Back in June, the Taliban blew apart the front walls of Sarposa prison in Kandahar City, freeing about 400 of its fighters and hundreds more regular criminals. From a security perspective, things continue to deteriorate there.
In the weeks since the jailbreak, 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.
This still absolutely floors me:
The Correctional Service of Canada had helped train and improve security around the prison, (Canadian police superintendent Joe McAllister) 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 article doesn't explain how a tanker truck managed to get in front of the prison in the first place. That absolutely boggles my mind.
I travelled in far southern Mexico in the early 1980s, just immediately north of Guatemala where a civil war raged. There were army checkpoints everywhere I got checked a lot.
In Phnom Penh, Cambodia in July 1996, the situation was secure enough to make formal checkpoints within the city centre unnecessary.
Not that I'm a security expert or grizzled foreign correspondent, but it doesn't make sense that such a high-value target for the Taliban would be so unprotected.
I should also note this BBC story:
There is convincing evidence that 60 children and 30 adults were killed in a US air strike in western Afghanistan last Friday, the United Nations says.
The US originally said its planes had killed 30 militants in the attack in the province of Herat.
President Karzai sacked two senior Afghan army officers over the incident. The US says Afghan forces led the operation in the district of Shindand.
The incident has worsened relations between Mr Karzai and foreign forces.
On Monday the government said it wanted to renegotiate the terms under which US-led forces and Nato-led forces operate in Afghanistan.
If confirmed, the Shindand incident is one of the worst cases of foreign forces killing Afghan civilians.