ShareThisKANDAHAR - His trigger-finger is curled into a permanent claw and he shakes uncontrollably due to bullet fragments lodged against his spine.
Yet two years after the Afghanistan government persuaded him to renounce his insurgent past, 45-year-old former Taliban commander Mohammed Gul is itching to rejoin the battle.
"This is my obligation, to go back and start fighting," said Gul, whose name has been changed. "The government said it would give me land and a job if I left the Taliban. They have broken those promises. Now I will break them."
Gul's situation reveals the challenges facing Afghanistan's underfunded and often counterproductive efforts to persuade Taliban insurgents to defect. In 2007, several thousand fighters surrendered throughout the country. Now defections are reduced to a trickle.
In the past 4 1/2-years, $3-million has been steered toward Taliban reconciliation, but evidence on the ground suggests the highly touted program has been a failure.
"We have broken many promises," said General Khan Mohammed, co-director of the Kandahar office of the Afghanistan National Independent Peace and Reconciliation Commission (known by its Dari acronym, PTS). "The government has broken many promises."
That may soon change. The United States is reportedly preparing a well-funded amnesty program along the lines of the Sons of Iraq program that persuaded thousands of Sunni Muslims to give up the Iraq insurgency.
Canadian officials are said to be overhauling the existing PTS program with Afghan President Hamid Karzai's blessing. But unless new money starts flowing into the hands of disgruntled former fighters like Gul, all of the PTS's early gains may soon be erased.
Karzai and NATO leaders have vowed to start a well-funded Taliban amnesty program later this year. Until then, the four-year-old PTS remains Afghanistan's most focused endeavor to lure insurgents from the battlefield.
Its pitch is simple, according to Mohammed: Renounce all Taliban ties and receive free care of war wounds, a temporary housing subsidy, a job and an empty plot of land.
The line worked on Gul. Wounded in a 2001 gun battle, his injuries became unbearable over six years of slogging across the mountain ranges of Khakrez district north of Kandahar.
"I practiced jihad (holy war) against the invaders," said Gul, a corpulent man dressed in a lopsided turban and frayed robe. "I wanted to fight the government, to remove the invaders from Afghanistan."
A friend eventually persuaded him that the PTS office would pay for decent medical care. In 2007, he joined several thousand Taliban fighters who signed with the PTS and renounced the insurgency. The program showed potential then, persuading some 4,400 fighters to surrender throughout the country.
"They took care of my hand and told me they would give me money for rent, general expenses, a piece of good land and a job," Gul said.
He was sent to Kabul for a meeting with the head of the PTS, who, he said, gave him $600. The money lasted three months. When he returned to the PTS office for more cash, administrators laughed at his request, he said.
As for the land, the PTS granted him property papers, but the provincial government has yet to provide him with a plot. Now, he said, he's jobless, landless and penniless, dependent on the goodwill of neighbors to feed his two children.
"I think I must go back to the fighting," he said. "What else can I do? I'm hopeless here, hopeless."
The destitution of Taliban turncoats is common, according to Mohammed.
In all of 2008, 48 insurgents joined the program in Kandahar. In the three months since the presidential election, just five have made their way to Gen. Mohammed's office.
"There are big problems," he said. "At first, so many came in saying they no longer wanted to destroy Afghanistan, saying that the fighting life was too hard, saying that they wanted an ordinary life. But they now realize we have nothing to offer."
Another former Taliban fighter, 40-year-old Mullah Salam, said insurgent friends visit him every month to urge him back to the battlefields of Maywan district, where he served as a Taliban medic until taking up a PTS offer in 2007.
"I was very tired of the fighting," said the father of eight, whose name has also been altered. "I wanted to stay at home with my children. My children needed school. They needed to go to the city to have a good life."
On a recent weekday, he was working as a construction laborer, a job paying a fraction of the $230 a month the Taliban had offered. Despite his low wage and his two-year wait for PTS land, he said he would never go back to the Taliban.
"I'm a former commander, a former police chief, a former director of a prison," he said. "I used to drive a very nice car. Now I cannot afford shoes for all my children. I know that the foreign people here are good people. The Canadians and Americans are here to help. But when Obama gives money to the Afghan government, the Afghan politicians put it all in their own pockets."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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