THE CHRONICLE HERALD– Last Monday’s massive prison break in Kandahar essentially put the boots to any last hopes of a successful NATO mission in Afghanistan.

As straight-faced Afghan prison officials scratched their heads and pointed to the empty tunnel entrance, which apparently allowed at least 471 Taliban prisoners to escape, we are expected to believe their claim that this was not an inside job.

To back up that story, the Afghan guards stated that there was no need for the Taliban detainees to obtain the keys to their cells that night because it was common practice to leave all the cells open at night.

We are then to believe that some 471 prisoners — essentially an entire battalion of fighters — carrying their belongings and equipped with flashlights silently filed out through a 360-metre tunnel.

This was to have occurred sometime between 2 and 4 a.m., and during that two-hour time frame, not a single guard twigged to the fact that the crowded mass of snoring, farting, wheezing humanity had gone silent and that the cellblocks had emptied.

The tunnel itself is another amazing feat of surreptitious construction. Using a building about 400 metres from the bustling Sarpoza prison, the Taliban mining crew somehow managed to conceal their months-long digging, despite the fact that, in the estimate of one Afghan official, they would have extracted one thousand truckloads of dirt.

In all that time, not one guard or policeman found it untoward that truckloads of earth were emanating from the same dwelling?

As for the night of the escape, the official theory is that, as the 471 prisoners emerged from the tunnel, they were given a fresh set of civilian clothing and then whisked away in a convoy of waiting cars. Even if we are to accept the possibility that six prisoners crammed into each vehicle alongside the drivers, that would still amount to no fewer than 80 cars involved in the prison break.

Given that this central part of Kandahar City is subjected to a strictly enforced night curfew, heavily patrolled by the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, not to mention being in close proximity to NATO rapid reaction forces, how could such a monumental, nocturnal movement of people have gone unnoticed and unchecked?

If we are to accept that this was simply a lucky lightning strike by the Taliban, then we would have to accept that this is the second time that lightning has struck the same prison.

Read more about Tough To Secure Kandahar Prison, Afghan Loyalty

© 2011 The Chronicle Herald

Photo by Flickr user

RAW STORY– Last year was the deadliest yet for civilians in the Afghan war with a 15 percent jump in the death toll, the UN said in a report Wednesday which laid bare the conflict’s impact on ordinary people.

The 2,777 deaths underscore the level of violence in the country as foreign troops prepare to start handing control of security to Afghan forces in some areas from July ahead of a full transition due by 2014.

Insurgents were responsible for 75 percent of all civilian deaths, up 28 percent on 2009, the figures said.

That compared to 16 percent for international and Afghan government forces, down 26 percent on the previous year, while responsibility for the remaining deaths could not be attributed.

Large numbers of children and women were among the dead — 1,175 and 555 respectively.

The issue of civilian deaths caused by coalition forces, long a thorny question for the US-led troops, is particularly sensitive in Afghanistan at the moment.

Last week, nine young boys were mistakenly killed while out collecting firewood in an air strike in eastern Afghanistan.

Read more about Afghan Civilian Deaths Hit New High.

© RAW STORY 2011

Photo by flickr user Afghanistan Matters

INDEPENDENT– The most extraordinary failure of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan is that the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars has had so little impact on the misery in which 30 million Afghans live. As President Barack Obama prepares this week to present a review of America’s strategy in Afghanistan which is likely to focus on military progress, US officials, Afghan administrators, businessmen and aid workers insist that corruption is the greatest threat to the country’s future.

In a series of interviews, they paint a picture of a country where $52bn (£33bn) in US aid since 2001 has made almost no impression on devastating poverty made worse by spreading violence and an economy dislocated by war. That enormous aid budget, two-thirds for security and one-third for economic, social and political development, has made little impact on 9 million living in absolute poverty, and another 5 million trying to survive on $43 (£27) a month. The remainder of the population often barely scrapes a living, having to choose between buying wood to keep warm and buying food.

Afghans see a racketeering élite as the main beneficiaries of international support and few of them are optimistic about anything changing. “Things look all right to foreigners but in fact people are dying of starvation in Kabul,” says Abdul Qudus, a man in his forties with a deeply lined face, who sells second-hand clothes and shoes on a street corner in the capital. They are little more than rags, lying on display on the half-frozen mud.

Read full article about Afghanis dying of starvation.

Photo by flickr user AfghanistanMatters

© COPYRIGHT INDEPENDENT, 2010

RAW STORY– The Soviet Union couldn’t win in Afghanistan, and now the United States is about to have something in common with that futile campaign: nine years, 50 days.

On Friday, the U.S.-led coalition will have been fighting in this South Asian country for as long as the Soviets did in their humbling attempt to build up a socialist state. The two invasions had different goals — and dramatically different body counts — but whether they have significantly different outcomes remains to be seen.

What started out as a quick war on Oct. 7, 2001, by the U.S. and its allies to wipe out al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban has instead turned into a long and slogging campaign. Now about 100,000 NATO troops are fighting a burgeoning insurgency while trying to support and cultivate a nascent democracy.

A Pentagon-led assessment released earlier this week described the progress made since the United States injected 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan earlier this year as fragile.

The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, has said NATO’s core objective is to ensure that Afghanistan “is never again a sanctuary to al-Qaida or other transnational extremists that it was prior to 9/11.”

He said the only way to achieve that goal is “to help Afghanistan develop the ability to secure and govern itself. Now not to the levels of Switzerland in 10 years or less, but to a level that is good enough for Afghanistan.”

To reach that, there is an ongoing effort to get the Taliban to the negotiating table. President Hamid Karzai has set up a committee to try to make peace, and the military hopes its campaign will help force the insurgents to seek a deal.

Read full story about the US/Afghan Slog Being as Long as Vietnam.

Photo by US Army on flickr

© COPYRIGHT RAW STORY, 2010