Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman
Thank you to Mr. Regehr and Mr. Bercuson for appearing before the committee. I want to briefly ask a question to each of you and then leave the time for you to respond.
I have to say I very much welcome the questions you raised, Mr. Regehr, about what seems to be an enormous gap between the information from those who really are delving into what is happening and the kind of simplistic line between good and evil: the Taliban on one side as evil and the good forces we represent on the other side, including, I guess, the Northern Alliance, the drug lords, and the warlords who make up the Karzai government and so on.
I'm wondering if you could comment further. You're probably aware that the UN envoy to Afghanistan from post-9/11 until 2004, who was involved in the organization of the Bonn conference, actually stated, “One of my own biggest mistakes was not to speak to the Taliban in 2002 and 2003”. He went on to say it was not possible to get involved in the conference at that time but he considered it “a very, very big mistake” for there not to have been aggressive outreach to do that and to generate a comprehensive peace process.
I will raise my question with Mr. Bercuson and then leave time to respond.
Mr. Bercuson, I have to say I'm very surprised to hear you urging what is so widely recognized as not working: really, escalating further the cycle of violence, more chaos, more killings, more fanaticism, and more Taliban. I hear you urging that we need more people doing more of the same and somehow we're going to get a better result.
I'm sure you're aware there are many NATO countries that wouldn't go near that aggressive combat search-and-kill mission because they feel that's exactly the result it would produce. Yet I hear you saying that we need more of it. I wonder if you can elaborate further on the evidence that doing more of what's not working is going to produce a better result.