It was 4 a.m. before the guards at Kandahar’s Saraposa prison even knew anything was wrong. By then it was too late: The last of at least 476 prisoners, most of them Taliban and some of them experienced commanders, had escaped the facility through a tunnel — more than 1,000 feet long — painstakingly dug into the compound over the course of five months.

The Saraposa prison break this morning wasn’t just a triumph of DIY underground engineering, clandestine keys and possible double-agents. The escape amounts to a big manpower boost for the Taliban in a region where the insurgency has recently lost ground.

Equally, the breakout is a damning failure for Afghan security forces that failed to stop an even bigger escape at the same Afghan-run, 1,200-inmate facility two years ago. The threat of imprisonment is a real deterrent to insurgent activity, at least at the lowest levels. The Saraposa breakout undermines this effect.

The return of hundreds of veteran Taliban fighters to their units — just as the annual spring fighting season is getting underway — is also foreboding development for NATO forces hoping to show off lasting security gains ahead of their slow withdrawal, scheduled to begin this summer. “This will have a negative effect on Kandahar’s security situation,” Abdul Wahab Salihi, the deputy intelligence chief in Kandahar, told The New York Times.

The escape from Saraposa apparently had all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster: high stakes, a fearsome antagonist in the form of NATO forces, a daring and intricate plan and alleged inside men. It was like the 1963 Steve McQueen classic The Great Escape, with the Talibs playing the McQueen role and ISAF standing in for the Nazis. The only difference is that the Talibs were way more successful than McQueen and his cohorts.

Also like a big-budget Hollywood movie, the bust-out was accompanied by a slick promotional campaign. Around the same time the befuddled Afghan prison guards were just discovering the escape hole chiseled into the concrete floor of a blue-walled cell, Taliban PR rep Zabiullah Mujahid announced the escape to Western media.

“We have planned and worked on this for five months, and the tunnel is 360 meters long,” Mujahid said in a statement. “This was very important for us; we were trying to not leave anyone behind, not even one sick or old political prisoner.”

“Our mujahedeen worked in a very careful way,” Mujahid added by way of understatement. The tunnel’s diggers started their work in a house on the opposite side of the Kandahar-Kabul highway from the prison. Likely working at night, they dug underneath the highway and the prison’s razor-wire-topped walls and, apparently, straight into a cell belonging to Taliban prisoner.

At least one prisoner was in communication with the diggers. “There were four or five of us who knew that our friends were digging a tunnel from the outside,” escapee Mohammad Abdullaht told the Associated Press by phone this morning.

Based on Abdullaht’s statement, some of the prison guards might have been in on it, too. “Some of our friends helped us by providing copies of the keys,” the Talib explained. “When the time came at night, we managed to open the doors for friends who were in other rooms.”

Just in case the escape was detected, the Taliban had fighters and suicide bombers standing by, according to The New York Times.

Starting around 11 p.m., Abdullaht and the other ringleaders sneaked prisoners through the tunnel in groups of four or five, Abdullaht said. By sunrise, nearly 500 inmates — a third of the prison’s capacity — were free in Kandahar city. Half an hour later, prison guards sounded the alarm, and nearby U.S. forces joined the hunt for escapees. CTV described a “swarm” of allied troops in and around the tunnel’s outside exit.

“Some of the prisoners have already been recaptured,” Kandahar Gov. Wesa Tooryalai said this morning. CTV pinned that number at 26 … out of at least 476 total escapees.

Tooryalai was quick to assign blame. “This is absolutely the fault of the ignorance of the security forces,” he said. “This was not the work of a day, a week or a month of activities, this was actually months of work they spent to dig and free their men.”

“I don’t know how many among them were leaders or prominent people,” local intel chief Salihi said of the escapees, “but if there is a fire and you put more wood on it, there will be more flames, so these escaped people will add fuel to the fire.”

Photo: Allauddin Khan/AP

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