Although a good number of Canadians seem to agree with his new position on Afghanistan, the chattering classes have been hammering Jack Layton. As it happens, I myself have some reservations about immediately pulling out Canadian forces from Afghanistan, although I increasingly believe it’s now a quagmire on the road to becoming a Vietnam or Iraq-like debacle.

That’s surely a more accurate sense of the situation than Stephen Harper’s breathtaking dishonesty when he insists that “The Taliban is on the run” and Canada won’t withdraw until the country is “secure and more prosperous.”

Layton also wants talks with the Taliban, a position harshly denounced as unconscionable and ludicrous. It’s true this may prove a fruitless, impractical effort. They may well be impossible to deal with. But there’s much evidence that the entity we call the Taliban is in fact far less monolithic than our present strategy takes into account, and that there are “moderates” who may be open to discussion. President Hamid Karzai has himself raised this possibility. Surely it’s worth trying. If it fails, nothing is lost; if it succeeds, much is gained.

But it’s another dimension of this notion that seems to have most enraged Layton’s critics. It’s the accusation that he’s prepared to cozy up to the devil, that the Taliban are beyond the pale of normal discourse, that any suggestion of negotiating with them is unthinkable, immoral, tantamount to giving them legitimacy.

This charge reflects either great ignorance or great hypocrisy.

Look at those we do talk to. In fact look at those with whom we happily cooperate, beginning in Afghanistan itself. The Karzai government, our close ally, is awash in warlords guilty of massive crimes against humanity, unscrupulous drug peddlers and officials who massively steal reconstruction funds.

Most Western governments readily embrace the dictators who run Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Libya and Uzbekistan. Six-nation talks go on with North Korea. The U.S. threw bags of money at violent Somalian warlords in their clash with religious extremists. A deal has just been done with the psychopathic Lord’s Resistance Army that offers amnesty in return for ending their nihilistic insurgency in northern Uganda.

Finally, there can hardly be a government more culpable of genocidal behaviour than that of Sudan. President Bush has formally declared the crisis in Darfur, orchestrated by the Sudanese government in Khartoum, to constitute a full-blown genocide, and Sudan remains on the State Department list of sponsors of terrorism. Yet the agreement finally reached between that government and the rebel groups in southern Sudan was universally welcomed while everyone accepted the need for it to be involved in negotiating a truce with the rebels in Darfur.

The latest Security Council resolution has called for a UN mission to Darfur to replace the Africa Union force — but only if Khartoum approved. In other words, the international community stooped to pleading with the genocidal government responsible for the violence to accept foreign troops to stop that violence.

But there’s more. The U.S. and Britain both collaborate closely with the Sudan government on issues related to “the war on terror.” Two years ago, the Guardian revealed that the CIA had sent a plane to Khartoum to ferry the head of Sudanese intelligence, General Salah Abdallah Gosh, to Washington for discussions with his American peers. General Gosh’s name is widely assumed to be among the 51 leading Sudanese officials considered by the UN-appointed International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to be most responsible for the conflict.

A year later we learned just how close the tie really was. In October 2005, Guardian reporter Jonathan Steele reported the following from Sudan:

    Question: When do Bush administration officials cuddle up to leaders of states that the U.S. describes as sponsors of international terrorism? Answer: When they are in Khartoum. I know because I saw it the other day [at] the closing dinner of a 2-day conference of African counter-terrorism officials, to which the U.S. and UK were invited as observers. The western spooks were less than happy to have the western press on hand, especially as their names were called out. But loss of anonymity was a small price for the excellent cooperation both agencies believe Sudan is giving to keep tabs on Somali, Saudi and other Arab fundamentalists who pass through its territoryâe¦.

    [The dinner] was in the garden of the headquarters of Sudan’s intelligence service, not far from the Nile. Up stepped a senior CIA agent. In full view of the assembled company, he gave General Salah Abdallah Gosh, Sudan’s intelligence chief, a bear hug. The general responded by handing over a goody-bag, wrapped in shiny green paper. Next up was the [British] M16 official, with the same effusive routine.

Are the Taliban worse than President el-Bashir of Sudan, Joseph Kony of the LRA, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, and all the other madmen, tyrants and war criminals the west routinely deals with, whether grudgingly or enthusiastically? Why have our media never decried attempts to negotiate with any of them? Why has Jack Layton attracted such hostility for his eminently reasonable suggestion?