News Bulletin Embassy of Afghanistna in Canada

Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan lays a wreath at the National War Monument in Ottawa Friday, Sept. 22, 2006. (AP Photo/Jonathan Hayward, CP)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has asked Canadians to stand firm in providing military support to Afghanistan. In a speech to Canada's parliament he addressed public concerns about Canadian deployment during which 36 soldiers have been killed since 2002.

He said continued Canadian involvement was crucial to prevent terrorism both in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Canada's PM Stephen Harper confirmed his support: "Canada does not leave a country before achieving success."

Canadian and British forces have borne the brunt of foreign troop casualties in recent months. Four Canadian soldiers were killed in a blast in the south on Monday - one of three suicide bombings in the country.

Hundreds of people have been killed this year as violence has risen, mainly in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Mr Karzai received a standing ovation from MPs and senators as he stepped onto the podium to address Canada's parliament. "I know my visit comes at a time of sadness for a number of families across Canada who have lost loved ones in my country," he said.

But he asked Canadians to maintain their support. "A democratic nation is not built overnight. Afghanistan's democracy will continue to grow, will continue to develop... but only with the patience and with the continued support of Canada and other members of the international community. "Helping us into the future is much more valuable than perhaps you can imagine."

The BBC's Lee Carter in Toronto says Mr Karzai will not be meeting the leader of the New Democratic opposition party, Jack Layton, who has called for Canadian troops to be withdrawn from their combat role in Afghanistan.

Mr Layton said that despite repeated attempts to set up a meeting with the Afghan president, none was scheduled.

Mr Karzai arrived in Ottawa a day after addressing the UN General Assembly in New York.

At the UN he called for the destruction of safe havens and elaborate networks operating in the region to recruit, train, finance, arm and deploy terrorists. But he said military action alone would not stop terrorism in his country.

A recent poll found only 38% of Canadians support their country's military presence in Afghanistan, while 49% want the 2,300 troops hunting Taleban and al-Qaeda militants to withdraw. Afghanistan is the largest recipient of Canadian foreign aid.

OTTAWA — Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai thanked Canada for its contributions to rebuilding his country and asked for continued support in an address to Parliament on Friday.

Calling Canada a model for "all that is good," Karzai said he knew the timing of his visit was significant.

"I know my visit comes at a time of sadness for a number of families across Canada who have lost loved ones in my country, Afghanistan. I also know it is at a time that millions in Canada are pondering your country's role in Afghanistan."

Karzai said it is to those people, in addition to the members of Parliament, that he wished to address his speech. He also expressed his condolences to Canada’s fallen soldiers.

"If the greatness of life is measured in deeds done for others, then Canada's sons and daughters who have made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan stand among the greatest of their generation," he said.

"They have sacrificed so that we in Afghanistan may have security and they have sacrificed to ensure the continued safety of their fellow Canadians from terrorism."

The sacrifice is worth it and Canadian efforts are making an enormous difference in the lives of Afghans, he told the joint session of Parliament.

Karzai said his people endured over two decades of pain and suffering beginning with the 1979 Soviet invasion. After helping the world fight communist forces, Afghanistan was abandoned, he said.

"Few cared about the dismal plight of the Afghan people and even fewer thought about the consequences of leaving a country so dangerously vulnerable to foreign extremists," he said, adding Afghanistan tried to warn the world of the terrorism that was brewing there but their pleas for attention were ignored.

"Perhaps by the standards of today's world we did not exist for we had nothing to sell to the world or nothing to buy from the world, so we did not matter …The tragedy of Sept. 11 showed in a terrible way the flaws of the arguments against helping Afghanistan. For one thing, it showed that, in fact, the cost of ignoring Afghanistan was far higher than the cost of helping it," he said.

Karzai outlined the progress made by his country in the last few years and said Afghanistan needs the continued support of Canada to stay on the path to success.

"Despite our phenomenal progress, our new democracy faces serious challenges and threats as well," he said. He pointed to the insurgents and poppy cultivation for opium as specific examples.

"If we do not destroy poppies in Afghanistan, poppies will destroy us," he said. "We want to have a country as good as yours and a parliament as good as yours and we will not have that unless we destroy poppies."

