The escape of almost 500 Taliban prisoners is just the latest blow in the effort to secure Afghanistan from insurgents. It couldn’t come at a worse time, as Afghan troops are apparently finally ready to take on the monumental task of defending their country. Umm, okay, sure.

What gets me is that the Taliban’s escape hole took five months to dig, and apparently nobody noticed the work on it. What gets me even more is that up to 100 prisoners were escaping per hour on Monday night, and nobody noticed that. Are they not training prison guards in Afghanistan? Or were the existing guards just complicit in the escape, as the government suggests?

Either way, the blame for this failure has to be placed squarely on Hamid Karzai. As the President of Afghanistan, it’s his job (via the Afghani National Police and Military) to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. It’s especially important when the people he and the armed forces are supposed to be guarding are your bitter enemies. Unfortunately, that same police force (and other security apparati) has been subject to increasing infiltration from insurgents. From the Independent:

Afghanistan’s Justice Minister told President Hamid Karzai yesterday that “collaborators inside the prison” staff were partly to blame for the break-out. The news of yet another inside job – the jailbreak follows a string of attacks in which insurgents have infiltrated the security forces – casts serious doubts over the readiness of the Afghan army and police to start taking control of the country from Nato this summer, even though this is a crucial part of the West’s plan to extricate itself from Afghanistan.

Compounding matters is the rampant corruption in the Karzai government:

Daily Afghanistan says the Afghan government has lost credibility and is riddled with corruption and bribery. To mask its incompetence, the paper writes, the government resorts to “complicated and dangerous” policies, referring to the government’s “one-sided” reconciliation efforts with the Taliban. It alleges that the Taliban and foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated the “senior ranks of the security apparatus.

Leaked documents from last year showed that, for a while at least, parts of Afghanistan were still under control of warlords. I’ll have to see if that’s still the case, but with this latest news, and the continuing flow of reports about corruption in the government, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Of course, Karzai himself appears to be aiming for warlord status, even if not the title. He claims to be a friend of ours, while meeting with Taliban leaders and making moves toward reconciliation with them. And his last election was rank enough with fraud that his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, dropped out of the run-off, so we don’t even really know if he should be president right now.

It’s apparent that Karzai has grown too accustomed to his office. If you count the Interim Administration, he’s been the political head of Afghanistan for almost 10 years now, and it’ll be 13 if he serves another full five years. With everything I’ve read about him in the past couple years, he doesn’t seem too serious about fixing the problems in his country. Instead, the situation has grown worse and worse.

Afghanistan needs direction and leadership for a post-NATO state, and I’m not confident that Karzai is the one to provide that. I think it’s time for new blood in the President’s seat.