Thank you very much.
First of all, I very deliberately started, at the beginning of my presentation, referring back to the testimony, much of which is in your preliminary report, where there are lots of suggestions on how you might be able to start a peace process and the kind of preliminary work, for example, that Graeme MacQueen talked about: dialogue at the local level.
When I talk about a peace process—and others before me have used the terminology—it's of a comprehensive multidimensional process reaching down to the grassroots level, encompassing as many of the parties as possible within Afghanistan, but then this regional dimension as well. I think there's lots in the report about how this might be done.
But the first lesson of this type of peace process is that each one is very specific to the situation at hand. That's why it's so important to choose someone who's acceptable to all the parties, who has the stature and has the weight of the international community behind, to actually examine, to enter the dialogue behind the scenes and try to see what the best process might be.
In other words, in a way it's not really for us to sit here saying this is the best process or that's the best process. It's really to try to identify...to throw our weight behind, first of all, the idea that the process is necessary: to champion this, not ad hoc efforts.
In fact, there are many ad hoc efforts going on, including some by Canada. Virtually all of the countries who are troop contributors are there talking at the local level. We're heard of Pakistan doing this. Karzai himself is trying to do it, except that he doesn't have the trust with the parties to do it.
All of these ad hoc efforts are going on, so the peace process lacks coherence too. That's why there needs to be an overall lead, a lead individual—and I think it also has to be through the UN—to do this.
The problem is getting the process started, and that goes back to the history of the conflict and the fact that the Afghanistan mission began—if we recall, it was in the heyday of the Bush administration's unilateralist approach.... They've moved off that now. At the time the Taliban were overthrown, Lakhdar Brahimi, as a special envoy, said this is the time to negotiate.
The U.S. government at the time was not interested. They didn't think it was necessary to negotiate. They said no, these are the winners; we'll support them. In fact, they didn't even want a UN-authorized mission, an ISAF mission, in the south, because they wanted a free hand with Operation Enduring Freedom to track down what they saw as the remnants of al-Qaeda.
That goes back to the fundamental problem with our strategy, which is that we are pushing together all of these elements. We are conflating disaffected warlords and the Afghan Taliban with al-Qaeda—what kind of strategy is that?—instead of following a peace process that would separate the hardest of the hard-liners from all the rest.
I had better stop there.