Karzai thanked Prime Minister Stephen Harper for his "steadfast support" of the mission in Afghanistan and also thanked previous Liberal prime ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin for initially committing Canada to the mission.

He left the joint session of Parliament with this message: "In Afghanistan, you are not only serving the cause of security for the international community, and your country, you are also helping one of the most oppressed societies in the world and the little children that they have. Thank you."

Karzai arrived in Ottawa late Thursday and met privately with Harper in the evening.

On Friday morning, he was met on the front steps of Parliament by the prime minister and a military honour guard, before making his way inside to address the House of Commons.

Karzai's visit is viewed by some as an attempt to boost support for a controversial mission that has claimed 37 Canadian lives since 2002.

His visit follows Harper's address to the United Nations on Thursday in which he called Afghanistan the most important overseas engagement for Canada and a test for the strength of the UN.

Karzai also spoke to the UN, and similar to his speech in Ottawa, he outlined some of the many challenges facing his country.

Corruption is proving to be a problem for Karzai's government and a Canadian official who recently briefed journalists on Karzai's visit said diplomats are working with the Afghan government to ensure public servants hired for key positions can be trusted to do their jobs.

Karzai's country is also facing economic struggles. He has singled out the growing problem of poppy cultivation as the main impediment to his country's economic recovery.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported this week that Afghanistan continues to produce opium at record levels, and will break the Taliban's 1999 record for opium production before it banned poppy farming.

Women's rights have also not made as much progress as people may believe. Last week, the Afghan independent human rights commission released its latest assessment of the near non-existent state of women's rights in Afghanistan, pointing to the widespread persecution of women by a legal system that should be protecting them and a troubling rise in "honour killings" — the murder of girls and women by their families because of their refusal to participate in arranged marriages or end what the families view as inappropriate relationships.

At a presentation at the University of Ottawa last week, Afghan MP Malalai Joya was highly critical of the state of women's rights and overall democratic reform. She said warlords still control huge portions of the country.

Karzai goes straight to doubters of Afghanistan mission
Mike Blanchfield CanWest News Service Saturday, September 23, 2006

CREDIT: CP PHOTO/Jonathan Hayward

Prime Minister Stephen Harper (right) and Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, in the House of Commons following an address to Parliament by President Karzai on Parliament Hill in Ottawa Friday.

OTTAWA - Call it vintage Hamid Karzai, a carefully aged blend of humble thanks for all the world has done for his country mixed with a desperate plea to do even more.

It is a combination that Afghanistan's charismatic president has honed in numerous international settings, whether it is big summits, or bilateral visits such as Friday's address to a joint session of the House of Commons. And on Friday it was delivered with the perfect balance of solemnity and humour, all of it topped with a dashing style of flowing green robes, black karacul hat and piercing dark eyes.

Each time he ventures into an international forum, Karzai must balance two competing imperatives: show gratitude for every grain of help his once forgotten country is receiving, while never letting anyone forget it needs so much more to turn the corner.

That's because in the years following the Taliban's ouster and his installation as interim leader, then elected president, the world was slow to meet its spending pledges to reconstruct Afghanistan and prevent it from ever becoming a pariah state and a haven for terrorism.

In Canada, the challenge was different: Canada has made Afghanistan it's number one recipient of development assistance and also has a healthy military presence with 2,500 troops.

But with polls showing Canadians divided on whether the ultimate sacrifice of their 36 soldiers and one diplomat is too high, Karzai had a different challenge, one he met head on, from the moment he began his address to the joint Houses of Parliament by aiming his remarks at the families who have lost loved ones "in my country, Afghanistan.''

Karzai had to convince Canada not to give up on his country the way the world did at the end of the Cold War.

"The miseries of the Afghan people,'' he said, began in 1979 with the Soviet invasion, a 10-year occupation that killed one million Afghans, disabled another one million, and sent more than one quarter of its population -- today roughly the same as Canada -- fleeing to foreign lands.

"Whereas Afghans had fought and won the world's war against Communism, the reward that Afghanistan received was abandonment by the international community.''

The rest, as he said, was history. The country became a haven for extremists and terrorists, the ones who plotted and carried out 9/11.

"They chose to kill the Afghan people for so long, and then they said, `well, now it's time to go to New York.' And they did reach you in New York,'' he said referring to the deaths of 24 Canadians in the Twin Towers.

