Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee

Afghanistan's challenges going forward are magnified to the extent that corruption saps efficiency of development and morale of the population. Canadians are working hard to help Afghan custom agents learn best practices. Bribing officials won't come to an end overnight, but hopefully with the right kind of mentoring, in tandem with overall improvements in other aspects of business, Afghans see better fairness and transparency. An excerpt from a report in the Gazette:

Two uniformed Canadian customs officers have been in Kabul since the beginning of the year to mentor Afghan customs officers on revenue collection and drug enforcement and, crucially, to not take bribes.

More Canadian agents are likely to be coming in the near future.

The presence of the Canadians in the capital is part of a multi-pronged $2.2-million Afghan initiative by the Canada Border Services Agency.

Their aim is to professionalize the Afghan customs service by making its officers and recruits less susceptible to pressure from their friends, tribal elders and others who import or export contraband, such as opium, or try to avoid paying duty on legitimate trade.

The international mission in Afghanistan faces a tough year ahead as more troops come to this land to counter the insurgency and provide security for development. But as Ann Marlowe points out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, some elements of our strategy are lacking:

Fifth, and worst, Gen. McChrystal seems to be doing his best to hearten the insurgency and dismay Afghan progressives. Our commanding general told the Financial Times last week that the point of the surge was to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, rather than clearing and holding insurgent-ridden areas of Afghanistan.

Gen. McChrystal gets it wrong on other issues. He envisions Pakistan—a country that provides sanctuary to the Taliban—as a facilitator of talks, though most Afghans believe Pakistan is trying to destabilize their country. He imagines the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia—both the source of dubious charities that fund the insurgency—as venues for the talks. And he remarks that insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is "most likely to cut a deal," noting that he is a "former prime minister."

Hekmatyar is better known as a psychopath who began his political career by throwing acid in the faces of female students when he attended Kabul University in the 1970s. He's on our list of international terrorists and should be captured or killed—not negotiated with.

No surrender to the thugs. No negotiations with psychopaths. A future for Afghanistan will not be built by cutting deals with monsters.

The Torch website has helpfully collected some of the responses to the proposal of "reaching out to the Taliban" by paying them off. I'm pleased to see that the downfalls of this plan are not merely obvious to me and my closest colleagues in the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.

One example from Bruce R. at Flit:

We always need to be seen, if only to satisfy ourselves, to be holding out the olive branch of peace. But really, given that the Taliban demands have not changed, and that their Dubai meetings with the UN and the Saudis appear to have achieved exactly squat, it would be fairly straightforward to assume that there has been no change to the conditions that made reconciliation unthinkable three years ago. The bad guys still think they can win this thing outright.

And the intrepid Terry Glavin once more lays out the sordid story in the Tyee. An excerpt:

It's not what Afghans want, but that didn’t dampen the euphoria about a cheap and easy "exit strategy" from Afghanistan that was the talk of the town leading up to the big international gathering in London last Thursday. Foreign ministers, diplomats and mandarins from more than 60 countries washed into Britain on a tsunami of upbeat messaging: President Hamid Karzai had come up with a bright and shiny new peace-talks plan. This time, it's going to work. But when the day was over, they had little to show for themselves except the appearance of looking wet and bedraggled.

It certainly sounded like a good idea. An international trust fund to win back the loyalties of "moderate Taliban" and reintegrate weary and misguided Talban fighters was the way British Foreign Secretary David Miliband described it. For years, Karzai had embarked upon various buy-off efforts and peace-talks gambits, including a demobilization project that Canada helped bankroll back in 2005 that brought some 50,000 "insurgents" in from the cold. The government in Kabul had largely botched these schemes, but now, everything was going to be just fine. Karzai and the Saudis and the Pakistanis were issuing all sorts of hopeful hints about new signs of Taliban openness. There were gleeful "I told you so" chirrups coming from the usual opponents of the Afghan project, and joyful noises coming from the newly debt-burdened NATO capitals.

But "peace at any cost" were the words Karzai had let slip in the days before the London conference. Karzai's finance minister, Omar Zakhilwal, had gone and sounded off about looking foward to welcoming Taliban leaders into cabinet posts in Kabul and government offices right down to the district level, and it was only about $1 billion he'd be wanting to make it happen. Karzai arrived in London after holding out-of-the-way meetings in Istanbul with Iran, China, and other such freedom-loving countries, announcing that the King of Saudi Arabia himself would be pleased to convene arrangements to satisfy the Taliban high command.

