This Kandahar break-out is a real blow for the allies in Afghanistan | Jason Burke | Comment is free

 

• • Monday 25 April 2011 13.04 BST

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The real significance of the audacious break-out of prisoners from a Kandahar jail lies in the fact that more than 100 Taliban commanders are believed to be among the escapees. These are not the top-ranking members of the leadership who run overall strategy – most of whom remain safe in Pakistan – but the crucial mid-level militants who lead groups of between 50 and a few hundred fighters.

One of the most important lessons learned by US forces in Iraq was the utility of targeting such men. Thinning their ranks not only eliminates enemies who cause casualties on a daily basis and disrupts units on the ground but has important consequences for insurgent movements as a whole. If sufficient numbers of them are killed, a gap begins to emerge between the strategic leadership and the footsoldiers.

Two problems that the Taliban upper command has always wrestled with is the direction and the discipline of its fragmented and often dispersed fighting force.

A loss of mid-level leadership makes those problems much more intractable as there is no one to pass on broad instructions or corral the often disorganised fighters on the ground. Worse, as insurgent movements – like nature, abhor a vacuum – the newly vacant positions are rapidly filled by less experienced men who, being often very young, have little grasp of the strategic need for the Taliban to win over local communities.

These "new Taliban", as many Afghans call them, are more likely to be responsible for criminal activity, unsanctioned campaigns of intimidation and execution as well as violent acts such as suicide bombings which kill dozens of civilians.

This is a very real issue for the "old Taliban" who lead the movement and has prompted repeated efforts by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the movement's supreme leader, to rein in, discipline and educate those rising up the ranks through "battlefield promotion".

For the western allies, these tensions constitute a huge advantage, holding out the potential that the Taliban movement might definitively start to fracture and that locals across the country might finally be convinced to back the Afghan government against the militants. This happened in Iraq in 2007, and contributed to the success of the surge.

Western strategists and policymakers are hoping for something similar occurring in Afghanistan as a new fighting season opens. With this latest break-out putting more than 100 experienced commanders back in the fight, those hopes have just dimmed.