Terry Glavin

The Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee is about to unveil its vision for Canada's role in Afghanistan post-2011. It's time to put aside this irrelevant debate about detainees and get to the real conversation about how to meet Canada's strategic objectives. An excerpt from the Montreal Gazette:

The document takes no issue with the plan to withdraw Canada's battle group from Afghanistan at the end of 2011.

But what many have missed, Glavin said, is that Canada's development and aid package in Afghanistan is also due to expire at the end of 2011.

Yet Parliament is "paralyzed. Nobody knows what to do," Glavin said. Instead, MPs are engaging in an "elaborate work-avoidance activity" focused on the treatment of Afghan detainees more than three years ago.

"We need to have a new conversation in this country about a new mission," Glavin said. "We have to think about 2011 as the beginning of something, not the end of it."

Canada's mission in Afghanistan is the biggest thing the country has done militarily since the Korean War, he said.

"Are we going to turn that legacy into the greatest shame and embarrassment?

"We need to sharply refocus our objectives in Afghanistan. What are we there for? Why did all those soldiers die? How are we going to finish the job?"

To find out, the committee — made up of human-rights activists, Afghan-Canadians, academics, writers and journalists — consulted more than 100 organizations and individuals in Canada and Afghanistan.

"Everyone we talk to says, 'democracy,' " said Glavin. "Anything that gets in the way of that, we have to go through it like a wolf in a flock of sheep."

Canada should make a concerted effort to block any attempt by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to strike a backroom peace deal with the Taliban, says Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan's main opposition leader.

"The sacrifices you have made here, and all your taxpayers' money. What for? You will have to ask that," Mr. Abdullah said in an interview.

He said Canada would not be trespassing on Afghanistan's sovereignty if it moves to block a "reconciliation" deal that circumvents Afghanistan's parliamentary system. More importantly, he said, Canada is burdened by a duty to its own citizens to see that it does not happen.

"You have more than a right to stay firm in that," Mr. Abdullah said. "Not just for the sake of any Afghan persons or an Afghan movement, but for the sake of the sacrifices you have made here. You are not in the business of betraying your own people. In that sense, it is an obligation."

The former Afghan foreign minister, who was Mr. Karzai's front-running challenger in last year's fraud-plagued presidential election, credited the Canadian-led Electoral Complaints Commission with heading off a fatal rupture in Afghanistan's young democracy last November.

A recount ordered by the commission forced Mr. Karzai to a runoff vote, but Mr. Abdullah declined the rematch, citing entrenched corruption in Afghanistan's elections system.

Mr. Abdullah said that despite the calamitous result, the intervention of the complaints commission and its Canadian chairman, Grant Kippen, saved the day. But he said that Canada cannot give up now, with a complete political collapse looming after Mr. Karzai's attempts to strike a power-sharing bargain with the Taliban.

"Had it not been for the commission's efforts, we would have had no hope," said Mr. Abdullah, who is in the early stages of building a broad-based political party with a focus on political accountability, transparency and fully free elections.

"There was a complaints commission that we could trust. They gave us hope. Without it, this country would have been in turmoil, and I'm not just talking about the Taliban. I'm talking about the whole political scene. It would have been in turmoil."

Unless Mr. Karzai is held democratically accountable as he proceeds with his Taliban reconciliation schemes, a far worse scenario looms.

While Mr. Karzai has been offering peace deals to the Taliban ever since he was first elected in 2004, he has ramped up his entreaties since his close-call re-election last November. The Taliban leadership has repeatedly rebuffed his appeals, but Mr. Karzai has lately won some Western backing for an internationally funded package of buyouts to Taliban fighters.

That plan has been overshadowed, however, by Mr. Karzai's oblique suggestions of outright power-sharing with the Taliban by granting its leaders top government posts and control of government ministries. At an international conference of more than 60 donor countries in London last month, Mr. Karzai further surprised delegates with an announcement that he intends to invite the Taliban to a traditional "jirga," or grand assembly, later this year.

  While this enthusiasm for deal-making has won some support in the war-weary countries that make up the NATOled ISAF coalition, Mr. Karzai's recent moves have set off loud alarms in Afghanistan.

"With whom are we going to negotiate? Who are the decision-makers?" Sabrina Saqib, an outspoken young Afghan MP, said in a separate interview. "The Taliban ... say that they want the foreign forces gone. Is this negotiable? Canada has come to bring us democracy. If you leave, I don't know how many days I will have."

She said an "exit strategy" sell-out to the Taliban would reverse all the gains that Canada and the other 42 members of the International Security Force have made in Afghanistan, Ms. Saqib said.

Canada's Lawrence Cannon was one of the few foreign ministers to express skepticism about Mr. Karzai's reconciliation scheme in London last month. Nevertheless, while Ottawa's long-standing policy of backing "Afghan-led reconciliation efforts" is appreciated by the Afghan people, the policy could be easily subverted, Mr. Abdullah warned. The policy could make Canada complicit in a power-sharing deal that reverses Afghanistan's slow and painful strides toward democracy.

"I know how bureaucracy sometimes works," Mr. Abdullah said. "You go along with something if it suits."

He said Afghanistan's friends around the world should hold Mr. Karzai accountable to democratic principles and not let him get away with turning back the clock. "The government is shifting the whole focus to how we should bring the Taliban back. This is very dangerous.

"If the Taliban will finally break the resolve of the North American public to stay in Afghanistan, they will be back," he continued. "They don't want to be part of the political process. They want to destroy it and replace it with their own.

"All this talk about reconciliation is very tempting for the international community, but this is a charade. Who is talking about fighting corruption? Everybody is talking about reconciliation, and it doesn't have a foundation, it doesn't have a basis. If you pay bribes to people through the same corrupt system, then all you're left with is corruption."

The Marefat School in the foothills of the Paghman Mountains is a place where young Hazaras, some of the poorest people in Afghanistan, are getting a chance at a future. As Terry Glavin reports from Afghanistan, this place has not always been so peaceful, even until recent times:

Last year, the school was attacked by a mob incited by Tehran's mullah in Kabul, Ayatollah Mohseni, from his gleaming, blue-domed madrassah down in Karte Se. The mob came screaming for Aziz Royesh, Marefat's short and stocky principal. The school is a dirty nest of Christians, communists and prostitutes, they shouted, there are boys and girls together, Royesh is an apostate, Royesh must die.

"I was right here," Royesh told me, standing in the rutted and muddy alley outside the school. "The boys quickly locked the doors to the school, and I ran into my house, right there."

Yet the students, teachers and administrators have struggled to keep this place going. But if Afghanistan is to have a future for its youth beyond the poppy plantations and battle-scarred villages, this effort must continue. The youngsters want a future:

"I will be a chemist. I will be a doctor. I will be a journalist. I will be a businessman."

They will be.

The National Post is running a series of commentaries on the idea, gaining traction in some circles, of negotiating with the Taliban and getting international troops out of the country (just before the Taliban tear up any peace deals and conquer the country all over again, presumably). Here is a roundup of these excellent op-eds:

Matt Gurney: Beware a 21st-century Vietnam
Those eager to find a negotiated end to the war in Afghanistan must recall that invading, occupying and rebuilding a foreign country after a major terrorist attack reflects the middle ground of retaliatory options. If a diplomatic debacle in the pursuit of peace at any cost allows Afghanistan to go down in history as a failure, a war best not fought, the consequences to future generations might be worse the next time a rogue nation effectively declares war against the West, as the Taliban/al-Qaeda criminal consortium did in 2001.

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.