We have previously discussed the Kandahar jailbreak by the Taliban (including the subsequent combat action in and around Kandahar), but at the time there were many unanswered questions.  While the main stream media foolishly focused their attention on the evolution of the Taliban into well-organized guerrilla fighters, The Captain’s Journal likened it more to a Mad Max movie.  The Taliban relied on a few RPGs, a small amount of command and control on the ground, and 30 or so motorcyclists with rifles.  The fault was with the Afghan police and ISAF forces, we surmised.  We posed the question(s):

Where was the force protection?  Where were the vehicle barriers (you know, those mechanically operated devices that flatten your tires if you go over them the wrong way)?  Where were the concrete truck barricades?  Where was the training?  Where was the supervision?  Forget expensive UAVs and road construction for a minute.  What about spending a little money on teaching the Afghan police about combat and force protection.  Failure to do so has cost us the freedom of 400 Taliban – and potentially U.S. lives to capture or kill them again.

Many of these questions have been answered in a recent Globe and Mail article entitled Inside the Taliban Jailbreak.  Read carefully near the end of the citation below to see just how the Canadians have approached management of this prison.

The prison cells that once held Taliban sit almost empty, with little remaining except rubbish: plates of rice ready for meals never eaten, and sandals discarded by fugitives who ran away in bare feet. Some of the debris inside Sarpoza prison offer hints about what happened amid the chaos last month when the Taliban accomplished one of the largest jailbreaks in modern history, freeing at least 800 prisoners and rampaging into Kandahar without facing any serious resistance from Canadian troops or the other forces assigned to protect the city.

A chunk of metal the size of a picnic table sits 125 metres away from the site where a truck bomb hit the gate, testifying to the force of the explosion. In a room where prison officials believe the inmates planned their escape, bullet casings on the floor suggest the prisoners had smuggled at least one handgun into the cells.

With those scattered bits of evidence, and a dozen interviews with witnesses, a picture emerges of the way security collapsed in the largest city in southern Afghanistan on the evening of Friday, June 13. Details of the attack show not only why the city defences fell apart; they also illustrate how the notorious problems of the Afghan mission – corruption, poor intelligence, a distrustful population, weak Afghan security forces, a lack of foreign troops – made the ingredients of a disaster.

The Canadian military has not escaped blame. In a private session two days after the attack, Kandahar’s provincial council strongly criticized the foreign troops for arriving at Sarpoza roughly two hours after the jailbreak started. They demanded to know why Canadian soldiers watched the prisoners run away and failed to chase them. Witnesses say that hundreds of inmates spent their first night of freedom camping in the fields only a few kilometres south of the prison, within easy reach of the Canadian soldiers sent to investigate.

Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, the top Canadian commander in Kandahar, confirmed that NATO surveillance tracked the fugitives as they fled. But he said it’s not Canada’s job as part of the International Security Assistance Force to hunt down escaped prisoners.

“You can ask yourself the rhetorical question, what if we find 100 fugitives in the fields?” Gen. Thompson said. “What is ISAF’s duty in that circumstance? Is it to go arrest people?”

The commander continued: “We’re not policing this country, right? It’s not our role to police this country. Our role is to stand behind our Afghan partners and assist them.”

But the Afghan forces stationed nearby did not consider themselves capable of standing up to the Taliban that evening, as police in three outposts around the prison hunkered down behind their fortifications and refused to intervene.

Local and foreign intelligence agencies also failed to understand glaring signs of trouble at the jail in the weeks before the attack, including a mass poisoning of prison guards just eight days beforehand. Taliban fighters warned local shopkeepers about an impending battle in the hours before they struck, but nobody passed the warning to the correct authorities.

Corruption likely helped the Taliban that night, too, as some indications have implicated a senior Afghan official in the jailbreak planning.

