There was too much defeatism in the tea house for young Atiqullah's taste. He was sure the Taliban would be back. "Afghanistan's military and political situation is tumultuous, as unpredictable as spring weather. It is sunny and cool for part of the day and suddenly you see the cloud burst and it rains," Atiqullah said, hoping that the Taliban would prevail eventually, with Allah's help. His older companion said the reality on the ground was different. "The Taliban are not the threat they were a year ago and Americans seem to have succeeded in taking our country," he said. But an anticipated spring offensive in the last few weeks showed the Taliban were still in business after a long winter lull that followed their failure to disrupt Afghanistan's presidential poll last October.A plan by President Hamid Karzai to offer amnesty to all but the most-hardened Taliban fighters could weaken the insurgency. Karzai also dropped leading anti-Taliban figures from his new cabinet, and there have been several reports by security forces of Taliban surrendering recently. "The Taliban are neither weakened nor will any one of them surrender arms to the infidels. The reports of surrenders are just propaganda by the occupying infidel forces," Mullah Dadullah, one of the most-wanted Taliban commanders, told Reuters by satellite telephone. "The jihad (holy war) in Afghanistan will continue until the infidels are ousted."
Certainly, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Sfaff, General Richard Myers, appeared to overstate his case when he described the security situation in Afghanistan as "exceptionally good" during a visit in mid-March. But then the U.S. forces are hoping to hand over control of southern Afghanistan to NATO-led peacekeepers early next year, a few months after parliamentary polls set for September. The recent spate of attacks have ranged across the south and east, and a bomb blast on March 27 in Kabul was the first in the capital for five months, though there were no fatalities. U.S. forces had suffered their worst one-day losses in combat for some time a day earlier when four soldiers were killed by a land mine in Logar province just south of Kabul. Bombs in the southern city of Kandahar and eastern city of Jalalabad also announced the Taliban's defiance during recent visits by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and U.S. first lady Laura Bush.