Canadian officials have met with Taliban more than a dozen times since Kabul fell: documents

Canadian government officials have met with representatives of the Taliban on at least thirteen occasions in Qatar since it swept to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, documents obtained by CBC News reveal.

The documents, obtained through access to information law, show David Sproule, Canada's senior official for Afghanistan, has been — along with various Global Affairs Canada (GAC) officials and representatives of allied countries — pressing the Taliban for commitments on extending the right to an education to women, fighting terrorism and granting safe passage to Afghans who want to leave the country.

Unlike foreign affairs departments in the U.S. and Pakistan, Canada does not provide regular updates on its talks with the government in Afghanistan.

A spokesperson for Global Affairs turned down an interview request for Sproule, but the department did acknowledge that the senior official has been engaging it informal talks with the Taliban and would continue to press it on human rights issues.

The documents obtained by CBC News are mostly emails Sproule sent to his GAC colleagues. They show the Taliban has made its own requests of Canada and other countries — and has issued denials regarding the dangers faced by Afghans trying to leave, despite multiple reports by CBC News and other media outlets about those dangers.

In a meeting on Oct. 12, 2021 — not long after it took over — the Taliban asked representatives of foreign governments to reopen their embassies in Kabul.

According to a note Sproule wrote to his colleagues, Afghanistan's acting foreign minister at the time, Amir Khan Muttaqi, also asked those governments to lift their sanctions and claimed his government was inclusive because it included ethnic minority representation and "women in government have not been fired."

During that same meeting, Sproule reported, the Taliban claimed that "people are using security as an excuse to leave the country, but are really leaving to seek economic opportunities." Sproule said the Taliban also claimed that while it did not want anyone to leave, it would "not create hurdles if they wanted to go."

Sproule said that the Taliban suggested that foreign governments "interested in helping women ... should start by paying the salaries of 200,000 female teachers, including 28,000 in Kabul."

Sproule reported that during his next meeting with Afghan government representatives, also in October, the Taliban acknowledged "a minor problem in cabinet" — a lack of women.

Taliban representatives also claimed, he said, that "women judges, prosecutors and others" taking part in demonstrations against the regime "are deliberately provoking security personnel to retaliate against them so they can produce video of the retaliation to back up their claims for asylum abroad."

Sproule reported the Taliban accused "the international community" of a double standard because it "recognized many other governments that came to power by force but had the support of the people."

He said that on Nov. 23, he asked another Taliban official (whose name and title were redacted in the documents) why they would not consider a power-sharing agreement "with respected figures outside the movement to give it added legitimacy."

The Taliban representative agreed there would be an "advantage in doing so," Sproule said, since the last four decades in Afghanistan showed that one political group could not fully control the country by force — but the regime was maintaining "100 per cent monopoly over power."