KEY POINTS:
When the Taleban broke more than 750 prisoners out of jail in June in one of the most spectacular attacks in living memory, Nato's response was instant but invisible.
Senior commanders scrambled every drone plane they could spare as prisoners poured out of the Kandahar jail. The closest
Nato garrison hunkered down inside their base, afraid of more attacks, as prisoners poured into the night.
But commanders at nearby Kandahar airfield watched live pictures of the anarchy, from the comfort of their operations room, as wave after wave of escapees began marching east, to sanctuaries in Pakistan.
A fleet of Predator drones criss-crossed the skies some 10,000m above Afghanistan's second city, flying through the night and long into the next morning, as rag-tag columns of men made good their escape.
Some of the prisoners went straight to Arghandab, just outside the city, where they fought with Nato troops a few days later. But most of the 400 Taleban prisoners, who were among the 750 inmates freed, fled back to Pakistan - beyond the reach of Nato's force. Or so they thought.
International troops are using drones to patrol Pakistani airspace in an attempt to monitor insurgents on both sides of the border. "We wanted to see where the prisoners went," said one official in Kabul, hinting that the fugitives had betrayed their hideouts when they fled.
It is an open secret that armed Predator drones, operated by the CIA, are flying routine fire missions inside Pakistan against al Qaeda leaders.
Islamabad insists it will never sanction American soldiers on its soil but senior Nato officials insist the drones are there with tacit, if sometimes strained, consent of Pakistani officials.
The most notable example of a drone attack came last January when a missile from a Predator hit a terrorist safe house in Waziristan, killing Abu Laith al-Libi, the man accused of plotting an attack against Bagram airbase, when United States Vice-President Dick Cheney was visiting.
Nato sources continually blame Pakistan for a surge in Afghan violence and growing frustration at Pakistan's failure to tackle the Taleban on their side of the border has prompted talk of Nato operations against the insurgents on both sides of the Durrand line.
The drones watch and log the movements of senior Taleban commanders in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas. Unlike the presence of special forces, they carry far less political risk.
But the information is not always foolproof. The US is investigating claims that its warplanes killed 89 civilians in an air strike in Herat last week. There is little doubt the US special forces who called in the air strike were relying, in part, on information from a drone that was watching the Taleban commander who they were hoping to arrest.
It is possible that the "thorough battle damage assessment" that US officials said proved they had only killed insurgents, was also done by a drone. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai disagrees and the Americans have, reluctantly, begun an investigation.
Perhaps more telling, is that three months after the jail break, not one of the fugitive prisoners has been arrested.
- INDEPENDENT
