NEW YORK TIMES: After years of deriding Afghanistan’s government and army as corrupt tools of Western occupiers, the Taliban have begun publicly airing a softer vision for the country’s future, with senior insurgent leaders saying the militants are willing to govern alongside other Afghan factions and even to adopt the current American-financed army as their own.
Still, the new statements offer the tantalizing prospect of a Taliban leadership that is ready to talk, even if many of its aims are out of line with the Afghan government and its Western allies.
That willingness may be in part because of a still-unfolding feud at the group’s top levels, according to recent interviews with a senior Taliban commander and another Afghan man close to the group. Those two men, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say that the Taliban’s hard-line military commander, Mullah Abdul Quyyum Zakir, a former detainee at the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, is being pushed aside in favor of more moderate rivals. .. (more)
