Nations — in exchange for the United States' commitment to withdraw its troops by May 1 of this year.
The U.S. would further strong-arm the democratically elected government in Kabul to release thousands of Taliban prisoners, and the Talibs would be expected to parlay with that government, and the U.S. would moreover badger and browbeat the government into sharing power with the bloodthirsty criminal enterprise that has been terrorizing and tormenting the Afghan people for more than a quarter of a century.
There has been no ceasefire, because the Taliban leadership was not obliged to enter into one, and has rather embarked upon a campaign of targeted assassinations that has left hundreds of people dead, mostly judges, journalists, women's rights leaders and civil society figures who have given the impression that they are disinclined to return to the time of the so-called Emirate's subjugation and slavery from the days prior to Sept. 11, 2001.
It remains unclear whether Joe Biden's new administration in Washington is going to carry on with this obscenity. A legacy of policy incompetence and incoherence from the Bush era through the Obama years and the consequent squandering of American “blood and treasure” in Afghanistan have allowed isolationist influences from the American far-right and the far-left to have their way with public opinion. There isn't much of a constituency Biden can depend upon to support any initiative that might secure the very real gains Afghans have made in the cause of a sovereign and democratic Afghan republic.
That kind of constituency is even weaker in Canada, even in the matter of the dramatic gains Afghan women have made against barbaric misogyny, and even though Canada has expended $3.6 billion in assistance to Afghanistan since 2001, and even though 158 Canadian soldiers gave their lives for the Afghan cause before our troops were called home in 2011. And even though the Trudeau government claims the G7 distinction of adopting a “feminist foreign policy,” and even though Canada is spending $270 million in a new development assistance package that claims to be largely directed toward improving health, education, and the “empowerment of women and girls,” Canada's engagement with the Taliban-Kabul negotiations is to more or less just stand there, gawping.
Ottawa's official position is that Canada will work with the Afghan government and the international community “to ensure that gains to date are not eroded” in the talks. Heather McPherson, the New Democratic Party's critic for International Development and Deputy Critic for Women and Gender Equality, doesn't believe a word of it. It's been nearly two years since Justin Trudeau announced that Canada would appoint its first ambassador for women, peace and security. It's more than a month since McPherson put a series of polite suggestions to Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau about what Canada might do to amplify the voices of Afghan women in the Kabul-Taliban talks. “I have not heard back from them at all. Zero,” McPherson told me. “I'm getting zero response.”
Canada should be working overtime on this issue, McPherson said. Canada could appoint a special envoy to act as an observer at the talks with a mandate to uphold UN Security Council commitments to engage Afghan women in peace and security efforts. We should be working with our European allies to press the Americans to enforce an unconditional ceasefire as a non-negotiable requirement for talks. We should be consulting closely with Afghan women's leaders.
“It's the Liberals' almost pathological ability to do nothing. I get it. It's complicated. Afghanistan is not an easy place to work,” McPherson said, “but Canada is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that Afghanistan
has a future that includes women and girls, and walking away during a peace process is worse than irresponsible.”
There is a persuasive point of view among Afghans and the better-informed observers of the Afghan struggle to the effect that the peace talks are doomed, because any peace talks with the Taliban were always destined to ignominy and failure, simply because it's Pakistan, Afghanistan's vicious and scheming neighbour, that is the true author of Afghanistan's historic and continuing misfortunes.
That point of view is argued convincingly in a comprehensive and in-depth analysis to be released this week by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, authored by Chris Alexander, the former Conservative cabinet minister whose 18-year career as a diplomat included such posts as Canada's first ambassador to Afghanistan and the United Nations secretary-general's deputy special representative to Afghanistan.
Echoing the findings of Pulitzer-winning journalist Steve Coll's investigations in his award-winning 2018 book, Directorate S, Alexander lays out the evidence for the Taliban as a proxy force of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Alexander's report presents an unimpeachable case for the prosecution: Pakistan has harboured, sheltered, armed and aided the Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami and several other jihadist cults that have waged war on Afghans from well before 9/11, and the ISI is continuing to do so.
It's grim reading, but it also lays out a path that Biden could take to get the United States out of the peace-talks quagmire Trump has saddled him with: It's time to shut down the mayhem emanating out of Pakistan's military-intelligence networks in Rawalpindi, and Pakistan's ruling elites in Islamabad. Do that, and there's hope for Afghanistan.
Afghans have already paid too stiff a price. So have the rest of us.
OTTAWA'S OFFICIAL POSITION IS THAT CANADA WILL WORK WITH
THE AFGHAN GOVERNMENT.