Canada's Ambassador to Afghanistan has managed to put his finger on one dire aspect of this new "peace" proposal to funnel cash to the Taliban in the hopes that they'll stop murdering their fellow citizens (Spectator):

"There's no point developing some kind of a fund to which former insurgents are eligible if we're not equally providing support to Afghans who are not part of the insurgency now," he said.

"So we don't want to create the impression that somehow if you're a member of the insurgency that you would be uniquely be able to benefit from the fund."

The article goes on to summarize the lame results of past efforts along this line:

Other efforts to entice the Taliban to stop fighting generally haven't worked. Past incentives have tended to attract low-level fighters, many of whom eventually return to the ranks of the insurgency.

To the Canadian government's credit, they have not signed on to this scheme as yet. We hope that they continue to avoid getting involved in this "trust fund for the Taliban" idea and focus resources on Afghans who actually want to help build their country.

One obstacle to obtaining the crucial support for Afghans that they so desperately need comes one group that ironically appears to be motivated by progressive principles -- but corrupted by dogma and ideology. In the National Post, Terry Glavin showcases the practitioners of double-think and the harm they are doing to those who don't want their kind of help. An excerpt:

Code Pink has been especially busy at the machine's nobs and levers lately. The recent scam operation they ran in Afghanistan has been child-safety-certified by no less than Jane Fonda, queen mother of the decadent liberal American bourgeoisie, who pronounces on the testimony so grossly misrepresented by Code Pink millionaire matron Jodie Evans this way: "Bottom line: everyone she met with wants the U.S. Military out of their country." A lie, hovering in a cloud of lies that gets a look-through thanks to a whistle-blower in Code Pink's ranks, Sara Davidson. Sara thought she was being a good and loyal hippie dove when she traveled to Afghanistan with Code Pink, but discovered too late that the only role Code Pink wanted her to play was that of a useless, idiotic dupe.

Lauryn Oates, meanwhile, is an actually-existing feminist who is returning to Afghanistan in a few days (we'll be meeting up in Kabul) to complete only the latest of more than dozen field assignments she's undertaken among the women of that country. Lauryn is no dupe.

Elsewhere, Code Pink has been busy performing fabulous and elaborate public-relations stunts for that peace-loving, Protocols-of-Zion-believing death cult known as Hamas. This comes as no surprise to Omri Ceren, "but there's something particularly unseemly about ostensible feminists shamelessly marching in a gender-apartheid protest."

Ah, but Omri, don't you see? It's all for peace. Peace at any cost, peace at any price, peace in our time.

Was the London conference an unfortunate blip or does it signal the deepening of a worsening trend that may have the international community ultimately abandoning Afghanistan on the basis of misplaced cultural relativism and deeply unprogressive ideas? CASC's own Terry Glavin unleashes a veritable broadside against critics of the international intervention in Aghanistan in Human Rights Service:

Bankrolling the Taliban?
"Peace at any cost."  Those were the exact words Afghan President Hamid Karzai used last week to describe the intent of a Taliban peace-talks plan that the UK, the US and Japan are pegged to bankroll as a new exit strategy from Afghanistan. British foreign secretary David Miliband must have winced.

Miliband prefers to describe the plan as kind of international trust fund. The idea is that Karzai might draw from it to bribe jihadist commanders out of the Taliban chain of command. It’s an attempt to find what Miliband calls the “the right balance of military muscle and political outreach,” but for Afghan feminists, secularists and democrats, the long, lingering dread of a squalid sell-out, all dressed up in the guise of peacemaking, is fast giving way to a gnawing, horrible fear.

"You cannot buy off your enemies,” Ahmad Zia Kechkenni, a senior adviser to Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main challenger in last year’s fraud-riddled elections, told me the other day. “When your money is gone, they will go back to fighting.”

In Paris, London, Washington and Ottawa, in all the places where young Afghan progressives would expect to find their closest friends and allies, “peace” is the conceit that animates every conversation about Afghanistan. The words on all the protest placards are “troops out.” If Europe and the United States cook up a sordid sell-out, there will be no one to stand in its way.

The Afghans are not the ones saying "Troops Out"
“Troops out” is not what Afghans say, least of all those Afghans who you would think European liberals would be proud to call their friends. From one opinion poll to the next, Afghans have good moods, and sometimes they’re in bad moods, but Afghans are now the most studied people in all of Central Asia. What they think should not be unknown to us.

