No surrender in Afghanistan...

Terry Glavin, one of Canada's experts on Afghanistan, gets it right in the National Post....

From 1994 until 2001, while the Taliban was turning Afghanistan into a slave state and the people were reduced to eating rats and grass, the UN Special Mission to Afghanistan shuttled truce-talks envoys around the country. Mere weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, they were still at their keyboards in Kabul, composing plaintive appeals to Taliban officials. How did that turn out?

By all means, try to reason with the Taliban. But you’ll want to know, going in, that its jihad is a revolt against the very idea of reason. The only reason the Taliban makes a promise is to break it. It’s why no one has yet devised a negotiating stratagem more elegantly effective than “put the gun down or we will kill you.” And sometimes even that doesn’t work.

Since 2001, the Taliban actually has come to several “peace agreements” — on the Pakistani side of the border. The Taliban has torn up every one. It has marched into every town or province it had promised to leave alone. Last year, the Pashtuns of the tribal areas parlayed with the Taliban for peace, and for their trouble, they were hanged from lamp posts. They were incinerated by the dozens in suicide bombings.

There is a bright side to the recent enthusiasm for engagement with the enemy, though. Pour thousands of fresh American troops into the Pashtun heartland while President Hamid Karzai holds out sacks of fresh foreign cash, and not a few Kandahari bandits may switch sides. But peeling off low-level conscripts is the opposite of an “exit strategy” that would set out to integrate the Taliban high command into cabinet posts and civil service jobs. Such deal-making would mean surrender, and we wouldn’t even be allowed to call it that.

The peace-talks lobby gets its traction from an antiquated lexicon that defines “insurgents” as Sandinistas, Viet Cong, Tupamaros. But the Taliban is the opposite of a 1960s-type Third World liberation movement: Instead of seeking to bring about a forward-looking left-wing revolution, the Taliban is seeking to keep the country locked in reactionary, Islamist dictatorship.

We should listen to the 200 women’s organizations that met in Kabul on Jan. 25. They pleaded loudly and unequivocally: No peace talks with the Taliban, no money for misogynist fanatics. Similarly, an alliance of secular and democratic parties from the Pashtun heartland met in Peshawar a month earlier, and fairly begged NATO not to abandon Afghanistan and not to parlay with the Taliban.

Please read the whole thing...