PRESS RELEASE: Solidarity with the Anti-Taliban and Anti-Pakistani-Invasion Resistance in Afghanistan (Ottawa, September 9, 2021)

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PRESS RELEASE: Solidarity with the Anti-Taliban and Anti-Pakistani-Invasion Resistance in Afghanistan (Ottawa, September 9, 2021)

Solidarity with the Anti-Taliban and Anti-Pakistani-Invasion Resistance in Afghanistan

Press Release

Ottawa, September 9, 2021

As Canadian citizens and members of the Afghan community in Canada, we strongly condemn and oppose the Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan and the forceful subjugation of Afghanistan’s population under the draconian rules of the group. The Taliban captured power through illegal and violent means and with direct support from the Pakistani military. We denounce the Pakistani government for its continued support of the Taliban as its proxy force and call upon the international community to uphold international law and put an end to Pakistan’s invasion of Afghanistan.

We also denounce the US’s hasty and irresponsible withdrawal from Afghanistan, which paved the way for the catastrophe that has been unfolding in Afghanistan over the past month. The US and its coalition allies in Afghanistan are directly responsible for the crisis in that country by failing to ensure a political settlement that respects and protects human rights and the democratic will of the Afghan people. The so-called Doha Peace Agreement signed between the US government and the Taliban on February 29, 2020, granted political recognition to a terrorist group at the expense of the Afghan people’s right to choose their own future. We denounce the US agreement with the Taliban and the UN Security Council’s endorsement of that agreement. This is the first time that the United Nations has validated an agreement between a foreign country and a terrorist organization in regard to a third country in the absence of the people and government of that country.

We support the government of Canada’s decision not to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. The so-called interim government announced by the Taliban is a testimony to the fact that the group has absolutely no commitment to include others, particularly women and minority groups, in their government. This is a blatant disregard of the people of Afghanistan and the international community’s expectations for an inclusive government representative of all segments of Afghan society. 

We know the Taliban. Whatever their promises, they will never deliver in action. One does not have to be an Afghan to know that Pakistan created the Taliban in the 1990s to install a puppet government in Kabul and to make Afghanistan a de facto province of Pakistan. As Pakistan’s proxy force, the Taliban have done everything, including massacres and genocide of ethnic minorities who resisted them, to impose their will upon the people of Afghanistan. Even now, the Taliban are committing horrendous war crimes in the Panjshir valley, where national resistance against the Taliban and the Pakistani invasion of Afghanistan has taken shape. Ordinary people are facing summary executions, arbitrary detentions, disappearances, torture, forced displacement, hunger and death due Taliban violence and their blockade of food and medical supplies to the province. We call for immediate action from the government of Canada and the international community to address Taliban atrocities in Panjshir.

We demand that the international community and the government of Canada stand with Afghans in their rightful resistance against the Taliban’s tyranny in Afghanistan. Daily protests in Afghanistan and around the world against the Taliban’s rule are reminders that the people of Afghanistan refuse to become citizens of a state under Pakistani guardianship. We refuse to submit to an obscurantist, medieval terrorist group that is the Taliban. We refuse to have our future decided and agreed upon in Doha or New York. We call upon our allies in Canada and around the world to join us in our struggle for a free, democratic and peaceful Afghanistan.