Afstan: "shake hands with the devil"? Again?

Terry Glavin puts the principled case for our mission, in the Vancouver Sun:

The idea of peace talks with the Taliban is gaining a great deal of traction these days as the perfect, Canadian way to stop the war in Afghanistan.

You have to admit it sounds awfully nice.

The problem is it would likely mean a human rights disaster and a giant leap backwards for the fledgling democracy Canadian soldiers have been fighting and dying to defend there.

It would also mean a power-sharing deal with thugs and criminals whom the vast majority of Afghans want nothing to do with.

That's what Dr. Sima Samar, the head of Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission, told me the other day. It's not every day that I get a telephone call from a former deputy prime minister of Afghanistan, but Samar, in Canada for a round of speaking engagements, was talking with as many Canadians as would listen.

"Of course I always prefer talking rather than war," Samar said. "But the victims of violence should not be forgotten, and human rights should not be negotiated away."..

It's not "pro-war" versus "anti-war." It's about standing with Afghans who want the fight for basic human rights to reach into every corner of their country, versus settling for a disgraceful and dubious peace with their sworn enemies.

In response to a question about the rising demand that Canadian soldiers and other NATO forces in Afghanistan be replaced with UN peacekeepers, John Manley, co-author of Ottawa's recent report on Canada's future in Afghanistan, replied with the obvious: "There is no peace to keep."

Actually, it is possible to imagine. But first you'd have to expect the UN to make a complete about-face, rescind several Security Council resolutions, and cave in to what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon only last month called a "misjudgment of historic proportions."

You'd also have to suspend disbelief enough to picture blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers out on patrol along truce lines arising from the partitioning of Afghanistan's 10 southern provinces -- which, incidentally, is just one of the Taliban' power-sharing demands.

Imagine about a third of Afghanistan locked into slavery, obscurantism, jihadism and the most savage kind of misogyny the world has ever known.

Then ask yourself whether this is the "Canadian way" of doing things.

Yes, it would mean our soldiers could come home and we would no longer be bothered by such persistent and unpleasant questions as whether we're just stooges of American imperialism "imposing our values" on faraway people.

But we would be haunted by questions of the kind that now torment Sima Samar, who remembers only too well the last time the world shook hands with the devil and abandoned Afghanistan.

"Finish the job you started," was Samar's advice...

Terry Glavin's latest book is Waiting for the Macaws and other stories from the age of extinctions. He is a founding member of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.