One Talib showed a voter registration card with his photo on it. Another said he used to work as a laborer for the American military in Ghazni on a Provincial Reconstruction Team.
The Talibs' interpreter was a village teenager home on vacation from high school in Kabul. The boy said he wants to be a doctor, and was eager to find out about scholarship opportunities in the West, but he also boasted about his readiness to fight foreigners.
The Taliban is also benefiting from foreign reinforcements, and the guerrillas' ranks include Americans, Europeans, Arabs, Chinese and other fighters, said Maulavi Arsalan Rahmani, who was minister of higher education in the ousted Taliban government.
Now senator in the Afghan parliament, Rahmani said senior Taliban leaders who answered Karzai's call for reconciliation, and moved to Kabul and other government-controlled cities, feel betrayed by the promise of rapprochement. Anger is simmering among almost 60 high-ranking Taliban defectors because the U.N. Security Council refuses to lift sanctions against them.
They include the Taliban's former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Mutawakel, its commerce minister, Abdul Razaq, and Qazi Habibullah, who served as ambassador to the Taliban's closest allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
That discourages other Talibs from dropping their weapons, Rahmani said.
"They don't trust the promises," he added. "They openly keep saying, 'What good have those who have gone to the other side done? They are not given the rights of an Afghan.' "
Still, members of the Taliban are ready for peace and have proposed a three-stage plan to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah and other leaders, Rahmani said, that would culminate in talks about what role the Taliban should play in the government.
Rahmani, who vowed to leave the country if the Taliban ever controlled it again, said the Taliban should only share power, and not run a government itself, because few of its leaders are qualified.
"We have indirect relations with the Taliban. They will accept our proposals and the government will too," he insisted. "But what we are not certain about is whether the international community really wants the war to end. We doubt it, we doubt it."
Emerging again from the desert, the Ghazni Talibs showed no fear of being tracked from their village base as the van kicked up a long, high tail of dust. They casually parked at the side of the highway, waiting for their guest's pickup car to make its way through an Afghan army checkpoint.
Their passenger safely transferred, the Talibs, waving and smiling into the city, headed off toward the waiting troops.
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paul.watson@latimes.com