The latest poll shows that 61 per cent of the Afghan people support the recent U.S./NATO troop surge, and only five per cent blame the U.S. for the violence that wracks their country. While editorialists persist in rambling on about the legendary high dudgeon with which Afghans always meet foreign intrusions, only two per cent of the Afghan people cite "foreign influence" as the country’s biggest problem. Some 76 per cent say their government should negotiate with the Taliban only if the Taliban first stops fighting.

There was nothing extraordinary about the poll. The Afghan Center for Socio-Economic Research conducted its surveys throughout the country in the dying days of 2009, and its findings reflect the same kind of thing Afghans have been saying for years.

What Afghans say doesn’t count for much in “anti-war” circles. It never did. But if you ask, you will hear from Sima Samar, head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission. “Nobody includes women in these negotiations, and that's part of the problem." That’s what Samar told me the last time peace talks were being mooted as an exit strategy. "Finish the job you started, “she said. “It is about the protection of humanity.”

You will find the same across the political spectrum. At the conservative end, Fatima Gailani, president of the Afghan Red Crescent Society, says: "Tomorrow, I don’t want to wake up and open my eyes and you are not there. It’s really scary." Suraya Pakzad, a liberal democrat and founder of Afghanistan’s Voice of Women Organization, says a foreign troop withdrawal, any time soon, would be “devastating." From a more left-wing perspective, Horia Mosadiq, Amnesty International’s resident Afghanistan expert, says foreign troops should recalibrate their victory metrics: “Instead of a meaningless focus on how many Taliban are killed or how many villages are cleared, international forces should measure their success by clear benchmarks in terms of how they've improved human rights.”

But these are not the Afghan voices we hear, and there are reasons why.

Why are we listening to Malalai Joya?
The one Afghan woman whose name is likely to be known in the fashionable parlours of the west is Malalai Joya. The BBC calls her “the bravest woman in Afghanistan.” Spain's primetime 20 Minutos calls her "the world's most beautiful female politician.” The claims she makes for herself: “I represent all the suffering people in every corner of my country," and her own voice is “the voice of all Afghan women.” But what Joya says is exactly what the west’s isolationist intelligentsia wants you to hear: The Afghan people want all those imperialist soldiers to leave, the entire enterprise has been a fraud, a failure and a lie, troops out.

Joya became instantly famous in 2003. In a fiery speech to the Afghan parliament, she called her fellow MPs a pack of war criminals. Ever since, she’s been a fixture at anti-globalization protests and “anti-war” rallies, far from Afghanistan. Her recent memoir, ghostwritten by a Canadian “anti-war” activist, is earning hagiographic notices in the posh newspapers of Europe and North America, as well as in all the usual counterculture webzines. Her message: Troops out. Damn the consequences.

This is what you should expect to hear from the celebrity figurehead of an irrelevant neo-Maoist sect – (Joyas) the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan enjoys far more support among the rich white liberals of San Francisco and Toronto than it ever did in Afghanistan - but to Afghan feminists, Joya is no longer just a marginal character, and she’s not just a nuisance anymore, either.
 
Joya has been conscripted to a project that requires a silencing of the voices of Afghanistan’s feminist mainstream and civil society majority. In the United States, Joya’s most active support base is Code Pink, which claims 250 chapters and 100,000 members. Like every other “anti-war” outfit, Code Pink has consistently and falsely claimed to champion the cause of Afghan women.

Code Pink's dirty shenanigans
Code Pink was caught red-handed last October, when a reporter with the Christian Science Monitor witnessed an encounter between some outspoken Afghan women and a Code Pink propaganda-gathering delegation in Kabul. Shinkai Karokhail, a women’s rights activist and an Afghan MP, told Code Pink: "International troop presence here is a guarantee for my safety." Said Masooda Jalhal, a former Afghan cabinet minister: "It is good for Afghanistan to have more troops – more troops committed with the aim of building peace and against war, terrorism, and [committed to provide] security – along with other resources."

The controversy was short lived, even though the way that Code Pink manipulated the testimony it took from Afghan women was exposed in a six-part blog series written by Sara Davidson, one of the eight Code Pink delegates who travelled to Kabul. Code Pink published its report and submitted its petition in person to U.S. President Barack Obama: Troops out.

The end game?
What will happen if Karzai’s “peace at any cost” formula gains traction in the world’s rich countries, if the “anti-war” movement prevails and NATO countries grow weary of it all and decide to concentrate only on Al Qaida, and leaving Afghanistan to the men in black turbans? Says Wazhma Frogh, a young Afghan human rights activist: “The answer to that question will be a life-or-death matter, for many thousands of women in my country, and men as well.”