KABUL: With Taliban rebels launching mass jail breaks, threatening a major city and killing more foreign troops than ever, Afghanistan is replacing Iraq as the focus of the “war on terror”, analysts say.

The Islamist movement has dealt a series of stunning blows to President Hamid Karzai’s fragile government in the past week, causing jitters among Western nations who together have around 70,000 troops in the country.

Hundreds of insurgents escaped from a prison in Kandahar on Friday and within days rebels had massed in villages outside the southern city, forcing 1,000 Afghan and Nato troops to launch a major offensive to drive them out.

Democratic US presidential candidate Barack Obama spelt out his priorities if elected by saying on Monday that the real front of the “war on terror” was now Afghanistan and that the US mission in Iraq had been a disaster.

Further underscoring the instability is the fact that Afghanistan was deadlier for foreign forces than Iraq during the month of May for the first time since the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.

In Iraq the number of coalition soldiers killed dropped to 21 last month, 17 of them in action, according to US Defence Department statistics on the independent icasualties.org website.

But nearly seven years after US-led forces invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, coalition soldier deaths in Afghanistan rose to 23 during May, 19 of them by hostile fire.

“At the end of the day they have to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and win against it here, not in Iraq,” Ahmad Behzad, a member of Afghanistan’s parliament and a former journalist, said.

“If Taliban get grounded here and stronger its impact will be seen in US and in the West.” In a sign of international concern, world donors gathered in Paris a week ago pledged $20 billion to rebuild Afghanistan but also called on Karzai to do more to fight corruption and strengthen the rule of law.

But the conference was followed a day later by the Kandahar jail break, in which a Taliban suicide bomber blew up the main gates of the building to free more than 1,000 prisoners, causing widespread alarm.

“The Taliban are making use of the summer to assert themselves, which is being taken by the Americans with great alarm,” Hasan Askari, a political analyst at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, said.

Behzad, the MP, said the consensus among donors and also in the US election campaign on the need to focus on Afghanistan was a positive sign, despite the fears of a Taliban resurgence.

But the focus until now on Iraq had made international forces in Afghanistan more vulnerable, he said, adding: “It gave time for Taliban to regroup, plan better and attack softer targets, and hurt the troops.” Prominent historian and analyst Habibullah Rafi said international forces in Afghanistan had to review their tactics in the wake of the scores of civilian deaths in military operations since 2001, leading to resentment.

“Unless the government changes its tactics, unless the international forces change the way they conduct operations, I would say the violence would increase even more,” Rafi said.

Analysts said that quitting Afghanistan was not an option for the US-led coalition and the separate Nato-led International Security Assistance Force, but that they were in a “very difficult position”. “If they abandon this place they are going to get hurt back home,” said analyst Waheed Mujda, suggesting failing to wipe out the threat in Afghanistan could increase the likelihood of terror attacks in coalition countries.

“But if they fight for it they need more money and resources than at the beginning when it was easy,” added Mujda, a former anti-Soviet fighter who served in the ministry of foreign affairs under the 1996-2001 Taliban regime.—AFP