Taliban travel rocky road back to Afghanistan
Taliban travel rocky road back to Afghanistan
Two men sat in the governor’s garden recently, in this unruly province bordering Pakistan, smiling and nodding as they chatted with him. The men are former members of the Taliban who have taken advantage of offers of amnesty in exchange for returning from exile in Pakistan.
“The Taliban are also part of the Afghan population,” said the urbane governor of Khost Province, Merajuddin Pathan, explaining why he had welcomed these former Taliban officials. “We want to bring them back for the future of our country and stability. It is very simple.
“If they accept our laws and our national interest, they can come home.”
Yet the government’s program of national reconciliation, promised last year by President Hamid Karzai, has not proved so simple.
U.S. backs plan
The government has yet to announce the program formally, apparently because of resistance in the Cabinet and among ethnic groups that suffered particularly under the Taliban, whose militant Islamic government was ousted with American military help in 2001.
The U.S. military enthusiastically supports such a program as a strategy to undermine the Taliban-led insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan that has cost up to 1,000 Afghan lives in the past 18 months and killed 30 American soldiers in the past year.
Frustrated by the delays, the Americans have started a parallel allegiance program.
