[R-G] Taliban Gain New Foothold in Afghan City After Attack

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/articles/27kandahar.html
	
August 27, 2008

Taliban Gain New Foothold in Afghan City After Attack
  	

By CARLOTTA GALL

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The Taliban bomber calmly parked a white fuel  
tanker near the prison gates of this city one evening in June, then  
jumped down from the cab and let out a laugh. Prison guards fired on  
the bomber as he ran off, but they missed, instead killing the son of  
a local shopkeeper, Muhammad Daoud, who watched the scene unfold from  
across the street.

Seconds later, the Taliban fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the  
tanker, setting off an explosion that killed the prison guards,  
destroyed nearby buildings, and opened a breach in the prison walls as  
wide as a highway. Nearly 900 prisoners escaped, 350 of them members  
of the Taliban, in one of the worst security lapses in Afghanistan in  
the six years since the United States intervention here.

The prison break, on June 13, was a spectacular propaganda coup for  
the Taliban not only in freeing their comrades and flaunting their  
strength, but also in exposing the catastrophic weakness of the Afghan  
government, its army and the police, as well as the international  
forces trying to secure Kandahar.

In the weeks since the prison break, security has further deteriorated  
in this southern Afghan city, once the de facto capital of the  
Taliban, that has become a renewed front line in the battle against  
the radical Islamist movement. The failure of the American-backed  
Afghan government to protect Kandahar has rippled across the rest of  
the country and complicated the task of NATO forces, which have  
suffered more deaths here this year than at any time since the 2001  
invasion.

“We don’t have a system here, the government does not have a  
solution,” said Abdul Aleem, who fought the Taliban and helped to put  
some of its members in the prison. They are on the loose again, and he  
now faces death threats and sits in his garden with a Kalashnikov  
rifle on the chair beside him.

He said that without the presence of international forces in the city,  
the situation would be even worse. “If we did not have foreigners  
here, I don’t think the Afghan National Army or police would come out  
of their bases,” he said.

A rising chorus of complaints equally scathing about the failings of  
the government can be heard around the country. The collapsing  
confidence in the government of President Hamid Karzai is so serious  
that if the Taliban had wanted to, they could have seized control of  
the city of Kandahar on the night of the prison break, one Western  
diplomat in Kabul said.

The only reason they did not was they did not expect the government  
and the NATO reaction to be so weak, he said.

In fact, interviews with local officials and other people here who  
witnessed the bold prison break and its aftermath show that the level  
of government organization and security was woefully inadequate around  
what was clearly a high-priority target for the Taliban.

There were only 10 guards at the prison that night and about 1,400  
inmates, said Col. Abdullah Bawar, the new head of the prison.

Five of the guards were killed in the attack; three of them — Colonel  
Bawar’s son, his nephew and the son of another warden — died at the  
front gate when the tanker exploded. Four others were wounded, one  
losing a hand and suffering 17 bullet wounds, Colonel Bawar said.

Reinforcements arrived only after the prisoners had escaped. Police  
officers at a checkpoint a few hundred yards west of the prison  
panicked and started to flee, said Mr. Aleem, a former mujahedeen  
commander, who came out of his house that night to see what was going  
on.

“I told them, ‘Don’t run, you will be safe,’ ” he said. The Taliban,  
as he predicted, then made their escape south through a warren of  
streets opposite the prison, and did not bother to pick a fight with  
the police.

The city police chief and his forces, meanwhile, stood at a traffic  
circle to the east of the prison, guarding the approaches to the town,  
but never advanced on the prison until the Taliban, who numbered about  
40, were long gone.

“All the officials were watching with bulging eyes,” Mr. Aleem said.  
“If just 20 or 30 police had come round from the side they could have  
stopped them.”

Now he lives in constant danger. “It’s a very tough situation for  
people like me who helped the government,” he said. “I receive calls  
and they ask: ‘Are you still alive?’ ” The government also warned him  
the Taliban insurgents were plotting his assassination, and yet he  
maintained that they are not powerful. “I don’t think so; it is the  
government that is weak,” Mr. Aleem said.