He said he wants Canada's multicultural values to take hold one day in Afghanistan.

"When I address the Afghan people, I do exactly as you did today, Mr. Prime Minister. I switch from one language to another -- like that,'' he said, snapping his fingers and drawing a laugh.

He kept them smiling when he described his new national anthem, one that managed to mention all 14 ethnic groups in his country. "It is a beautiful song. It is not that long. It only takes a minute,'' he said, sparking more chuckles.

Karzai clearly revels in the attention he receives internationally and for good reason -- he is a virtual prisoner in his presidential palace in Kabul these days; he is man with price on his head surrounded by American bodyguards determined to keep alive.

"The first task of a leader is to keep hope alive,'' House Speaker Peter Milliken told Karzai after his address, "and I have no doubt that at times it is a very difficult and indeed lonely task, but you are not alone, as I hope you know.''

Milliken said he was aware that Karzai is a lover of great poetry so he decided to recite a few verses of one of the president's favorite poems, Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.''

"I think it gives us some insight into your own hopes for your country, your own realization that fulfillment is not always easily achieved, but the hope must be kept alive in you and the Afghan people and the friends of Afghanistan,'' Milliken said.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep,'' Milliken read as Karzai beamed a broad smile back up at him.

Clearly moved, Karzai said later he would cherish the memory of his address to Canada's Parliament.

"I will go back to Afghanistan with this tremendous feeling of the Afghan people not being alone,'' Karzai said, "of the Afghan people having friends in Canada and that reassurance is one more addition to the confidence that we have in Afghanistan for a better tomorrow.''

Religious schools that help breed terror must be reined in, Karzai tells The Globe - GLORIA GALLOWAY (Globe and Mail 09/23/06)

OTTAWA -- Pakistan must find the political will to eliminate the breeding grounds of terrorism that lie inside its borders if Afghanistan is ever to know peace, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said yesterday during his first official visit to Canada.

Mr. Karzai did not mention Pakistan by name during a passionate and eloquent address to the House of Commons. But in an interview with The Globe and Mail, he was blunt about the problems posed by his neighbour to the south.

"There are places there that, in the name of madrassas, in the name of religious schools that are not religious schools, that actually preach hatred for others, for us in Afghanistan and for the rest of the world."

Unless those schools are closed, Afghans will continue to suffer as will the Canadians soldiers and aid workers who are trying to bring peace and democracy to a country that has known war for so many years, Mr. Karzai said.

"So we have to focus there by all the means available and by whatever means available," he said in a 20-minute interview at the Afghan ambassador's residence in Ottawa.

While that does not mean sending foreign troops into Pakistan, Mr. Karzai said, the Pakistani military must take action and other countries need to pressure them to do so.

"We have to talk to Pakistan and we have to convince them that it is not in their interest, that it is going to hurt all of us eventually," he said.

Mr. Karzai, gracious and grateful, spent yesterday thanking Canadians for sending their military "sons and daughters" to help rid his country of insurgents. Speaking to a mother who lost her son in Afghanistan's defence was the most difficult moment of his day, he said.

But he was also here to convince politicians and the public that the battle for stability in Afghanistan is worth fighting -- and to enlist help from the international community in snuffing out what he sees as the nurturing grounds of terror, such as the madrassas or Islamic teaching schools that have been linked to the recruiting of jihadis for terrorist attacks.

"Terrorists are prepared to cross any boundaries and commit horrific acts of violence to try to derail Afghanistan from its path to success," Mr. Karzai said during a half-hour speech in the House of Commons that was punctuated by repeated rounds of applause from parliamentarians of all stripes.

"We will not succeed in eliminating terrorism unless we seek and fight the source of terrorism wherever it might be and dry its roots."

Five years ago, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the international community arrived in force in Afghanistan and eliminated some of the Taliban, he said.

But "most of them ran away and took refuge in neighbourhoods beyond our borders. Unfortunately, it was in those sanctuaries beyond our borders where they were reorganized, trained, financed, and provided with ideological motivation to come into Afghanistan, kill our children, kill our teachers, kill the clergy, destroy mosques full of worshippers, destroy schools, destroy clinics, kill international aid workers, attack international security forces, and try to bring us defeat."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, seeking to shore up public support for the Canadian military mission in Afghanistan amid a growing number of casualties, introduced Mr. Karzai to the Commons and escorted him around the national capital before addressing a lunchtime rally in support of Canada's troops on Parliament Hill.

