Foreign Policy Blogs

40 Taliban Switch Allegiance to Local Government

The Frontier Post is reporting a bit of good news from an Afghan Islamic Press newswire piece.   At least 40 Taliban insurgents have switched allegiances in favor of their local government.  Here, from Herat:

“As many as 40 Taliban including their three commanders joined the government in Pasaband district of Ghor province, officials said Sunday. The Ghor Police Chief Abdul Baqi Nuristani said that 40 Taliban, including their renowned commander Feroz, handed over their 25 various kinds of weapons to the government, adding they vowed to live peaces life onwards. Nuristani said that was the group of opponents which joined the peace process.”

Taliban are always switching allegiances back and forth; nevertheless each report of such defections are surely newsworthy, even if from a public relations perspective. Let’s see if this flows upstream to the New York Times.

 

Author

Faheem Haider

Faheem Haider is a political analyst, writer and artist. He holds advanced research degrees in political economy, political theory and the political economy of development from the London School of Economics and Political Science and New York University. He also studied political psychology at Columbia University. During long stints away from his beloved Washington Square Park, he studied peace and conflict resolution and French history and European politics at the American University in Washington DC and the University of Paris, respectively.

Faheem has research expertise in democratic theory and the political economy of democracy in South Asia. In whatever time he has to spare, Faheem paints, writes, and edits his own blog on the photographic image and its relationship to the political narrative of fascist, liberal and progressivist art.

That work and associated writing can be found at the following link: http://blackandwhiteandthings.wordpress.com