Carlotta Gall has a must-read dispatch on June’s massive prison break in Kandahar, and how it is effecting attitudes toward the government:
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.
Read the whole thing. Equally Riveting is Alex Strick van Linschoten’s diary of how life in Kandahar City has changed:
I’ve been woken up each morning at around 5am for the last two days by a constant stream of helicopters and jets passing over my house here in Kandahar City. A big battle is being fought in Dand district, just over 10 kilometres away from the city. The Taliban are able to operate within the city, as shown by the world’s largest prison break a month or so ago, but the main fighting goes on in the districts.
In fact I’m amazed how bad things have become so quickly since I was last here in February. It’s probably a combination of the prison break and the summer season, when fighting usually picks up. At least 1000 criminals and Taliban fighters on the run doesn’t help, either…
Of course the talk of the town these days is the arrival of our new governor yesterday morning. Security was stepped up all over town, with even American forces manning checkpoints in some areas. There’s no great dissapointment over the long-overdue departure of Asadullah Khaled, who sewed tribal division and oversaw the transition of Kandahar to the state it’s in today.
Elders and district government authorities will be visiting the new governor, Raofi, over the coming days. Let’s see how he plans to deal with the situation.
He has lots of videos, too, that are worth viewing. Since strong local leadership is one of those crucial first steps in halting an insurgency, here’s hoping Kandahar has a chance at a decent future now.
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Found Carlotta’s article extremely dissapointing, actually. Graeme Smith’s piece for Globe and Mail (entitled ‘Inside the Taliban Jailbreak’) was 30 times more interesting and reliable. And in fact Carlotta misses a number of the crucial things that have changed in the city since the jailbreak – just look at kidnapping figures…
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