![\"AFGHANISTAN\/\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/afghanistan\/files\/2010\/01\/t1.jpg\" "\\"AFGHANISTAN\/\\"")
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If you can’t beat the Taliban,\u00a0buy them out.\u00a0At last week’s conference in London, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s Western backers\u00a0endorsed his latest attempt to lure away\u00a0low level Taliban fighters with money and jobs, \u00a0committing themselves to a $500 million fund to finance the re-integration plan. The logic is that a majority of the Taliban ,\u00a070 percent actually according to some estimates, are\u00a0the so-called\u00a0“$10 fighters”<\/a> who do not share the leaders’ intense\u00a0ideological\u00a0 motivation. They are driven to the Islamists because they are the only source of livelihood in a war-ravaged nation. So if you offered them an alternative, these rent-a-day foot soldiers can easily be broken.<\/p>\n Quite part from the fact that several such attempts have failed in the past, the whole idea that members of the Taliban are\u00a0up for sale\u00a0 just when the \u00a0insurgency is at its deadliest is not only unrealistic but also smacks of arrogance, Newsweek <\/a>magazine notes in an well-argued article.\u00a0\u00a0It quotes Sami Yousoufsai\u00a0a local journalist “who understands the Taliban as few others do”\u00a0 as laughing at the idea that the Taliban could be bought over.<\/p>\n “If the leadership, commanders, and sub commanders wanted comfortable lives,\u00a0 they would have made their deals long ago. Instead they stayed committed to their cause even when they were on the run, with barely a hope of survival,” the article says quoting the journalist.\u00a0 Now the Taliban are back in action across much of the south, east, and west, the provinces surrounding Kabul, and chunks of the north.”They used to hope they might reach this point in 15 or 20 years. They’ve done it in eight. Many of them see this as proof that God is indeed on their side.”\u00a0 Indeed one Taliban member reacted angrily to the idea of a buy-out. “You can’t buy my ideology, my religion. It’s an insult,”he said.<\/p>\n At another level, come to think of it,\u00a0if theirs is a force largely made of\u00a0rented foot soldiers, \u00a0the Taliban have done exceptionally well\u00a0 taking control of large parts of the country massed against the world’s biggest military powers. Imagine what it would be like if this wasn’t just a $10 a day army as Karzai and his allies paint it to be\u00a0and instead a proper fighting force.<\/p>\n So why would they defect ? And just how realistic is this ?\u00a0 The relatively few Taliban who did accept Karzai’s previous offers to return to society live virtually in self-exile in Kabul, afraid to go to their homes in the countryside where the Taliban\u00a0won’t spare them. Some of those it had spoken to, Newsweek notes,\u00a0wanted to go \u00a0back\u00a0 to the Taliban,\u00a0\u00a0but they know\u00a0they won’t be\u00a0forgiven. So its a real problem, where do the Taliban go, even after Karzai offers them gobs of money. ” They wouldn’t want to live in expensive Kabul, where people on the streets would make fun of their country ways, huge black turbans, and kohl eyeliner. They hate everything that Kabul represents: a sinful place of coed schools, dancing, drinking, music, movies, prostitution, and the accumulation of wealth.”<\/p>\n Breaking an insurgency with money or turning ex-fighters against the insurgents is an old tactic. Indian forces did something similar in Kashmir to weaken the 20-year-revolt, back in the 1990s. They\u00a0 backed the creation of a force\u00a0 or the “Ikhwan<\/a>” , many of them ex-fighters to take on the insurgents. For sometime the pro-government militia \u00a0managed to inflict casualties, but it was a force, by the very nature of things, assembled to serve a purpose and then left pretty much to its own fate.. “We are dying\u00a0 a dog’s death,” I remember one of the members of the militia telling me, as the insurgents helped by intelligence from local villagers picked them off one by one in a matter of a few months. The Indian state, which had backed them earlier, had washed its hands off\u00a0 by then.<\/p>\n![\"AFGHANISTAN\/\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/afghanistan\/files\/2010\/01\/m14.jpg\" "\\"AFGHANISTAN\/\\"")
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