I appreciate the brief and I appreciate a lot of the information and research that you provide us with.
One of the difficulties in any reconciliation that people are now talking about a lot more is the fact that whatever one thinks of the interventions by the United Nations and by NATO and the Bonn conference, the London conference, the Paris conference, there have been some very clear commitments to women's rights, to human rights, to the principles of the rule of law, which have not always been observed in the years since 2001. We certainly know they weren't observed before 2001.
How do you reconcile those things? Everybody wants peace. I think everybody recognizes how very difficult it is to imagine how an exclusively military solution could be achieved in the current context. There's internal peace within Pakistan. There's peace and reconciliation between Pakistan and Afghanistan itself. There's a question of the role that other regional powers will play, not just very benign powers like India, but also other powers that have a clear interest in the region, like Iran.
I will come back to the nub of this question. One of the pressure points I'm getting is from a number of women's groups, both inside Canada, who are Afghan diaspora organizations, as well as from organizations that we met with in Afghanistan, saying whatever you do, don't trade our rights away in the hope of a reconciliation with the Taliban. The Taliban's record on women's issues is not exactly good; their record on human rights is not exactly good. So the question then becomes how do we proceed? I'm a little concerned that the sense not simply be that the fault's entirely on the side of the west and Karzai as to why there isn't peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan.
I know that's not your point, but my point is that you have to understand some of the hurdles as to why we've had such trouble getting to the table. I think this is one of the reasons it has been so difficult to imagine what a reconciliation that is ultimately going to work is going to look like.