Hundreds of Taliban to surrender arms: NATO

Nato official says the pace of the reintegration programme has picked up.

KABUL: As many as 900 Afghan fighters have agreed to lay down their arms, a senior Nato official said on Monday, but it is too soon to say if a drive to bring in low-level fighters can be decisive in curbing bloodshed.

Major-General Philip Jones, who leads Nato support of the Afghan government’s efforts to broker peace with various militant factions, said reintegration of local fighters had begun in earnest three or four months ago.

“The pace of people coming into the programme has picked up … but the initial steps are the first in a very long process of trying to build peace,” Jones told reporters in Kabul.

“It’s a tough and complicated and very human process at all levels, but of course it would be after 20 years of war and 10 years of insurgency.”

Yet many thousands more full- or part-time fighters from the Taliban and other militant groups will need to halt their hostilities if Afghanistan is to emerge from bloodshed. Violence reached its highest level last year in nearly a decade of fighting after the Taliban government was overthrown, as US President Barack Obama sent some 30,000 extra soldiers to take on Taliban militants dug in across southern Afghanistan.

After heavy fighting last year, parts of the southern Taliban heartland are more secure and Afghan and Western officials are hoping to rout the Taliban’s spring offensive.

But the Taliban, the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, and other groups remain well-armed and determined and bloodshed has intensified in eastern Afghanistan and spread to once-secure areas of the country’s north and west.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 8^th, 2011.