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| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| Afghanistan coaxing mid-level Taliban to abandon the fight |
| 2005-07-06 |
| Peals of laughter rang through the remote farmhouse as friends rushed to welcome home their long-lost neighbor. Hugs and handshakes were exchanged. Teenage boys circled about, offering endless trays of sweet tea. The women waited patiently in a back room, silent and unseen as ever. The bearded man at the center of the hubbub, Mufti Habib ur Rehman, allowed his solemn face crack into a grin. "It's good to be back," he said. Only days earlier, Rehman, a one-time Taliban governor, had been a wanted man. He lived as a fugitive across the border in Pakistan, 20 miles to the south. He hadn't seen his family in years. The Americans were offering a $2, 500 bounty for him -- dead or alive. Then one morning in April, after secret negotiations brokered by local clerics -- and promises from U.S. forces not to shoot -- the 35-year-old Taliban loyalist came in from the cold. "I am not a terrorist. I am here to work for the reconstruction of my country," Rehman said before pledging allegiance to President Hamid Karzai. Dozens of mid-level Taliban officials have quietly defected this year, a process U.S. authorities hope will help end the insurgency that has dogged Afghanistan since 2001. Rehman, one of the initiative's success stories, held a news conference where he embraced the local governor. "The past is clear for everyone," he told journalists. "What counts now is the future." The reconciliation plan chugs forward against a backdrop of intense bloodletting. The past three months have seen a sharp increase in Taliban attacks and aggressive U.S. responses across southern Afghanistan. Suicide bombings, assassinations and extensive battles have claimed more than 700 lives on all sides over the past three months, according to U.S. and Afghan official estimates. Yet hopes remain that dialogue can soften, if not solve, Afghanistan's insurgency. Reconciliation drives in at least four southern provinces -- led by governors, mullahs and tribal leaders -- have netted a small but influential group, including several commanders and Mullah Mohammed Nazim, a onetime governor of the former Taliban stronghold of Zabul. Still, there are many complications. Last spring, the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, scotched hopes of an early truce by rejecting an amnesty offer from the Afghan government's leading negotiator, former President Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. Afghan officials say the resurgent Taliban seems to be influenced by reinvigorated ties with al Qaeda, whose militants are suspected of having a hand in a suicide bombing in Kandahar last month that killed 20 people, including the Kabul police chief, Gen. Akram Khakrezwal. "It's not a traditionally Afghan thing. That may be the significance of the attack -- it shows the influence of a global jihadi network," said Joanna Nathan, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, a conflict-analysis organization based in Brussels. Afghan officials say that behind the hard core of Taliban lies a majority of battle-weary combatants. Three separate programs in Khost, once home to Osama bin Laden, claim to have attracted between 10 and 20 militants each. Their focus is North Waziristan, the district just over the Pakistani border that has, by several accounts, become a major Taliban bolt-hole. One key issue preventing the return of more insurgents, said Mullah Ramatullah Mansoor, a militant cleric who secretly met with Karzai after returning home last year, is the continued detention of Afghans at Guantanamo Bay -- an issue that sparked nationwide riots in May after allegations that a Quran had been flushed down a toilet. About 17 people were killed and 100 injured. The U.S. military, stung by reports of prisoner abuse at its detention centers in Afghanistan, is starting to address those concerns. On Saturday, military officials released 57 Taliban suspects from Bagram Air Base. Another 144 are due for release later this year. But Karzai has yet to announce a full, national amnesty for Taliban fighters -- something that looks increasingly distant given the surge in fighting of recent months. He is under pressure from allies within the former Northern Alliance, who have a deep loathing for the Taliban -- their enemy during the civil war in the 1990s. Human rights groups insist the Taliban must be held accountable for their numerous abuses, including their brutal treatment of women and the mass execution of enemy soldiers. And skepticism about the reform of ex-Taliban fighters remains. Amir Shah Kargar, a burly Khost resident who spent five years in a Taliban jail, shook his head slowly. "Only the American spies will come back," he predicted. "But the hard core, those with a real ideology -- they will never give up alive." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |