<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"\n\nWhen the stranger unbolted the cell door and whispered for them to hurry, Rahim assumed that somewhere in the prison a fight must have broken out. It was the middle of the night, and normally the heavy metal door remained locked until the morning call to prayer. For the past five months, Rahim had shared this cell, in Kandahar's Sarposa Prison, with five other captured insurgents, two of whom he'd fought alongside in the fiercely contested district of Panjwai. Now, from where they lay on old blankets and cushions on the floor, all five gazed uncertainly at the man standing in their doorway. \"We are your friends,\" the man said. \"There is a tunnel over here. Come quickly and get inside it.\"\n\nRahim and his cellmates stepped into the prison's dimly lit lime green corridor. At the passageway's far end, a metal gate sealed the cell-block entrance. Every ten feet or so, solid black doors led to more communal cells. Nearly 500 Taliban occupied this part of Sarposa, called the political block. Some were military commanders and shadow-government officials, others hardened foot soldiers and young recruits. Their arrests represented years of effort by coalition forces to quell a resuscitated insurgency and impose some semblance of law in one of the least stable regions in Afghanistan. Following the stranger down the long hall, Rahim noticed that most of the cells were now empty.\n\nThe group made its way quietly but without too much concern for the guards; Sarposa's officers seldom patrolled the political block. Once in the morning and once in the evening they came to take attendance; otherwise, the Taliban were left to care for themselves. Within the block's three contiguous wings, a council of elders resolved disputes, prisoners knitted blankets and clothes for those lacking them, and in an enclosed courtyard a detained imam led prayers five times a day. The cells themselves were lavishly furnished with comfort items delivered in large plastic bags by visitors every weekend\u2014cushions, blankets, rugs, electric fans, and lamps. Periodic security checks invariably uncovered mobile phones secreted in the floors and walls. Since the Taliban consider music un-Islamic, radios were nonexistent. Instead, for amusement, inmates flipped over metal soup bowls and beat them in time with religious chants. As Rahim and his cellmates moved down the corridor, their footfalls were mu&amp;amp;#xB1;ed by such a drumming.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n American soldiers interrogate a suspected Sarposa fugitive.\n\nNear the gated entrance at the end of the corridor, the stranger ushered the group into a cell adorned with old maps, embroidered tapestries, and a mirror hanging from a coatrack, decorated with an etching of an AK-47. A blue carpet had been pulled back from one corner of the cell to reveal a triangular hole in the floor. Rahim approached the jagged opening and peered inside. The striated walls tunneled down through half a foot of concrete, through an equally thin layer of foundational stone, and finally through some six feet of brown earth. Several prisoners gathered at its edge. Some were young fighters; a few were geriatrics or amputees. Rahim was in his early twenties but had lost his left leg a year earlier to an IED and now used a prosthesis. He watched an old man toss his crutches aside and lower himself into the floor. Rahim did the same.\n\nThe dirt below was dry and soft. It was so crowded that when Rahim fell to his knees and started to crawl, he bumped into the man ahead of him. As he inched forward, another prisoner jumped into the hole behind him. On all fours, his back scraping against the ceiling, Rahim wormed his way forward. Whoever had burrowed the passage had installed a series of light bulbs that hung from an electrical cord. But by now many of the bulbs had shattered, broken by passing prisoners, and pieces of glass littered the tunnel floor. After a few hundred feet, it was almost completely dark.\n\n\n\nBuilt on the western edge of Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, a few feet from the congested Herat highway and bordered by residential neighborhoods, Sarposa Prison is a hulking symbol of government control in the traditional heartland of the Taliban. Administered by Afghans with the help of American overseers, its five cell blocks house the majority of criminals and insurgents captured in the beleaguered Kandahar Province. Naturally the facility ranks high on the target list for those still at large, and over the years Sarposa's officials have engaged in severaldeadly struggles with the Taliban, each one exposing the prison's defining characteristic: its vulnerability.