Afghanistan: Peals of laughter rang through the remote Afghan farmhouse as neighbours rushed to welcome home the long-lost son of the soil. Hugs and handshakes were exchanged. Teenage boys offered trays of sweet tea.
The women waited patiently in a back room, silent and unseen as ever. The bearded man at the centre of the hubbub, Mufti Habib-ur-Rehman, allowed his solemn face to crack into a grin. "It's good to be back," he said.
Smile he might. Days earlier Rehman (35), a one-time Taliban governor, had been a wanted man.
He lived as a fugitive across the border in Pakistan, 30km to the south. He had not seen his family in years. US troops were offering a $2,500 award for his capture, dead or alive.
Last month, after secret negotiations brokered by local mullahs - and promises from the Americans not to shoot - he came in from the cold.
"I am not a terrorist, I am here to work for the reconstruction of my country," he said, before pledging allegiance to President Hamid Karzai.
Rehman is one of dozens of mid-level Taliban officials who have defected to the government this year, a process which US officials hope is the beginning of the end for the insurgency that has dogged them since 2001.
Reconciliation efforts in at least four southern provinces - led by governors, mullahs and tribal leaders - have netted a small but influential group. include a handful of commanders and the former governor of Helmand province.
Last Tuesday the former Taliban foreign minister, Mullah Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, said he would contest a seat from Kandahar in next September's parliamentary elections.
The US military, anxious to free troops for Iraq and reduce its $10 billion annual bill in Afghanistan, is four-square behind the reconciliation efforts.
The generals also want to quell trouble before the parliamentary election, shortly after which 5,000 British troops are due to arrive.
US officials advocate narrowing the wanted list to about 100 senior Taliban, allowing the remainder to return home free. They say reconciliation is working.
Last week Col Gary Cheek, the US commander for eastern Afghanistan, said: "Our enemies are significantly weaker than a year ago and their influence continues to wane." Col Cheek had given the green light to Rehman, who held a press conference at which he embraced Khost's governor, Merajuddin Pathan. "The past is clear for everyone," Rehman told the cameras. "What counts now is the future."
It may not be so simple. Last week Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar scotched hopes of an early truce by rejecting an amnesty offer from the Afghan government's lead negotiator, former president Sibghatullah Mojaddedi.
"We don't need any guarantee of safety from the government," a Taliban spokesman, Abdul Latif Hakimi, told Reuters. "Mullah Omar, our leader, is not hiding. Rather, he is fighting."
On a bad day, talk of the Taliban collapsing seems utterly fanciful. Since early last month the coalition and insurgents have had a series of bloody exchanges that have killed 30 Afghan soldiers, three Americans, one Romanian and, reportedly, 150 Taliban.
In one incident, nine Afghans were killed in a machine-gun ambush as they got off a truck; in another, two US marines were shot inside a cave. In another attack suspected Taliban militants killed five Afghans working on a US-funded reconstruction project.
Determined to scuttle rumours of their impending demise, the militants relaunched their radio station, Voice of Sharia.
They evaded the authorities by using a mobile transmitter.
Afghan officials insist a peaceful solution is within reach. Three programmes in Khost - a town once home to Osama bin Laden - claim to have attracted between 10 and 20 militants each.
Their focus is North Waziristan, a mountainous area across the border in Pakistan, which has by all accounts become a Taliban bolthole.
Syed Muhammad, a returned Talib, said that in Miriam Shah, North Waziristan's main town, Taliban fighters cruised the streets and local mullahs preached jihad. "They say that Islam is in danger from America. It is destroying Afghanistan first, and then it will come to Miriam Shah," he said during an interview in the governor's garden.
Pakistani's Inter-Services Intelligence agency plays a hotly disputed role. Three former Taliban said that the spy agency, which fostered the Taliban in the 1990s, was funding and training its militants. "It is an open secret," said one, who requested anonymity.
According to Pathan, rogue intelligence agency officers are working against their government and the military intelligence service, which is loyal to President Pervez Musharraf.
Pakistan's leading anti-terrorist commander, Lt Gen Safdar Hussain, denied the allegations. "There is no state within a state," he said at his headquarters in Peshawar.
"The old guard from the jihadi days are long retired. Everyone in the ISI works under my command."
Whatever their support base - Arab donors are also suspected of contributing money and arms - many Taliban are getting sick of fighting, said Mullah Rahmatullah Mansoor, a militant cleric who returned home last year and later secretly met Mr Karzai.
One issue hindering reconciliation was the continued detention of Afghans at Guantanamo Bay, he added, an issue that sparked nationwide riots last week after Newsweek alleged that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet. About 17 people were killed and 100 injured.
A political minefield lies between the Taliban and a happy homecoming. Analysts say Mr Karzai has stalled announcing a full amnesty because he fears a backlash from the former Northern Alliance, whose leaders were once bitter Taliban enemies and now hold powerful positions in Kabul.
Human rights groups say the Taliban must be held accountable for their numerous abuses, such as the stoning of women charged with adultery and the mass execution of enemy soldiers.
Despite the optimism of the peaceniks, scepticism about a mass return remains. Amir Shah Kargar, a burly Khost man who spent five years in a Taliban jail, shook his head slowly.
"Only the American spies will come back," he predicted. "But the hard core, those with a real ideology, they will never give up alive." (Guardian service)