Why Taliban giving up their guns may not be all they seem

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, The Sunday Telegraph has discovered 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 pounds 7?million 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.

Some 200 insurgents in the northern province of Sar-e Pol have recently been struck off the programme, officials told The Sunday Telegraph, 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 without publicity 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 (APRP), 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 told The Sunday Telegraph. "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."

British commanders point to lower levels of violence in districts such as Nad-e Ali as proof that fighters must be relinquishing the fight. But critics say the scheme is not working where it is most needed.

Pressure for a breakthrough is likely to increase as the 2014 deadline for withdrawal of international combat troops approaches, increasing anxiety over how the Afghan security forces will hold up when in charge.

Politicians in the US and elsewhere - in several cases facing imminent elections - are under pressure to speed the troop reduction. Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, said last week he wanted America to switch to mainly training missions by the middle of next year, and France has promised to hasten its exit as Nicholas Sarkozy faces a tough presidential election campaign this spring.

Diplomatic efforts have focused on trying to open channels to the Taliban's ruling council, most recently by agreeing a political office in Qatar, in the hope of one day helping Mr Karzai's government reach a political deal.

Envoys in Kabul hope talks could begin within weeks in the Gulf State, though even the most optimistic stress that any resulting peace process would probably take years.

Marc Grossman, American special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, reportedly met Taliban negotiators in Qatar late last month.

One of the most imminent obstacles he faces is a Taliban demand that five of their leaders are transferred from Guantanamo Bay prison, where they have been held for a decade, as a confidence-building measure.

Mr Grossman has said no decision has been made, but the concession faces growing resistance from American congressmen.

At the other end of the scale, the APRP and Maj Gen Hook aim to weaken the insurgency by drawing away lowly fighters motivated more by unemployment and local grievances than ideology, or who are weary after years of fighting.

Donors have set up a trust fund of pounds 92 million, including pounds 7 million from Britain, to fund it.

The money pays for Afghan officials to reach out to fighters in their area and then provide a monthly stipend of around pounds 100 as well as training and jobs to those who want to settle, plus aid to their villages.

Such re-integration is unlikely until a broader peace deal is reached, some critics argue. Fighters will not defect until their comrades also stop fighting and they are free from the threat of reprisal, their argument goes.

Maj Gen Hook disagrees, saying the two approaches feed off each other.

"The more we can integrate, the more we undermine the coherence of the various organisations, the more likely we are to have talks, because we are taking the wind from their sails," he explained.

Another fear is that those joining the scheme are either not real fighters, or are only joining to gain a respite from the coalition surge.

Such concerns stem from memories of re-integration attempts in the late 1980s when Najibullah, the Soviet-backed president, tried to persuade the Mujahideen to give up their struggle, often with large sums of money. A joke at the time was that the same men could be seen handing in their weapons each week.

Maj Gen Hook rejects the possibility the same is still happening and said greater vetting had been brought in. Anyone wanting to join the scheme is now verified locally and then again by Afghan defence and security officials in Kabul.

Eye and fingerprint scans are taken so they cannot try re-joining later on.

He admits the rush to set up the scheme had caused problems at first and it was still "of variable quality".

But the programme was now running at "warp speed", he said, and the 200 Sar-e Pol cases proved vetting checks were weeding out fakes.

He said: "Because we hadn't established a proper vetting process, they were all accepted into the programme and for the past nine to 10 months it's been a constant issue because when we vetted them nationally we realised that they weren't all insurgents.

"The double vetting has been to take away stuffing the programme with local cronies and to make sure that the people who come in are insurgents and not just common criminals, which was I think a justifiable criticism at the start of the programme."

The Sar-e Pol imposters had not been given any of the pounds 100 per month allowance, he said.

"I am reasonably confident the Afghans have a robust process because they turn people away all the time," he added.

Syed Anwar Ahmadti, governor of Sar-e Pol, said more than 600 insurgents had joined the government in his province in the past year and confirmed that 200 had subsequently been judged fraudulent. But he disagrees with that ruling, made in Kabul, and believes that the men had been fighting the government. "It doesn't matter if they don't have guns, they were helping the insurgency in logistics or some other capacity," he said.

Sceptics allege the "insurgents" are in some cases only local men who are rounded up and given old weapons to hand in, so that local officials can appear efficient while also raking off a share of the re-integration money.

Syed Obadullah Sadat, a council member from the eastern province of Ghazni has publicly denounced as a sham the defection last month by more than a dozen fighters.

He said: "The process is fake, people are doing it for money. It's all for show."

Dr Ghani Bahadari, the Afghan official in Ghazni who runs the scheme, rejected the criticism as "gossip".

He said: "The reason they joined the government is that their leaders have established an office in Qatar and showed their interest in peace. They have also told us they are tired of war."