\n\nThe Taliban first tunneled their way out of Sarposa in 2003, when forty-one prisoners escaped. After a weeklong search, only a handful were recaptured. In 2008 a delivery truck carrying two tons of explosives blew open Sarposa's main gate, allowing some thirty Taliban fighters on motorcycles to swarm the breach with AK-47's and rocket-propelled grenades. They killed at least nine guards and released well over a thousand prisoners (some 400 of them insurgents). One witness to the assault told me he was standing across the highway eating a pastry when the bomb blew out all the windows of the nearby shops and turned the air opaque with dust. \"There were a lot of Taliban on this side of the road,\" the man said. \"One of them had a machine gun in his hands and was yelling at the prisoners, 'Come out! Come out of the prison!' \" A fleet of minibuses waited nearby to ferry the fugitives out of the city, back into the countryside.\n\nSoon after, American and Canadian advisers, keen to prevent captured insurgents from rejoining the fight, helped Sarposa officials institute a host of security upgrades. They erected a new guard tower on the perimeter and covered open courtyards with metal mesh. They moved the first checkpoint farther back from the road, installed new blast walls, and strategically positioned sixty additional assault rifles and machine guns. A U.S. official giving a tour of the improved facility told reporters that the only chance of another escape was if the enemy \"put a nuke on a motorcycle.\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nEscape from Sarposa \n\n Taliban accounts tell how a single foot soldier masterminded the most intricate prison break of the Afghan war.\u2014James Pogue\n\nTo disguise their operation, the Taliban diggers set up a working cement factory near the prison. During the five-month excavation, they sell 150 cinder blocks, \"making much profit.\"Worried that passing NATO tanks might collapse the tunnel, the team parks a truck just feet from the prison to test its integrity.The diggers veer off course, adding 350 feet to the total length of the tunnel.During the escape, prison spies are discovered. They are beaten and dragged through the stifling tunnel in handcuffs.Nearly 500 Taliban exit through a breach in the prison's political wing.\n\nThe Taliban conceived a subtler strategy. A little more than a year after the assault on Sarposa, an insurgent whom the Taliban call Ihasan Ullah (no doubt an alias) came up with the idea to dig a tunnel from outside the prison rather than from within. According to the Taliban, Ihasan once spent three months in Sarposa as an inmate and, while there, committed its layout to memory. In an account of the prison break published on the Taliban's website, Ihasan himself is said to have initially\n\n dismissed his own scheme as preposterous, a quixotic dream: \"This fantasy and vision seemed laughable at first even to its owner. He dared not share his opinion with others.\" Eventually, however, while riding a motorcycle past Sarposa with two of his friends, Ihasan could no longer help himself\u2014he revealed to them his secret ambition. Ihasan's friends \"thought it was impossible and deemed it dangerous to attempt. But they placed their trust on Allah.\"\n\nIhasan drew up a plan and submitted it to the Taliban's shadow governor for Kandahar, Mullah Mohammad Isa. Isa rejected it out of hand. \"No one was willing to even hear the idea,\" Qari Yousef Ahmadi, the Taliban spokesman for southern Afghanistan, told me. But Ihasan remained undeterred; he'd become convinced they could pull it off. After fleshing out the plan in greater detail, he returned to the governor, who consulted with his high command, a commission of Taliban elders assigned to advise him. This time the provincial leaders told Ihasan to start digging.\n\n\n\nIn the fall of 2010\u2014while, just a few miles away, American soldiers were engaged in some of the bloodiest combat of the war among the orchards and vineyards of Kandahar's restive Arghandab Valley\u2014Ihasan rented a small one-story building with a red door across the highway from Sarposa Prison. The building was said to be owned by Zia al-Haq, a young carpenter who kept a shop in front; behind the shop, Ihasan and his men built an annex and established a factory that filled steel forms with concrete for construction projects. At night, after the factory closed, four of them remained inside the building, pretending to be watchmen.\n\nIhasan himself swung the pickax while the others extracted the soil. As Ihasan burrowed farther from the building, the Taliban fid wheels from children's bicycles under steel barrows, fashioning carts to haul out the dirt. Back at the factory, Ihasan's helpers loaded the soil onto trucks and brought it to the bazaar, where it could be sold as brick-making material. Qari Yousef, the Taliban spokesman, says that Ihasan insisted on being the only digger. \"I talked to him about it,\" Yousef told me. \"He said, 'I never got tired of it. Each hour, each day, and each month I grew more excited, because I knew I was getting closer to my victory.' \"\n\nAfter two months, four additional Taliban joined the operation, and the pace increased to ten feet a night. When the tunnel was more than 300 feet long, the air inside grew thin, so the workers installed a long pipe with holes punched every few feet to deliver fresh air pumped from a large battery-powered bellows in the factory. After four months, with the tunnel more than two football fields long, Ihasan encountered a village water line and realized he'd strayed off course. Guessing he was somewhere beneath a neighborhood to the west of the prison, Ihasan downloaded a map of the facility from the Internet and used it to adjust course. When I asked Qari Yousef about this, he said, \"That was not the first time we used the Internet for help. We downloaded a map when we attacked the Inter-Continental hotel in Kabul. For this prison, we got the map from Google.\"\n\nBy now, twenty-one Taliban were living in the small room behind the carpenter's shop, some of them filling the concrete forms during the day, others moving dirt from the tunnel at night. Their building shared a wall with a tiny electronics store that sold cell phones and SIM cards. When I recently met with the neighboring store owner, he told me that he'd never noticed anything suspicious about the men in the cement plant. \"The door was always locked,\" he said. \"We never talked to them.\" The shopkeeper's landlord, however, a man in his early twenties named Ghulam Nabi, apparently possessed a keener sense of intuition.\n\nOne afternoon, a couple of weeks before the actual escape, the shopkeeper said Nabi walked next door and stood in front of the concrete factory, attempting to see inside. The building's owner, Zia al-Haq, stormed out and confronted him. \"Why are you standing in front of my gate?\" Zia demanded. An argument ensued, and Zia produced a metal pipe from within his kameez, a long flowing tunic. He struck Nabi on the head, and Nabi fell to the ground. Zia hit him again with the pipe, then kicked him several times in the face, before going back inside.\n\nThe shopkeeper said he watched the whole incident through his window. He put Nabi in a taxi and brought him to the hospital. \"His head wasn't broken, only blood was coming from his nose and mouth,\" said the shopkeeper. \"In the taxi, he was just staring at me blankly. For three days in the hospital he said nothing. The day he died, they picked up his head, and brains came out of his nose.\"\n\nThe shopkeeper told me that the district chief of police, several guards from Sarposa, and agents from NDS (the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's spy service) came to the house to investigate the murder. \"They asked what was going on,\" he said. \"We told them there was a fight between these two men. We told them this man was not allowing other people to stand in front of his building.\" If the investigators bothered to search the building, nothing struck them as out of the ordinary. The murder suspect, Zia al-Haq, had already vanished. A different man soon inherited the property. \"After the Taliban escaped,\" the shopkeeper said, \"that man also disappeared.\"\n\n\n\nGuided by satellite imagery, Ihasan and his men successfully altered course and, in the spring of 2011, reached the middle of the prison. Between the team's cement-factory starting point and the political wing stood a much smaller cell block called Tawqif Khana, which segregated important Taliban commanders from the rest of the population. This became the team's secondary target. At night, one of the imprisoned commanders, who had a mobile phone and was aware of the plan, would tap the floor of his cell with a long metal stake used to tether livestock. By following the sound of the tapping, Ihasan was able to navigate directly under Tawqif Khana.   \n\nThe team pressed on. After tunneling for another five days, covering some seventy-five feet beneath the prison grounds, they reached the political block. Now all that remained was for Ihasan to verify that the tunnel ended beneath the appropriate cell\u2014cell 7, which belonged to the only Taliban prisoners in the block who knew about the operation. Ihasan's idea was to raise a blade through the earth that would barely break the cement floor and thereby discreetly pinpoint their location to the prisoners above. But there was a problem: The tunnel was five and a half feet underground and not even three feet tall. It could never accommodate a blade long enough to reach the surface. No matter. Ihasan procured a car jack and several short blades. One by one, he drove the blades up into the earth using the jack. When one blade was almost entirely inserted, Ihasan affid a new one behind it to push the lead blade higher. In this way, the Taliban said they located cell 7 on their second try.\n\nThe passageway completed, the tunnelers withdrew to the factory and readied themselves for the crux of the mission. Governor Isa and his high command decided that Ihasan \"would himself be the commander of the prisoner extraction.\" On April 24 a team of suicide bombers was dispatched to stand ready near the prison in case the operation was discovered. To assist him, Ihasan chose five men from among the twenty-one Taliban living behind the shop. At 9 p.m., by cell phone, they alerted two prisoners in cell 7 and the commander in Tawqif Khana that the time had come. Within an hour, using the jack and steel pry bars, Ihasan's men had broken into Tawqif Khana;the concrete floor of the political wing was much thicker, but eventually they opened a second hole there. Four handguns and four knives were passed up to the prisoners, and Ihasan's men began fetching Taliban from their cells.\n\n\n\nDeep in the tunnel, Rahim started having difficulty breathing. The ventilation pipe above, while functioning, issued only a small amount of air. At one point an elderly prisoner started yelling in a panicked voice, \"Take me out! Take me out!\" In all, Rahim crawled almost a thousand feet, crossing the entire breadth of the prison grounds. After an hour, he spotted a dim illumination in the distance, leaking along the walls. Little by little the light grew brighter, until an arm reached down and pulled him out of the hole and into a crowded room.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n _Afghan officers search cars on the highway fronting the\n\nprison._\n\nHere things were happening. Two men held out a wide scarf full of bills and cell phones. \"Put everything you own into the scarf,\" one of them ordered. Rahim threw in all his cash\u20143,500 Pakistani rupees (about $40)\u2014and was directed to another man, who gave him a pair of shoes. Along the room's far wall, Taliban with mechanical clippers were trimming prisoners' beards. The inmates were allotted an equal share of money from the scarf, split into groups according to the areas in which they had fought before being captured, and ushered through the back door, across a yard surrounded by mud-mortar walls. When Rahim stepped outside, he realized where they were: a small building just opposite the heavily fortified front gates of Sarposa. From where he stood, he could see the top of a guard tower.\n\nAfter passing through a metal gate, the prisoners were loaded onto the backs of large trucks and covered with sheets. One by one the trucks pulled onto the highway directly in front of the prison, merged with traffic, and disappeared.\n\n\n\nAt 5 a.m., hours after Rahim and his cohorts passed directly beneath his office, the warden of Sarposa Prison, General Dastagir Mayar, was awakened. One of his guards stood in the doorway. The entire political block was empty, the guard said. A stout 57-year-old Pashtun from Wardak Province with a neat helmet of dark hair and a matching mustache, Mayar speaks quickly and with urgency, liberally gesticulating. He wanted to know how.\n\n\"You have to come and see,\" the guard told him. \"There's a hole.\"\n\nIt would be difficult to find a more accomplished prison official in Afghanistan than General Mayar. After graduating from the police academy in Kabul thirty-eight years ago, he served in the Ministry of the Interior for nearly a quarter century, through communist and mujahideen regimes alike. During this time, he says, he received training in Russia, India, Turkey, Germany, England, and the United States. Unlike many educated Afghans with money who fled abroad when the Taliban took control of the country, Mayar settled in Kabul to work for an NGO that distributed bread to indigent war widows. When Hamid Karzai came to power with the support of the United States, Mayar joined the Ministry of Justice and helped establish a national corrections system. Eventually he served as the warden of a series of prisons.