It was 4 a.m. before the guards at Kandahar’s Saraposa prison even knew anything was wrong. By then it was too late: The last of at least 476 prisoners, most of them Taliban and some of them experienced commanders, had escaped the facility through a tunnel — more than 1,000 feet long — painstakingly dug into the compound over the course of five months.
The Saraposa prison break this morning wasn’t just a triumph of DIY underground engineering, clandestine keys and possible double-agents. The escape amounts to a big manpower boost for the Taliban in a region where the insurgency has recently lost ground.
Equally, the breakout is a damning failure for Afghan security forces that failed to stop an even bigger escape at the same Afghan-run, 1,200-inmate facility two years ago. The threat of imprisonment is a real deterrent to insurgent activity, at least at the lowest levels. The Saraposa breakout undermines this effect.
The return of hundreds of veteran Taliban fighters to their units — just as the annual spring fighting season is getting underway — is also foreboding development for NATO forces hoping to show off lasting security gains ahead of their slow withdrawal, scheduled to begin this summer. “This will have a negative effect on Kandahar’s security situation,” Abdul Wahab Salihi, the deputy intelligence chief in Kandahar, told The New York Times.
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