We cannot negotiate with the Taliban

September 4, 2011

VANCOUVER, BC, Sept. 4, 2011/ Troy Media/ – On September 1 Human Rights Watch issued a briefing headlined “Afghanistan: The Taliban Should Stop Using Children as Suicide Bombers” in which it reports that “children as young as seven have reported that they were deployed as suicide bombers. Surviving children who trained as suicide bombers describe having been given amulets containing verses from the Quran that they were told would protect them from the explosion. They said they were told that when the bomb they carried detonated, everyone around them would die but they would survive.”

For anyone who still believes that the Taliban have any legitimate grievances or any right to political leadership in Afghanistan, such a heading should violently snap them out of their fantasy. Let’s face it: when you find yourself asking an armed opposition group to please not blow up innocent children with shrapnel-filled explosives in public places, it should become clear the group you’re dealing with is not one you can negotiate with.

Taliban deserve a deep, hard look

It’s time to take a deep, hard look into Taliban ideology and to face up to its alarming parallels with violent ideologies of the past – the kind that led to world war and genocide in our not-so-distant past. As citizens privileged to live in a peaceful and democratic country, we must stop excusing ourselves, on the basis of being outsiders, from any honest consideration of just what the Taliban are all about. It’s time we ask, what do the Taliban want?

The Taliban want a world where an entire nation’s female population is permanently imprisoned in their homes, where nine-year-olds are married against their will to adult men for lives of sexual enslavement and drudgery. The Taliban want a theocratic government like Iran’s – where citizens are stripped of any meaningful social and political freedoms – but won’t bother with any of the Islamic Republic’s not-quite-saving graces like having universities or tolerable economic growth. They want a medieval justice system devoid of courtrooms and lawyers but centred on the dirt floors of sports stadiums where amputations and stonings are carried out after judgments made by illiterate mullahs. They want books to be burned, kites to come down from the sky, children’s toys to be rendered illegal, and the sound of music to disappear. They want to cut Afghanistan off from the rest of the world, pull the plug on the Internet, television, free media and the re-emerging cultural life of the country. They want Afghans to live in fear and hopelessness. They want darkness.

We know this because the world already saw how the Taliban govern, from 1996 to 2001. There is not a shred of credible evidence that they would do things any differently if returned to power.

But we have since learned more about them. We have learned that they are deeply anti-Semitic. We have learned that they believe “infidels” deserve only death, although Afghan Muslims are equally fair game, not as collateral damage but as deliberate targets in the suicide bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and rocket attacks that take the lives of civilians on a daily basis in Afghanistan. We have learned of mass graves where men, women and children from the Hazara ethnic minority were buried after massacres carried out by the Taliban before and during their rule in the 1990s, massacres that were often preceded by alarmingly hateful and racist anti-Shia propaganda from Taliban leaders. We have learned of the torture and abuse that has taken place in Taliban prisons through documented accounts by journalists, human rights organizations and from survivors. We have read news stories of 10-year-old boys hung by the Taliban for “spying” and an eight-year-old girl forced to detonate herself. We have seen the charred remains of the banks, grocery stores, hotels, restaurants and shops that the Taliban destroy, along with the human lives inside of them.

And almost precisely at the same time that the Karzai administration and the U.S. insist that negotiations are the right direction to pursue, insurgent violence escalated 51 per cent between the spring of 2010 and spring of 2011 – not exactly a reassuring signal that the Taliban want peace too. It was also during this period that the Taliban’s use of children as suicide bombers increased, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. For instance, in May, a 14-year-old boy carrying a bomb surrendered to international forces in Ghazni, saying he had been told to carry the bomb or have his hand cut off.

And yet our neighbours to the South, with an approving nod from the I-told-you-so NDP, want to negotiate with these people?

What the Taliban want, they already have: violence. They merely want more of it, with fewer restrictions. Foreign armies, democracy, humanitarian agencies – all of these are major nuisances when you wish to lay down Islamo-fascist law and brutally subdue a population. That is what lies behind the vague demand in Mullah Omar’s recent Eid message for “a real Islamic regime.”

We can’t leave Afghans alone to face a monster

For the Taliban, violence is not a means to an end, but the end itself. An Afghan philosopher, who now uses the pen name “Buddha,” told me once in a Kabul cafa that what the Taliban are after is the surplus of violence. He gave the example of Taliban snuff films, and the attention to aesthetic detail lavished on the set of real life murders: the silk brocaded curtains, the music, the flower-filled vases and art in the background.

It’s not right, nor will it ever be, to leave Afghans to go it alone in the face of this monster.

Lauryn Oates is a Canadian aid worker managing education projects in Afghanistan. She is projects director at Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan.

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