Both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Taliban have promised the world major military offensives in southern Afghanistan. The NATO-led alliance is sending thousands of soldiers into the fray to preempt the Taliban Ghazwatul Badr uprising that has been announced with a centurion call for thousands of fighters and suicide bombers to ready their ammunition belts. Yet although Afghanistan is well into its balmy spring, the battlefield in southern Afghanistan has entered a twilight zone of cloak-and-dagger assassinations with only limited clashes. The poppy harvest is only now ending, and growing doubts about Afghanistan's future have infested the parched valleys and high mountains passes. The Taliban have not gone on a blazing warpath, and that makes everyone a little more nervous.
| "It's quiet out there, Sarge." "Yeah. Too quiet." "That makes me .. nervous." |
The bill still has to be passed by the Wolesi Jirga (People's Assembly), the lower house of Parliament, and signed by President Hamid Karzai before becoming law. Similar approaches to the Taliban have failed in the past. The move follows a law providing an amnesty from war crimes committed over nearly three decades of civil war.
Meanwhile, as the time-bomb ticks toward more fighting, the rag-tag Afghan insurgency is fast morphing into a 21st-century guerrilla movement.
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