To the crowd of several thousand, many of them dressed in red to demonstrate encouragement for the armed forces, Mr. Harper repeated his promise to stay in Afghanistan until the mission can be termed a success.

Canadian troops are committed to remain in the country as part of the NATO mission until 2009 but the Prime Minister has said that commitment will be reviewed in two years and could be extended.

"We don't start fights, my friends" he told the gathering. "But we finish them, and we never leave until our work is done."

Mr. Karzai told reporters that his country is grateful for what Canada has already given -- and would be pleased if Canadians decide to remain past 2009.

"Just about five days ago four Canadian soldiers trying to help Afghan children, distributing candies and notebooks to Afghan children, were killed by a suicide bomber. Now that's I believe much more than enough -- much, much more than enough" of a gift to Afghanistan, he said.

"Therefore, we are grateful. And when Canada decides to leave in 2009, after having fulfilled its commitment to Afghanistan, Afghanistan will be very grateful and will say goodbye to the Canadian sons and daughters with tremendous admiration and a good memory. But, if by that time, by 2009, the people of Canada say no, the job is not yet done, we would like to stay a few more years, Afghanistan will say, 'welcome, stay.' "

Mr. Karzai also said during his speech in the House of Commons, that, thanks to help from other countries, democratic elections have been held in Afghanistan and women hold 28 per cent of the seats in parliament; six million children attend school compared with less than a million under the Taliban; 4½ million refugees have returned; and there is a free press and six private television stations.

"Canada, in all respects, has been among the leaders of this partnership. Thanks to Canada's contributions, Afghanistan today is profoundly different from the terrified and exhausted country it was five years ago."

Some in this country, notably NDP Leader Jack Layton, have suggested that negotiation with the Taliban may be more helpful than waging war. But Mr. Karzai said such negotiation is not possible.

"Who do we talk to? Where is the entity called the Taliban with a political organization, with an office," he told The Globe. "Who is the leader and where is the leader?"

Montreal — As the bodies of four Canadian soldiers arrived home from Afghanistan on Saturday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai maintained that the sacrifices of Canadians are making his country a safer place.

Mr. Karzai appeared eager to shore up support for Canada's presence in his country while polls continue to show decidedly mixed opinions about the mission.

On the second day of his visit to Canada, Mr. Karzai met with the two federal leaders whose parties have expressed the most criticism about the country's involvement in Afghanistan: the NDP's Jack Layton and the Bloc Quebecois's Gilles Duceppe.

Mr. Karzai also met with Canadian soldiers Saturday morning at a downtown hotel, thanking them for their contribution in rebuilding his war-torn homeland.

A woman holds a sign outside the hotel where Afghan President Hamid Karzai was speaking in Montreal on Saturday. One person was arrested at the small demonstration.

"We are together in a noble cause, in a cause that is worthy, as much as we may be pained by the losses that we have," he said.

Mr. Karzai said Canadians should remember that the four soldiers killed last Monday were helping provide a ravaged country with a future.

"Now we see difficulties, and that sometimes blinds us to the accomplishments that we have achieved."

Pte. David Byers, Cpl. Glen Arnold, Cpl. Shane Keating and Cpl. Keith Morley died and 17 children were injured when a man on a bicycle detonated a bomb near Canadian troops on foot patrol in the Panjwaii district.

"It is for that sacrifice that we must make sure that the Canadian mission in Afghanistan ... succeeds," Mr. Karzai told a luncheon, where International Co-operation Minister Josee Verner announced an additional $12-million in loans for low-income Afghans.

The Afghan leader was effusive in his thanks throughout the day. Following a brief visit with Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay at city hall, the two crossed the street, where Mr. Karzai mingled with stunned Montrealers.

"[Canada's support] means a lot to us," Mr. Karzai told a slightly bemused woman. "For the taxpayers' money that you send, for the soldiers that you send, your sons and daughters — they help us immensely."

"Merci mille fois," he added, using the French expression for "thank you, a thousand times."

