I've got it! The way to move toward peace and progress in Afghanistan, that is.

Starting immediately, NATO needs to arm and train the Taliban!

This may sound crazy, as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Canadian contingent is now preparing to train the Afghan National Army (ANA) to a point where it can take over the war against the Taliban.

The narrative of Canada's role in the Afghan civil war as told by the country's mainstream media is designed to lead readers and viewers to two inescapable conclusions:

First, that after 10 years, Canada's involvement in the conflict has come to a definitive end.

Second, that thanks to the efforts and sacrifices of Canada's troops, at least 157 of whom have died with scores more maimed physically and mentally, the West has triumphed unconditionally in Afghanistan.

Alas, the balance of probability is high that both these yarns are baloney.

It is equally likely that the people spinning these Afghan fairy tales know very well they are not true, and that they are designed principally to serve the political needs of the country's Conservative government.

Mao Zedong, a guy who may have known a thing or two about guerrilla warfare, famously observed: "The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea."

So when you hear news reports that thanks to the efforts of NATO forces in Afghanistan the Taliban is now "on its knees" in what used to be its heartland of Panjwaii, you can be reasonably certain that your leg is being pulled.

We're still waiting for that apology to Opposition Leader Jack Layton from the Harper Conservatives.

You know, the one they owe him for getting their on-line Tory Rage Machine ™ and their Tame Mainstream Media Auxiliary ™ to label him "Taliban Jack" back in 2006 when the New Democratic Party leader had the temerity to suggest that the so-called NATO coalition should open lines of communication to the Pashtun fighters labelled the Taliban by the West.

Alert readers will recall how Defence Minister Peter MacKay, at the time the minister of foreign affairs, sniped at Layton: "Is it next going to be tea with Osama Bin Laden? This cannot happen!"

R2P is in the air. When the United Nations approved a declaration in 2005 that the international community has a Responsibility to Protect the citizens of a nation when its government cannot, or its government is itself the oppressor, expectations were high. This was not a call simply for military intervention: It offered an entire continuum of tools, from the diplomatic to the economic. Nonetheless, loud silence followed. Now R2P has been invoked, at least implicitly, for Libya, where those expectations might finally be met. But its limitations are also palpable, as Afghanistan has dramatically demonstrated.

You'd never know it from Canadian mainstream media coverage of the war in Afghanistan, of course, but Spiegel Online International reported yesterday that German troops in that country are in a state of near revolt against their commanders.

The reason? The danger they face training Afghan soldiers who, in the words of one German trooper quoted by the magazine, "consider us to be infidels who don't belong in their country."

“A comprehensive peace process has to bring all the combatants to the table.” – Jack Layton, Sept. 1, 2006, on the war in Afghanistan

Now that the United States has entered direct talks with the Taliban, one wonders what Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative camp followers will have to say about this development.

The New Yorker magazine reported yesterday that "the Obama Administration has entered into direct, secret talks with senior Afghan Taliban leaders."