Kandahar, Afghanistan – 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.

Details of the June 13 attack show not only why the city defenses 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.

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?” 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.”

Their room also had a view of the jail’s central guard tower, and prison officials say they used at least one smuggled handgun to open fire on the tower during the jailbreak. Brass casings remain on the cell floor. None of the guards in the tower were killed or injured, but the gunfire coming from that corner of the prison may have resulted in the initial false reports that Taliban had breached the prison’s north wall.

No matter how suspicious the behavior of the Taliban inmates at the time, Gen. Thompson said it would have been difficult for the Canadians to notice.

“If there are Taliban holding little meetings and they’ve struck some kind of agreement with the warden, if that was in fact the case, I don’t think we’d be aware of it unless the warden saw fit to share it with us,” he said.

The day of the escape, the first explosions and gunfire erupted around 9:10 p.m., witnesses say, as insurgents attacked the Dand Chowk police checkpoint about 600 meters east of the prison and the Gendama police barracks about 2,200 meters to the west, hitting the two nearest positions held by Afghan forces and keeping them away from the prison for the next hour.

At the same time as the two checkpoint attacks, a fuel tanker rolled up to Sarpoza’s main gate. The driver appeared nervous, and he ran away. Guards fired in the direction of the fleeing insurgent, but he escaped; the Taliban later claimed the suicide bomb had a defective switch.

Moments later, at about 9:18 or 9:19 p.m., two rocket-propelled grenades whistled out of the darkness. The first shot missed the tanker but the second ignited a massive explosion. Witnesses describe a shock wave so powerful that it knocked out windows a mile away, and a large ball of white light rose momentarily over the west side of Kandahar city. Four guards in the gate towers were killed instantly.

A few insurgents went a short distance along the rows of Taliban cells and distributed weapons to comrades, shouting at them to escape quickly. Cell doors in the wing are required to be locked by nightfall, but the Taliban timed their strike just minutes before the guards made their evening rounds; one escaped insurgent said a group of ringleaders hiding in the bathroom had given precise timing to the jailbreakers using smuggled cellphones.

Roughly 400 Taliban escaped the national-security wing, and only three were recaptured.

“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.”

From The Globe and Mail