Kabul, January 22: The Taliban are re-branding themselves as a local liberation movement to win the hearts and mind of local Afghans, amid increasing public discontent with the West-backed government and foreign troops.
“There is a tremendous change in the Taliban’s behavior,” Haji-Khan Muhammad Khan, a tribal elder from Shawalikot, a rural district of Kandahar Province, told.
Taliban are branding themselves among locals as a local liberation movement, independent of Al Qaeda.
Taliban leaders have also laid down a code of conduct for its fighters and issued directives restricting the use of suicide bombings and guiding fighters on how to act on hostages.
“They don’t behead people or detain those they suspect of spying without an investigation,” notes Khan.
“Sometimes they still make mistakes, people still fear them, but now generally they behave well with people.”
Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until ousted in the 2001 US invasion.
The regime is often condemned by the West as evil for enforcing a medieval-style rule in the central Asian Muslim country.
Local Support
Many believe the new image is part of Taliban’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of the locals amid increasing public discontent with the government and foreign troops.
“The Taliban are trying to win the favor of the people,” Wahid Mujda, a former Taliban official, told.
“The reason they changed their tactics is that they want to prepare for a long-term fight, and for that they need support from the people; they need local sources of income,” he explained.
“So, they learned not to repeat their previous mistakes.”
Khan, the tribal elder, agrees.
“They had to change because the leadership of the Taliban did not want to lose the support of the grass roots.”
Taliban have been waging guerilla warfare against the US-led foreign troops and the West-backed Kabul government.
“The Afghan adaptation to counterinsurgency makes them much more dangerous,” said a senior NATO intelligence official in Kabul.
“Their overarching goals probably haven’t changed much since 2001, but when we arrived with a new counterinsurgency strategy, they responded with one of their own.”
A recent report by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) said that Taliban had widened its influence to cover almost all Afghanistan.
-Agencies