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n A small group of suspected Taliban are returned to Sarposa.\n\nWhen he was sent to Sarposa in 2009 at the request of the attorney general, Mayar told me, \"everything was messed up. There was no security. Drugs were coming into the prison regularly. We didn't have enough personnel.\" He continued: \"We were receiving messages from NDS that we were going to be attacked again. So we used the little security we had to guard against an attack from the outside. We didn't have enough people to patrol the inside.\" In a sequel to the 2008 attack, the Taliban targeted the main gate shortly after Mayar became warden, using a truck packed with 1,700 pounds of explosives. The blast shattered the windows of his office, injuring him with shards of broken glass. Several guards were killed, but those remaining managed to drive back the assault.\n\nIn addition to the security improvements he made with his American and Canadian advisers, Mayar said he lobbied to change the location of the prison. \"I told them. I warned them. When I first came here, the first thing I said was we need the prison to be in a different place. We came up with a plan to move it. The mayor's office agreed, the governor agreed, the Americans agreed. But the Canadians said, 'We've already spent a lot of money on this prison, therefore it should stay where it is.' \"\n\nMayar insisted that he continued to vigilantly defend what he perceived to be the facility's point of greatest vulnerability: its unbuffered perimeter, which runs hard against a neighborhood and a major thoroughfare. \"I was a good ecutive officer,\" he said. \"The problems that I saw, I alerted the higher authorities about. I was sending requests to Kabul and the police chief. I told them these are the problems we have. I told them we need a checkpoint on each street around the prison. I told them. But who thought someone would make a tunnel with electricity inside? It's beyond imagination.\" The inconceivability of the escape\u2014what else could he have done? how could anyone have possibly anticipated such a thing?\u2014was a point Mayar emphasized repeatedly when I met with him inside Sarposa, where he is now the chief suspect in the jailbreak, a prisoner who stands accused of treason.\n\n\n\nNews of the escape traveled quickly, adding to a growing sense of futility and frustration with a war that was now grinding through a ninth year of oscillating gains and setbacks. Later the same day, officials and news outlets from the U.S. and Europe pointed out that in a single night the Taliban had managed to undermine eighteen months of intense combat throughout Kandahar Province. In Canada, meanwhile, members of Parliament lamented the millions spent reinforcing Sarposa. \"How can we invest in something and it be so poorly run?\" said former opposition leader St\u00E9phane Dion. \"Nationally speaking, we wanted an explanation.\"\n\nIn Afghanistan, the finger-pointing started immediately. On the afternoon of the escape, Mayar found himself under interrogation by NDS agents and Interior Ministry officials. Just hours into the investigation, the justice minister made a confounding announcement (which he would later rescind): There had never been a tunnel; the prisoners had instead been let out through the front gate. At this point, Mayar realized his fate was sealed. \"One day I was a national hero,\" he told me, \"the next day I was a traitor.\" The following evening, Mayar and three of his officers were arrested; a day later, twelve more guards joined them. Other officers fled the city. Mayar and his men spent five days in detention at the National Police headquarters, after which they were transferred into the custody of NDS.\n\nMayar told me that the prosecutor handling his case instructed the NDS agents to give him his own cell, in deference to his rank. Instead, he was locked in an underground basement full of insurgents. \"They were talking among themselves,\" Mayar recounted with a laugh, \"and when I entered the room, the first thing I heard one of them say was, 'It smells like Americans.' I didn't sleep all night.\" The next day he was moved upstairs to a new cell located down the hall from an interrogation room that held several Taliban fighters who had escaped from Sarposa and been recaptured. Every day, through the walls, Mayar could hear NDS agents electrocuting them and beating them with whips. He would sit in his cell and listen to their screams.