Earlier in the day, Mr. Karzai skipped a speaking engagement to sit down with Mr. Layton, who has been calling for Canadian troops to be withdrawn from southern Afghanistan.

In a news conference following their meeting, Layton said the two agreed that solving Afghanistan's problems requires more than just military might.

"The roots of the problem lie outside Afghanistan — they lie in Pakistan," Mr. Layton said. "A political solution, ultimately, is the only route to bring security for the long-term, and ... Pakistan has got to be engaged in the creation of that environment."

Taliban insurgents often use the porous border between the two countries to cross over into Afghanistan.

Mr. Karzai also reportedly met with Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe at Montreal city hall. Details of their meeting were not immediately available.

Mr. Duceppe has demanded an emergency parliamentary debate on the country's foreign policy.

While it's too early to tell what effect, if any, Mr. Karzai's visit will have on public support for the mission, members of Canada's military feel it will help focus the debate.

"There is a lot of benefit for the Canadian Forces to be there because we are doing a lot for the reconstruction effort," said Maj. Maurice Poitras, who served a tour of duty in Kabul in 2004.

"It shows that he [Mr. Karzai] is very thankful for us having been there, and us being there right know."

Several thousand people rallied on Parliament Hill on Friday, shortly after Karzai addressed the House of Commons, to show their support for the 2,300 Canadian soldiers serving in Afghanistan.

It was a somewhat different scene outside the downtown hotel where Mr. Karzai was staying. About 35 anti-war protesters staged a demonstration and at least one person was arrested.

Some of the demonstrators wore masks, one burned an American flag, and there was some pushing and shoving between police and protesters. Mr. Karzai is scheduled to leave Canada on Sunday.

Only once before has a foreign head of government addressed Parliament while Canadian forces were fighting to protect that leader's country. The year was 1941 and the speaker was Winston Churchill.

First Churchill, then Karzai. No wonder so many of us have difficulty understanding the mission in Afghanistan. The old reference points have been upended. A President lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Very Churchill. But the President is a Muslim, and the band is playing Abide With Me. How do you make sense of that?

"In the First and Second World Wars, you knew the enemy, and you had a front line with him," the Afghan President explained yesterday in an interview. "Here, you know the entity, the enemy that attacks you, but there is no front line." There is only fog, and crossed cultural references.

And yet, he warned, "if we let Afghanistan or any country be taken back by terrorists," then it will be within their power "to strike us anywhere, at their timing, at their liking."

Really? Are we fighting in Afghanistan to protect ourselves against terrorism? Or are we just taking sides in a civil war?

War doesn't work the way it should any more. The enemy is militant Islam, and yet Mr. Karzai is Muslim, though no quisling. NATO is leading the coalition of aid and armies in Afghanistan -- the mere fact that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is engaged nowhere near the North Atlantic is, itself, passing strange -- and yet other, far more powerful nations are standing aside, while Canada does much of the fighting and bears the brunt of the casualties.

To President Karzai's enormous frustration, a decisive victory is impossible, since the enemy melts away to its redoubts in Pakistan, whose government permits this, even though Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf visited U.S. President George W. Bush yesterday and was treated like the ally and friend he purportedly is.

But that's the thing about this war, if war is what it truly is. Everything is slippery. The drug trade is involved, and some of our allies are only a scintilla less unpleasant than the enemy, and everyone, it seems -- in politics and in the news media as well -- speaks while grinding an axe. Despite the billions of words spilled describing, analyzing, condemning and justifying this war, most of us really don't know what's going on over there, because we can't frame it. It doesn't make sense.

So what do we hold on to? Perhaps, just what our gut tells us. Mr. Karzai seems like a decent man, trying to do right by his country. Churchill and Karzai: It works to put the names together. Very different men, very different wars, but both on the same side, right? Churchill would have agreed.

Our troops are not coming back filled with bitter stories of incompetence and betrayal. They are committed to this fight, and they're the ones who are fighting it. NATO and the UN want us there, and Mr. Karzai assures us that the Afghan government wants us there, and most of the Afghan people must want us there, because if they didn't we'd be hearing that by now.

Mr. Karzai insists that typical Afghans want to see more troops, many more. When the troops are around, no one blows up their schools, and reconstruction teams can operate safely, and life gets better. That makes sense.