Sifting through the rubble at Sarpoza prison, it’s obvious that the attack was not just a successful Taliban operation. It was a failure of the institutions that protect Kandahar city, despite the Canadian money and lives expended to build a zone of security here in the past two years …

Let’s stop this sorry and pitiful tale for a moment and play “what wrong with this picture?”  It is certainly the case that there is corruption and ineptitude within the Afghan police.  It is currently more a cabal than an institution.  “The effectiveness of the police and other local officials is growing in importance as the Taliban moves to regain territory in southern Afghanistan this summer. Afghan and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops battled the Taliban on Wednesday for control of villages around the city of Kandahar, about 220 miles east of Farah.  Throughout the country, police officers often have been little more than hired guns who raise money for local warlords through illegal taxes, shakedowns and corruption. Many policemen and district officials sell weapons and opium. Some collude with the Taliban.”

But even with the wild card of the Afghan police, the event never had to occur – or at least, it could have been mitigated.  The Canadian military made the same mistake seen in the early phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  For much of the campaign in Iraq the byline was to stand down when the Iraqis stood up.  Security was not assumed to be the precondition for the construction of institutional infrastructure.  Rather, the assumption was that the institutional infrastructure was there to begin with, and the mission is to assist it.

Of course, this is wrongheaded, but seeing the results of such an assumption (the prison break) won’t even allow mission creep, much less a complete revisiting of the doctrine brought to the theater.  There is an intransigence in NATO that refuses to allow a consistent or comprehensive strategy.  This will consume the nighttime thoughts of General Petraeus for months into the future.

This intransigence caused the Canadians to rhetorically question why they should apprehend the enemy.  This statement sounds stunning to the casual observer, and indeed, it requires daily numbing by a recalcitrant command to be so cynical.  But the enemy sat in a field after escape, at least long enough to catch a little sleep (according to the Globe and Mail report).  But wait.  There are problems further upstream in the chain of events.

… the Canadians could not be accused of neglecting the prison itself. One of the key tenets of “clear, hold, and build,” as a method of counterinsurgency is the idea that investing money and improving the lives in a particular spot will make the locals more likely to deliver useful intelligence. By that measure, the guards and prisoners at Sarpoza should have been excellent sources for the Canadians, who had been pouring money into the jail.

In the year before the prison break, the Canadians paid for new septic systems, solar-powered lighting, new doors and windows, an infirmary, landscaping, guard towers and washroom facilities, among other improvements. Painted walls replaced the rough stone surfaces; where chunks of masonry used to fall on prisoners as they slept, the ceilings now arched smoothly.

The current budget for all prison upgrades stands at $4-million, and Canadian officials visited the jail regularly to check on the progress.

Despite the Canadians’ focus on the prison, however, they failed to understand the trouble brewing inside.

A report by the U.S. magazine Newsweek claimed that the planning started when a disgruntled prisoner telephoned insurgent leader Mullah Berader and complained about prison conditions, but that story was dismissed by Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi.

“The Taliban in jail were always calling us, asking us to release them,” Mr. Ahmadi said. “Especially our commanders who were sentenced to 20 years or execution.”

Several sources say the planning started in earnest after accused Taliban prisoners launched a hunger strike in May, trying to obtain sentences in cases that remained undecided. Some suspected insurgents had languished in the prison for years without a conviction, and they described themselves as frustrated with a justice process that they claimed was designed to keep them in jail indefinitely.

They struck a committee of seven Taliban prisoners, who gathered every day inside one of the nicest cells of the national-security wing, a sunny room on the north side with a view of a garden.

They posted a sign on their door, saying: “No interruptions from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.”

So now The Captain’s Journal has had our questions answered.  Rather than concrete barriers, concertina wire, vehicle immobilizers, mentoring and supervision of the police, the Canadians spent their money on landscaping, paint and solar-powered lighting.

Said one Taliban of the operation, “I thought that there would be big fighting, aerial bombardments, and many Taliban would be killed some arrested,” said a Taliban fighter, now enjoying freedom with his family in Kandahar city. “But when we reached our safe houses we were surprised, because there was no fighting, nothing.”  He added: “I didn’t think we would succeed like we did.”

Actually, it isn’t surprising at all.  It’s Like Mad Max and the Keystone Cops.  Mad Max will win every time.  Unless and until NATO acquiesces to a comprehensive and sensible strategic approach to Operation Enduring Freedom, we should expect to see more of the same.