Just 19 Taliban find amnesty plan attractive
WRAPPED in shawls against the cold, some with scarves to hide their faces, the men stand in front of a table bearing an arsenal of assault rifles and rockets.
As the insurgents renounce their armed struggle and declare they have made peace with Hamid Karzai's government, local journalists film the ceremony.
Such scenes are now a common feature of Afghan news bulletins and portray one of the main pillars of Nato's strategy to overpower the Taliban and force them to the negotiating table prior to the planned exit by US and British forces.
However, there is disturbing evidence that all is not as it seems. New figures show that over the past 18 months the "re-integration" scheme that Britain has funded with £7m (€8.36m) has attracted only 19 militants in Helmand province, where British troops are fighting.
In at least one Afghan province the insurgents pledging to change their ways and uphold the Afghan constitution were not what they seemed. Around 200 insurgents in the northern province of Sar-e Pol have recently been struck off the programme, officials say, because checks subsequently found they were not genuine fighters but imposters seeking cash handouts.
The news will not surprise the scheme's sceptics, who allege that Western taxpayers are being duped by criminals, the unemployed and corrupt officials while the real fighters stay in the conflict or join the government temporarily.
A leaked Nato report earlier this month also appeared to cast doubt on the very premise of the re-integration programme: that Taliban fighters are tired, motivated by money and want a way out.
Interrogators who have questioned thousands of insurgent prisoners in the past year reported instead that they remain motivated, feel their support is rising and their victory inevitable as foreign troops withdraw.
Fighters in Helmand, where the great majority of Britain's 397 dead have been killed, remain too afraid of their comrades in the Taliban to publicly relinquish the struggle and join the scheme despite security gains in the province, Nato and Afghan officials said.
Under the scheme, agreed two years ago at the London conference on Afghanistan, fighters are offered amnesty, training, jobs and aid for their villages if they leave the insurgency. Around 3,000 men have joined nationwide in the past 18 months, but figures show the take-up in the southern and eastern strongholds of Taliban support, including in Helmand, has been negligible compared to that in the relatively peaceful north.
Nato officers insist that the low figures do not reflect the unknown number of fighters who are quietly laying aside their weapons and settling their differences with Hamid Karzai's government.
Maj Gen David Hook, the British officer who leads Nato support for the Afghanistan Peace and Re-integration Programme, said that the numbers painted only a partial picture.
"They don't want to come in because they are afraid it exposes them to the threat of the Taliban," he said.
"At the moment some of them are more afraid of the Taliban than they are of being killed or captured. The question here is, how many people have done what Afghans traditionally do when they get tired of fighting? They have just gone home, laid their weapons aside and gone back to normal society.
"This informal effect is difficult to measure."
©Telegraph
- Ben Farmer in Kabul
Originally published in