\n\nLast August, after a month in captivity, Mayar discovered that an old friend, Brigadier General Ghulam Farooq Dawari, had replaced him as warden of Sarposa. Before coming to the facility, Dawari had served as the head of a neighboring prison, and during that time he was in regular contact with Mayar. \"When he was appointed to this position, I came to congratulate him,\" Dawari told me when I met with him at Sarposa. We were squeezed into the tiny room where he lives, which barely accommodated a narrow cot and an old television on a metal stand. As he gazed distractedly at the television, Dawari invoked the kind of cryptic restraint journalists encounter so often with Afghans occupying precarious positions in a precarious government. \"I told him, 'There are good and bad people around you,' \" Dawari said. \" 'Some good people are advising you, but bad people are using you.' He said unfortunately he could not recognize who was good and who was bad.\"\n\nMuch later, after we drank tea and ate grapes and discussed the weather, I pressed the general to speak plainly. Did he think Mayar was guilty? Could his friend have been complicit in the escape? \"It's very difficult for me to say yes or no,\" he answered. \"What I would say is that when these things happen, they're very secret. This is the work of the Taliban, which has the support of Pakistan. If one person knows about it, another person can hear. I can't say he was aware of the plan, and I can't say he was not aware.\" Dawari paused. \"I visit him sometimes,\" he said. \"When I see Mayar, I feel sorry for him. It's painful for me. He is the same rank as I am. His officers are very good people. They know Kandahar better than I do. But now they are in prison.\"\n\n\n\nMayar, for his part, told me, \"I have no one except the new warden. The new warden is my family and my friend.\" We were sitting inside his old office, and the film of brown dust on the coffee table between us was polka-dotted with spots where Mayar had leaned forward and jabbed his finger to emphasize some point or other. He was as loquacious as Dawari was reserved\u2014a difference maybe not of temperament but of circumstance. For nearly three hours, Mayar expounded on the injustice of his situation with the fervency of a man who has waited long and lonely hours for a sympathetic ear. It was clear that everything he told me was something he had told himself a thousand times before.\n\nAccording to Mayar, whose black hair had grown gray during his imprisonment, the prosecution's case rested on an alternate theory of how the tunnel was built: The passage was not actually dug by Ihasan and his twenty-one helpers but by Taliban prisoners from within Sarposa itself. As evidence, they have pointed to a fresh layer of loose dirt and debris spread over the political block's hard-packed courtyard. But Mayar has an explanation for this. He says that while he was warden, his Canadian advisers hired a local contractor to add the new dirt to the courtyard in order to create a slope that would allow rainwater to better drain. He told me this again and again, with the kind of exasperation you might expect from a man potentially facing ecution over such a matter.\n\nThe prosecution's theory would seem simple enough to disprove. But Mayar's attorney told me that the local contractor, fearful of contradicting the government, claims his documentation of the project was destroyed in an office fire.\n\nThe Canadian government, of course, could easily confirm or deny Mayar's account. His attorney, however, says he doesn't know how to contact them. When I contacted them myself, a spokesman for their foreign office forwarded my questions about the dirt, contractor, etc., to several people at the Correctional Service of Canada (which worked with Mayar at Sarposa) and then responded that \"it would be inappropriate for the Government of Canada to comment.\"\n\nMayar does not believe that the case against him has much to do with his guilt or innocence anyway. He thinks he is the victim of a vendetta. When I asked why he and his guards had been so quickly blamed, Mayar glanced at Dawari, who had joined us and was sitting silently on a leather couch across the room. \"There are some powerful people here,\" he said, echoing suddenly the elliptical rhetoric of his friend. \"I didn't obey them. I obeyed the law. That is what I'm being punished for.