Hundreds of Taliban fighters could abandon their insurgency in Afghanistan as a result of peace talks under way between local commanders and President Hamid Karzai's government, a provincial governor said on Saturday. Three years after US-led forces ousted the Taliban from power for harbouring Al Qaeda, Karzai and his US backers hope to coax lower-level Taliban fighters back to normal life, leaving senior commanders and Al Qaeda leaders isolated. Tribal chiefs are acting as intermediaries between the Taliban and Karzai's government in the southeastern provinces of Paktia, Khost and Paktika, said Paktia governor Assadullah Wafa. "We have more than hundreds of Taliban who want to return to their normal lives in Khost, Paktia and Paktika provinces," Wafa told the news agency. In return, the tribal chiefs and local officials want the US ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, to urge US forces not to harass Taliban members who quit the insurgency, he said. "The government is talking to them through tribal chiefs and we are demanding Khalilzad use his influence and propose to the American military not to detain or harass those Taliban who plan to stop fighting the government," Wafa said. He said a regional delegation had travelled to Kabul hoping to meet Khalilzad, but the ambassador was away from the capital. An embassy spokesman said Khalilzad had since left the country. No Taliban official could immediately be contacted for comment, but Taliban spokesman Abdul Latifi Hakimi told the news agency earlier this week the group was committed to fighting Karzai's government and US and NATO troops in Afghanistan. He said the government was using the issue of talks with the Taliban as propaganda and a way of creating a rift among the militants. Leaders of the mainstream opposition parties fear that Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun, wants to use the proposed amnesty to strengthen his power base in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and southeast ahead of parliamentary elections due in April. Wafa declined to identify any of the Taliban he said were willing to stop fighting, but said the group that he was in contact with consisted of both senior and ordinary members of the radical Islamic movement. US-led troops overthrew the Taliban government in late 2001 after it refused to hand over Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks on US cities.