NYT : Taliban Gain New Foothold in Afghan City After Attack

Taliban Gain New Foothold in Afghan City After Attack

By CARLOTTA GALL | August 27, 2008

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.