In November 2008 Afghan President Hamid Karzai stated he would provide security for Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar if he reached out to the Afghan government. In May 2009 Karzai’s administration was rumored to be negotiating with Mullah Omar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Sirajuddin Haqqani. By the following month the United States and the United Kingdom were said to be open to negotiations with lower-level Taliban. A month after that, Karzai himself re-iterated that engagement with the Taliban was the best way to end the bloody insurgency.

Now those former Taliban who left the terrorist group amid promises of government are said to be having second thoughts. At the same time, the number of Taliban defectors is has been greatly decreasing as the Karzai Administration works out a new plan to try to lure lower-level Taliban back into the fold of the Afghan state:

“The government said it would give me land and a job if I left the Taliban. They have broken those promises. Now I will break them.”

“We have broken many promises,” said General Khan Mohammed, co-director of the Kandahar office of theAfghanistan National Independent Peace and Reconciliation Commission (known by its Dari acronym, PTS). “The government has broken many promises.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and NATO leaders have vowed to start a well-funded Taliban amnesty program later this year. Until then, the four-year-old PTS remains Afghanistan’s most focused endeavour to lure insurgents from the battlefield.

Its pitch is simple, according to Gen. Mohammed: Renounce all Taliban ties and receive free care of war wounds, a temporary housing subsidy, a job and an empty plot of land.

Despite this simple pitch however, the Afghan people remain leery of any promises made to them by a government they have been critical of many years now. As 2010 begins with civilian casualties in Afghanistan, the United Nations names Afghanistan as the worst nation to be born in, and American Jihadists try to make their way to Afghanistan, finding an effective way to engage with the Taliban while still ensuring the rights and security of the Afghan people is becoming more important as each day passes in the lives of the Afghans.

How ‘broken promises‘ brought down a heralded effort to reform the Taliban [The Globe and Mail]