\"\n\nA couple of weeks later, I returned to Sarposa and asked to speak with Mayar alone. We sat in the same office, mutely watching a young guard pour us tea. After the guard had left, Mayar made sure the door was closed. Then he said: \"I'm glad to be able to talk to you without the warden being here. There is a conspiracy against me. I don't know whether or not to tell you the truth. It could be dangerous for me.\"\n\nIn Afghanistan, conspiracy theories are ubiquitous, as commonplace as the tragedies whose true meanings they purportedly reveal; nevertheless, Mayar's anxiety, at least, was bona fide. \"There is the government,\" he said, \"but inside the government there are power brokers who have their own government. They were requesting me to release prisoners or to have prisoners transferred to Kandahar so that I could release them.\" One of these power brokers, according to Mayar, was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's brother, who was assassinated last July. Before he died, Karzai had been the head of the provincial council in Kandahar and its preeminent strongman.\n\nMayar said that Wali Karzai turned against him after he refused to free a relative of one of his guards. \"When the prison escape happened, all of the enemies I made in the government attacked me. NDS was under the control of Wali Karzai. The court was under the control of Wali Karzai. And they wanted to blame me because I didn't obey Wali Karzai.\"\n\nMayar shook his head. \"Because of the way this investigation is being conducted,\" he said, \"sometimes I think about killing myself. But suicide is a form of cowardice.\"\n\n\n\nEarlier this winter, in a nondescript house in Kandahar, I met with Rahim, the Taliban escapee (whose name here is an alias used to protect his identity). He had traveled from Helmand Province, where he was living in hiding, and had shaved his beard so as to appear less conspicuous. There was no heat in the room, and as we sat on the floor, Rahim pulled his one leg to his chest, wrapping it in his patu, a thin wool shawl worn by Afghan men. I'd been expecting a hardened veteran, a killer. Rahim was both of these things. But he was also a very young man, palpably unsure of himself, and the longer he talked the clearer it became that he was more nervous than I was. \"I did not want to be a Talib,\" he told me. \"When I saw the foreigners' behavior toward our people, I felt I had to stand up against them. It wasn't only me. Many, many people from my area joined the Taliban.\"\n\nRahim's hatred for the foreigners began about five years ago, when coalition soldiers (probably Canadians) built a road through Pashmul, Kandahar, the cluster of tiny villages where he was born and raised. \"They brought big tanks and trucks and destroyed any wall and house that was in their way,\" he said. \"They never asked permission from anyone and never paid anyone for the damage they caused. The only time they stopped was when the Taliban attacked them.\" According to Rahim, the soldiers often answered such attacks with air strikes and mortars that killed civilians. Seven members of his family, he told me, were injured by mortar fire.\n\nIn 2006, when Rahim and his friends were old enough, they began attending secret meetings organized by the local Taliban commander, Mullah Manan. \"He was telling us the stories,\" he said. \"He was telling us about the treatment of the people by the coalition and the cruelties of the coalition. He was encouraging us to join the Taliban.\" Finally, after a night raid in Pashmul during which an old man and three women were killed by special-operations forces, Rahim felt he had no choice. \"I knew them personally,\" he explained. \"They lived in my village.\"\n\nRahim's father, a former mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Kandahar during the 1980s, strongly disapproved of Rahim's decision and tried his best to dissuade his son from becoming an insurgent. \"My father was trying to take me back from the Taliban. He was sending me text messages,\" Rahim said. But by then, Mullah Manan's influence was greater than his father's; in Rahim's view, history had passed his father by. \"My commander was saying, 'You should not listen to your father.' He was saying, 'This is not the time to stay at home.' \" Rahim turned a deaf ear to his father's exhortations and for a year fought against Afghan and coalition forces in Zhari and Panjwai districts, traditional strongholds for the insurgency. It was in Panjwai that Robert Bales, an American soldier, allegedly murdered seventeen unarmed villagers, including nine children. When I drove through Zhari and Panjwai this April, both sides of the road were lined with heavily armed Afghan National Army soldiers braced for something to happen.