A Canadian soldier from the NATO-led coalition gives stuffed toys to children during a patrol in Afghanistan's Kandahar province in Oct., 2007.FINBARR O'REILLY/Reuters
The news cycle is filled with ceasefires of one kind or another. The shaky Israel-Hamas truce is one. Then there is the ongoing attempt to broker a peace between Russia and Ukraine.
There is another ceasefire that has received little attention in the West but has no less important global repercussions: the halt in fighting between Afghanistan and Pakistan negotiated by Qatar and Turkey last weekend in Doha.
Since the West ignobly withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban returned, the two countries have been fighting. Islamabad accuses the Afghans of harbouring terrorists who have killed hundreds. The hostilities escalated significantly when Pakistani air strikes earlier this month hit Kabul, Kandahar and the border regions. Qatar and Turkey stepped in and brokered a ceasefire. They are to be lauded.
The events unfolding in South Asia are extraordinary for two reasons. First, the West is nowhere to be seen in shaping events. Second, the Taliban are slowly easing their international isolation despite the West’s efforts. And therein may lie hard lessons for Canada as we seek to strengthen ties with the region’s dominant powers, India and China.
Canada, like most of the international community, has no diplomatic ties with Afghanistan, a foreign policy decision driven by human rights. The Taliban restrict women and girls from attending school, working and travelling. There’s even a bizarre edict on how loudly a woman may speak in public. The logic is that isolation will force the regime to change.
Nature abhors a vacuum, goes the old maxim, and in the West’s retreat came India, China, Qatar, Turkey, even Russia who see little reason to snub the Taliban. The neighbourhood is rough – Afghanistan has several jihadist organizations that want to export terror abroad. The Taliban cannot control them all or factions within the regime support their presence. The region’s powers understand this. Bringing the Taliban in from the cold is about narrow self-interest. There’s little mention of human rights by any of the players.
India last week opened an embassy in Kabul. It did not recognize the Taliban but the announcement was historic because India supported the Western-backed Kabul government and despised the Taliban, which bombed the Indian embassy in the Afghan capital in 2009 and its consulate in Herat in 2014.
Today, New Delhi does not want anti-Indian groups to use Afghanistan as a base to organize attacks. The Afghan foreign minister, on a visit to India, pledged as much and invited the Indians to invest in its mines. Afghanistan has vast untapped deposits of oil, natural gas, iron ore, cobalt, and lithium. Bygones, it seems, are bygones.
China kept its embassy open in 2021 and regularly sends senior diplomats. Beijing worries about Uyghur terrorists – a few hundred are in Afghanistan – crossing into central Asia and eventually into China’s restive Xinjiang province home to Uyghur Muslims. The Islamic State Khorasan Province has killed Chinese nationals in Afghanistan. China has some commercial investments too – the Aynak copper field and the Amu Darya oil project. Beijing pragmatically accepted that the Taliban must be engaged to secure China.
The Taliban have succeeded so far in containing some of the extremists in their midst including Uyghurs and the Islamic State, if not the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan which is terrorizing next door. Desperate for recognition, the Taliban calculates that if they are seen as contributing to global security it will lead to much needed aid and investment. This is not to suggest Canada restores ties with the Taliban. Far from it. We must be clear what our national interest would be before acting.
Canada’s human rights-driven foreign policy earns us respect abroad. But trying to navigate the world solely through the prism of idealism can lead to foreign policy disasters. In Afghanistan we tried to establish a democratic, centralized republic in a country that had no history of it. Our intervention had some success around education and media freedoms but otherwise was limited.
By understanding and accepting that there are cultures different to ours we can find the space, narrow as it may be, where common ground exists. If we do not, other powers who do not share our interests may step in. It’s a lesson from Afghanistan that Ottawa should keep in mind at it tries to repair relations with India and to reset ties with China.