Alissa Rubin talking “Bringing the Taliban is is one of the major efforts now, both of the Afghan government, but also of the Americans and the NATO forces. But it turns out it’s a bit tricker than anybody thought. They’ve been on it for almost 10 months and there’s some progress, but it’s still slow, somewhat hampered by a whole array of problems. One of them is that each province has to set up its own peace council, which will then make contact with local Taliban, tell them that they can come back without risking going to prison. But not all provinces have set up these peace councils, so you have a couple of provinces where, if you were a Taliban, and I met a couple, and you were trying to figure out where to go, you wouldn’t know who to go to. So if you are in one of those places where in fact they most want to bring in people, Kandahar, Kunar, Nangarhar, that system has really not been completely nailed down and there is enormous fear about coming in. So, of the about I believe it is now about 1400 people who have come in, about two thirds are in the north, which while interesting and important is really not the center of the insurgency, the center of the insurgency is the south and east. Furthermore when people do come in, it’s sometimes hard to tell who they are. In Kandahar I met a man who the Taliban had assigned to become a governor in their parallel government structure in the north of the country, and he had decided to turn himself in and join the government. And there was a ceremony, and then afterwards when I spoke to US intelligence a couple of months later people said, well, increasingly they were unsure that he really was slated to be a Taliban shadow governor, and they weren’t sure who he was. That is the kind of situation that leaves a lot of people doubting the whole program.” ENDS