\n\nEven after losing his leg, when he was 20, to an IED likely buried by his fellow insurgents, Rahim said, \"I was still loyal to the Taliban, and I still wanted to help them.\" He was sent to Quetta, Pakistan\u2014home to the Taliban's senior military leadership, who orchestrate the insurgency in Afghanistan\u2014where he received his prosthesis, and when he returned to Kandahar, he was tasked with transporting and resupplying insurgent groups throughout Panjwai. It was while bringing clothes and food to Taliban fighters there that he and two friends were picked up by the police and handed over to agents from NDS.\n\nIn a recent report, the United Nations found that about half the prisoners who spend time in NDS custody are brutally tortured. Forms of torture reported by prisoners include electric shock, \"wrenching\" of genitals, removal of toenails, suspension from the wrists by metal chains, and beatings with rubber hoses, braided cables, electric wires, and wooden sticks. The most rampant abuses take place in Kandahar.\n\nIn his case, Rahim said that the agents locked them in a hut and beat them for several weeks. \"They were beating us on our backs and the bottoms of our feet with a whip,\" he said. \"They were beating us and asking us, 'What were you doing? What were your activities?' We told them we were ordinary Taliban. We told them: 'We were with Mullah Manan, and we will be with him again.' \"\n\nEventually, Rahim was transferred to Sarposa.\n\nIt was getting late by the time he finished telling his story, and he was leaving early in the morning to return to Helmand, where the insurgency was even more entrenched than in Kandahar. As he stood to go, I asked him whether there was any message he wanted to convey directly to Americans. \"These foreigners should take their hands off my country,\" Rahim said in a surprisingly subdued tone that seemed to carry more weariness than anger. \"Afghanistan will be a stable place if these other countries stop interfering here. Our country will be better off without them.\"\n\n\n\nToday the political block in Sarposa is full again. In fact, it is overfull. When I last visited, there were 707 suspected insurgents living there. The maximum capacity for the entire facility is only 800; as of February, it held 1,550 prisoners. Now that number is certainly much higher. \"There has never been so many,\" General Dawari, the current warden, told me in February. \"Every twenty days we receive seventy new prisoners. The government thinks of this prison as a bottomless well.\" While new prisoners steadily arrive, few leave. Among the 707 suspected insurgents, Dawari said, only thirty-seven had ever appeared in court. \"This means the courts and the government don't care,\" he said.\n\nDawari had clearly grown disillusioned with the system he'd devoted most of his life to. His son was recently kidnapped and held for more than a month, he received constant threats on his own life, and he lived essentially as a prisoner himself. \"Since I've come to Kandahar, I've made many, many enemies,\" he said. \"My house is here in Kandahar in a safe place, but I haven't been home in twenty days, because I'm scared. I stay here day and night. My superiors don't allow me to leave, either. Every day there is new intelligence that there will be an attack on the prison. Once I didn't go home for three months.\" Despite his sacrifices and his thirty-one years of service, Dawari told me, \"tomorrow my fate could be the same as General Mayar's.\"\n\nBefore I left Sarposa, I returned to see Mayar once more. At some point I asked him whether he still believed in the government and justice system he says betrayed him. He thought for a while before answering: \"What is unbearable is that so many people have been killed here. My own countrymen and many young Americans and people from other countries have been killed here. They are sacrificing their lives here. But no one is helping with the law.\" Mayar estimated that \"at least 20 to 25 percent\" of the Afghans doing time in Sarposa were innocent. The implication, however subtle, was clear: What kind of government has such a legal system? And for what purpose have so many lives been lost protecting such a government?\n\nAs we stepped out of Mayar's old office, a group of guards snapped to attention and saluted their former warden. Mayar bummed a cigarette from one of them, then tossed his patu over his shoulders and walked back to his cell.\n\nLuke Mogelson is a writer based in Kabul and the editor of Razistan. Additional reporting by Muhib Habibi."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/taliban-jailbreak-luke-mogelson-june-2012>