It Seems Jack Is "WORLD" Leader Material....

Terry Glavin: Taliban Jack gets more than his due

Posted: February 01, 2010, 2:15 PM by NP Editor Filed under: Full Comment,Terry Glavin

 

Of course it would be both a farce and an irony of the most absurd kind, but what the hell. Now that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is pouring his old appeasement wine into a new bottle he calls "peace at any cost" and Afghanistan's feminists, secularists, human rights activists and democrats are once again overcome by that sickly sensation of having knives thrust into their backs, some people have become absolutely giddy with the idea that we should all thank Jack Layton for what has happened. Over at Macleans, under the headline Ahead Of His Time, Paul Wells writes: "Kudos to the NDP leader." Wells recommends his readers to his colleague Aaron Wherry, who has strung together a bunch of quotations from people in such a way as to imply that everyone had been far too beastly when they mocked 'Taliban Jack' in response to Layton's September, 2006 remark: “A comprehensive peace process has to bring all the combatants to the table.” The headline on Wherry's quote collection: And You All Laughed. Well, some people certainly did laugh, but can you blame them? Only days before, Layton's NDP had broken with every serious political party in the western hemisphere by adopting as its core Afghanistan policy: Support Our Troops, Bring 'em home. No one would stop laughing, so Layton tried to salvage things by doubling down with the notion that after an NDP government had spit in the face of the United Nations, Canada's envoys would be welcomed back to Afghanistan with their diplomatic pouches stuffed with patchouli oil, flipcharts, old Joan Baez records and instructions to subvert the authority of the embryonic Afghan republic by setting off into the hills in search of Taliban mullahs with whom to begin negotiations.

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