And though Stephen Harper has appropriated this war -- he has staked his prime ministership on it -- he's right about not cutting and running. We agreed to lead this mission. No honourable country would ever renege on such a commitment.

Mr. Karzai has already survived two assassination attempts. And now he returns to his dangerous country. If it is a civil war, at least we're on the right side.

So actually a Muslim leader laying a wreath of remembrance to a Christian hymn tune is fine. It's just a new reference point, that's all.

Afghanistan remains a blighted country. Everyone wants to control it, but no one really is able to. The British and the Russians stared at each other across the Hindu Kush in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was the Soviets and the Americans who used this hapless country to settle Cold War scores, years later. The country has not known peace since 1979. The bitter legacy of these campaigns is the unending jehad in the Indian subcontinent, an opium and heroin economy in Afghanistan, violence and religious fanaticism that threatens to spread globally.

Five years ago Ahmed Shah Massoud, the ‘lion’ of Panjshir, was assassinated by two men who had transited through Pakistan. In India today, no one recalls Massoud or cares to remember, that, but for this man, Pakistan would have captured Kabul in 1992. In India, it is more fashionable now to talk of al-Qaeda and 9/11 — because the rest of the Western world does so. It was Massoud who prevented Pakistani surrogate Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from occupying Kabul in 1992; it was his forces that pushed back Hekmatyar from Jalalabad and it was Massoud who did not admit defeat even when the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, occupied Kabul in 1996. He chose to fight instead.

The only way the Pakistanis could get rid of him was to assassinate the man. The history of the subcontinent would have changed had it not been for the leader in Massoud. But the Pakistanis have not given up yet.

The Taliban are now resurgent in Afghanistan, operating at will, as in the past, from Pakistani bases, trained and equipped there. Ghazni, Khost, Helmand, Paktia (where the governor was assassinated), Kandahar, Paktika, Logar, Balkh and Kunar and now Farah province in the west bordering Iran have been affected. The casualties are high and increasing by the day. Suicide bombings are very common, numbers of no-go zones have increased, weapons are costlier and more and more areas are unsafe for aid agencies.

Today’s Taliban fighter is far more radicalised and sophisticated than the one who was pushed out by the Americans into Pakistan in 2001. While the Afghan army pays its soldiers the equivalent of $ 4 a day, the Taliban pay as much as $ 8 a day. The Taliban fighter is prone to resort to slaughter and beheading and seems to revel in watching DVDs that depict anti-American violence.

It is quite apparent that continental Europe is wary of being sucked into a hopeless war, involving what is really the Pakistani army, with a deniability that the Pakistanis practised on their eastern borders. Whatever the spin might be, the ‘foreigner’ will have to leave. Added to this, Hamid Karzai is being increasingly seen as being helpless and unable to deliver security and development.

It has been this poor experience of governance that has contributed to the phenomenal growth of opium production in Afghanistan. Ninety-two per cent of the world’s opium (6,000 tonnes this year) now comes from this area. The farmer finds it far more lucrative to grow opium. After all, it fetched him about $ 5,400 per hectare last year which is 10 times more than wheat sales. The drug barons are expected to earn $ 3 billion this year. Banning production merely increases the premium. It could take 20 years to control this. In the short term, any curb without commensurate economic alternatives will only drive the farmer into the arms of the Taliban.

The indiscriminate use of the air force, the massive bombings where untold numbers of civilians died as ‘collateral damage’ and the cruelties of the secret detention camps in Baghram have taken their toll on the Afghan psyche. The possibility that this anti-foreigner (Western, chiefly American) sentiment could easily translate into a Pukhtoon national movement will have repercussions on Pakistan with its sizeable Pukhtoon population. It is true that the Pakistani Pathan has better assimilated into the Pakistani mainstream than the Baloch have but there is still a strong nationalist Pukhtoon sentiment coupled with a religious ferocity that is missing in the Baloch.

General Musharraf is right when he says that the Taliban are a Pushtoon force from both sides of the border with some of the tribes living on both sides of the Durand Line, although he conveniently omits to mention that the Taliban owe their genesis to the Pakistanis and their madrasas. Maybe it is now getting out of hand or perhaps, victory is at hand and Pakistanis are hedging their bets.