He dismissed the frequent plea of the Afghan Army and the police, that  
they do not have enough resources to fight the Taliban, and said the  
real problem was a lack of leadership. The provincial governor,  
Asadullah Khaled, was visiting the United States at the time of the  
prison raid, leaving the city without strong leadership that night,  
Mr. Aleem said.

“The government has the facilities, weapons and equipment, but we  
don’t have the shepherds,” he said. On Saturday a former army general,  
Rahmatullah Raufi, was appointed as the new governor of Kandahar in a  
long-planned change. The former prison chief has also been arrested  
and accused of collusion in the prison break.

Abdul Qadir Noorzai, the head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights  
Commission in Kandahar, said the Taliban raid represented a great loss  
of face for the government. “People already did not believe in the  
government, so it doubled their disbelief in the government.”

In the immediate aftermath of the prison break, terrified local  
residents closed their shops and the town was silent for days as  
people braced themselves for more violence, including a possible  
attack on the city.

Within days families were fleeing, as Taliban appeared in villages in  
the Argandab district to the north of the city of Kandahar, forcing  
the government finally to send in a large force from the army and the  
police to quell the threat. That response relieved the panic somewhat,  
but the city has remained tense as escaped criminals and Taliban  
militants precipitated a sharp rise in crime in the city.

“We don’t know exactly if the Taliban is powerful, we have heard  
that,” said Gul Muhammad, 35, a shopkeeper who witnessed the assault  
on the prison and was even thrown off his feet by the blast. “But when  
we see this kind of attack, it seems they are very powerful.”

Haji Muhammad Musa Hotak, a member of Parliament from Wardak Province,  
near the capital, Kabul, warned that the gap between the people and  
the government had grown dire.

So wide is it, in fact, the situation reminds him of the end of the  
Communist era, when support for the government of the Soviet-backed  
president, Najibullah, began collapsing under the onslaught of the  
mujahedeen, who had waged a 13-year resistance in the name of Islam  
against successive Communist rulers.

The Taliban attack has also shaken local confidence in the  
international forces here and exposed the difficult situation of the  
understaffed Canadian troops in Kandahar, who have lost 90 soldiers in  
the last two and a half years in the province trying to contain an  
increasingly virulent Taliban insurgency.

An independent report by a panel led by the former Canadian foreign  
minister, John Manley, recommended in January that the Canadian  
contingent continue in Kandahar Province only if bolstered by 1,000  
more troops and the necessary helicopters and surveillance drones.

On the night of the prison break, Canadian troops based in the town as  
part of the NATO-led international Security Assistance Force were busy  
dealing with a number of roadside bombs planted, apparently in a  
coordinated plan to divert the attention of security forces from the  
attack.

Two of the bombs exploded just half an hour before the prison raid,  
and two, laid to hit any reinforcements sent to the prison, were found  
and defused, said Joe McAllister, a Canadian police superintendent who  
leads an eight-member team to train and mentor the Afghan police in  
Kandahar.

Superintendent McAllister defended the slow arrival of Canadian and  
Afghan police officers at the prison that night, saying that rushing  
in and getting injured would have caused more problems. “Police safety  
is civilian safety,” he said.

But he acknowledged a more glaring omission, that of the security of  
the prison itself. “I would suggest it wasn’t as strong as it could  
have been,” he said.

The Correctional Service of Canada had helped train and improve  
security around the prison, he said, but still there was no barrier or  
blast walls near the entrance, nothing to stop the bomber from parking  
the fuel tanker right outside the gates.

The failings make people wonder what the foreign troops are really  
doing in Afghanistan, said Mr. Daoud, the shopkeeper. “The Canadians  
are here, but things are getting worse and worse.”

United States Special Forces, who maintain a base on the northern side  
of Kandahar city, occupied the football stadium for a while after the  
prison break to guard against a rumored Taliban plan to attack the  
city from the south.

Meanwhile the police, under a new chief, have begun aggressive night  
patrols to clamp down on the crime wave that has ensued from so many  
criminals being back on the streets.

“The police will have to work hard for a while,” Superintendent  
McAllister said.