Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

In June, resurgent Taliban forces attacked the major prison in Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city and the center of the predominantly Pashtun South. They blew up the prison’s wall, killed 15 guards, and freed all 1,200 prisoners, 400 of whom were Taliban members. This attack was not only a military disaster but also a major embarrassment for the U.S., NATO, and the Afghan government, which claim to have the fundamentalist Taliban on the run.

The stunning prison break came on the heels of another attack in Kabul in April, when Karzai narrowly escaped assassination while reviewing a military parade. High-level foreign officers like Colonel Dan MacNeal, commander of the 50,000-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force that is propping up the Karzai government, were also present in the reviewing stand.

How can this be happening after all of the suffering that the reactionary Taliban visited upon the Afghan people when it held power? When even today, its attacks target schools and road projects vital to the people’s welfare? To be sure, the Taliban enjoys support from Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, as well as sanctuary across the border and recruits from madrasas in Pakistan. It also gets support from the Al Qaeda network, both financial and logistic, including the importation of suicide bombing into Afghanistan, a tactic not used there until after 2001.

But the larger factor is diminished support for the Karzai government and the foreign troops and NGO’s, rather than much real popular support for the Taliban. Initially welcomed as better than the Taliban, the Karzai government and its international supporters have discredited themselves in numerous ways. The Karzai government is notoriously corrupt and remains linked to warlords who rob and terrorize the population.

The U.S. military’s preference for air strikes over ground combat has served to minimize U.S. casualties at the cost of higher casualties among civilians caught in the air raids. Moreover, despite billions of dollars in aid, the Afghan economy remains a shambles, with inflation and unemployment at catastrophic levels. On top of that has come the recent surge in food prices, which has created a new level of economic misery. Meanwhile, the population sees a new elite and its foreign supporters living in luxury.