In the Nineties, the Pakistanis used their jehad experience in the Afghan theatre to apply their skills, finances and manpower in Kashmir. Today, they are able to reverse this and use it in Afghanistan, despite the presence of the US and despite its disapproval.

Militarily, the idea would be to gain maximum territorial advantage before the winter sets in. Politically, meanwhile, Musharraf has tried to distance himself and his country from the Taliban. Much to Afghan annoyance, he said recently, in Brussels, that the Afghans themselves were to blame for the current state of affairs.

A similar Pakistani strategy is unfolding in India where the attempt is to hoist all attacks in India outside Kashmir on the Al-Qaeda banner or to pretend that things are not fully under the control of the army in Pakistan.

Anyone who has studied Pakistan knows that this is not true. And if things are not under control in a military dictatorship of more or less 60 years standing, then that country is falling apart. We all know that it is the Pakistani — essentially the Punjabi Lashkar and the Jaish who operate from bases in Pakistan and are members of Osama’s International Islamic Front — who continue to target India. They are not members of Al-Qaeda which is an Arab organisation.

Musharraf’s peace deal with the Taliban in Waziristan could signify a few important things. First and foremost is that Musharraf has realised that the Taliban cannot be militarily defeated. It is, therefore, better to strike a deal with them as the next force in Afghanistan. In Musharraf’s own army are officers and men reluctant to fight the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, on grounds of conscience. There is also the fear that Waziristan could now become a safe haven for Arab and central Asian terrorists wherein they would enforce the strictest code of Islam. Pakistan is now much more Islamicised and concessions to mullahs are inevitable for political survival in the country, especially with elections due next year. Finally, Musharraf can now redeploy his forces in Balochistan following the ‘peace accord’. That legitimises the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

Extreme anger, arrogance of military power and total ignorance of local conditions had spurred the intense response of October 2001, which sent terrorists scurrying for shelter, chiefly in Pakistan. The Big Ones remain untraced till date. Pakistan was enrolled as a stalwart ally. It was like asking a murderer to investigate his own crime.

Should Afghanistan collapse and disappear from the world atlas, like Iraq will, the ethnic constituents of what is now Afghanistan will probably get sucked into their neighbouring countries. On the other hand, if Ralph Peters (‘Blood Brothers’, Armed Forces Journal) is right, then there could be a Greater Balochistan, a Greater Pakhtoonistan, a Greater Afghanistan and another moth-eaten Pakistan. True, this is highly improbable; but what if...?

Frankly, we're shocked by the actions of opposition parties yesterday in the House of Commons. Over the years, we've learned to tolerate most of the shenanigans that take place in Parliament on a regular basis -- the posturing, the name-calling, the rude gestures that would be more at home in a schoolyard.

But we'd hoped that our MPs could put aside the partisanship and the petulance on an occasion like yesterday, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai had been invited to update both Houses of Parliament on the situation in his country.

The Afghan mission, after all, is the most controversial issue on the political agenda in the minds of many Canadians. Politicians of all stripes are well aware of that fact, and there has been intense jockeying both inside and outside the House by MPs determined to use Afghanistan to further their own agendas.

Common sense, therefore, would dictate that members would be in their seats yesterday, hanging on every word Karzai had to say. But wait a minute. Yesterday was Friday -- the day that many MPs skip out early and head for the airport so they can spend the weekend home in their constituencies.

Sun Parliamentary reporter Kathleen Harris checked out the opposition benches during Karzai's speech and counted at least 40 Liberal seats that were either empty or occupied with staff members from MPs' offices, while about half the NDPers were no-shows.

What a disgrace. While our soldiers are fighting and dying for democracy, on the very day that thousands of Canadians were showing solidarity with the troops on the front lawns of Parliament Hill, at a time when millions more are wrestling with what our nation's role should be, close to half the Liberal and NDP caucuses had better things to do than sit and listen to the one man who could put it all in perspective.

These members -- including former prime minister Paul Martin -- couldn't spare 20 minutes to listen to the democratically elected president of the country whose problems are gripping the world.

[Disclaimer: The content of this news bulletin does not necessarily reflect the view or policy of the Afghan Government, unless specifically stated as such. The collection of articles and commentaries from Afghan and international news sources is provided for informational purposes, and accuracy of the news is the responsibility of the original source.]