Routing of Fighters Brings Anxious Calm to Kandahar

Residents who fled their villages head home after the retaking of Arghandab district from the Taliban. Hundreds of villagers remain with family and friends in Kandahar. (By Musadeq Sadeq -- Associated Press)

Security in districts west of Kandahar has deteriorated so rapidly that many tribal elders are considering forming their own militias to fight the insurgents, Alokhor said. "The police will not be able to bring security to the area. They are too new at this and they don't have the proper training," he said.

Kandahar -- the capital of Afghanistan's most populous southern province, also called Kandahar -- has been a center of Afghan political power for centuries. It has also been the nerve center of the Taliban insurgency, which has run like a river through the heart of the conflict in Afghanistan since the mid-1990s under the leadership of its founder, Mohammad Omar.

Afghan security officials have repeatedly blamed the resurgent Taliban activity in Kandahar on an influx of foreign fighters who have crossed into southern Afghanistan from Pakistan. Many of the inmates freed in last week's prison break are from Pakistan's lawless tribal areas on Afghanistan's eastern border, which have become a hotbed of training for suicide bombers and Islamist fighters, according to Afghan officials in Kandahar.

Kandahar's provincial police chief, Sayed Agha Saqib, said about 20 mid-level Pakistani Taliban commanders -- many of them key strategists in the insurgency's suicide attack networks -- were among those freed in the prison attack.

Saqib said that investigators believe the prison raid was planned by Taliban leaders "inside and outside Afghanistan" and that it bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda tactics. He accused Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency of having a hand in the attack.

"There is absolutely no doubt that this was an al-Qaeda-led attack, and there is no difference here between the Taliban, the ISI and al-Qaeda."

Pakistan has denied that its intelligence agencies, which funded and supported the Taliban during the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan in the 1980s, continue to harbor links with the Taliban.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the influential head of the Kandahar provincial council, expressed doubt about the Taliban's staying power, saying that the Arghandab offensive and the prison raid were meant to do little more than send a message that the insurgency is still alive.

"The Taliban is no longer a movement that can take over a city or a province," he said. "The Taliban is now the kind of movement that can say, 'We can still create problems for you.' " More than 8,000 people were killed in Taliban-led attacks last year, and more than 1,700 have been killed this year in insurgent attacks.

Meanwhile, confidence in the NATO mission in Afghanistan has fallen to an all-time low. Western donor countries agreed two weeks ago in Paris to give about $21 billion in aid to Afghanistan, but that amount is less than half that requested by the beleaguered Afghan government. And as NATO casualties rise -- particularly among the Canadians, who lead NATO forces in the south -- coalition partners are facing domestic pressure to withdraw from the mission.

Ahmed Wali Karzai attributed the success of the most recent anti-Taliban operation to Afghan coordination with foreign troops in the region and a more rapid response from NATO's headquarters in Kabul, the capital.

But he added that the region, and the country, desperately needed to better prepare for the next wave of attacks. "We need a quick-action force so we can go after them," Karzai said. "We shouldn't be in a position of defending the city. We should go after the Taliban instead."

Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.