karzai peace plan

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.