Taliban seizes several Afghanistan villages

NATO spokesman Mark Laity said NATO and Afghan military officials were redeploying troops to the region to "meet any potential threats."

"It's fair to say that the jailbreak has put a lot of people (militants) into circulation who weren't there before, and so obviously you're going to respond to that potential threat," he said.

One Taliban fighter who escaped from the Kandahar prison Friday said he plans on rejoining the insurgency.

"This is jihad," Ameer Mohammed, 27, told The Associated Press on Monday. "We will not abandon it because we were jailed."

Friday's attack at Sarposa Prison involved dozens of militants on motorbikes and two suicide bombers. One suicide bomber set off an explosives-laden tanker truck at the prison gate while a second bomber blew up an escape route through a back wall. Rockets fired from inside the prison's courtyard collapsed an upper floor.

Leadership vacuum
Two powerful anti-Taliban leaders from Arghandab have died in the last year, weakening the region's defenses. Mullah Naqib, the district's former leader, died of a heart attack in October. Taliban fighters moved into Arghandab en masse two weeks after his death but left within days after soldiers moved in.

A second leader, police commander Abdul Hakim Jan, died in a massive suicide bombing in Kandahar in February.

Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter who runs a non-governmental organization in Kandahar that makes and sells soaps and body oils, warned after Naqib's death that his passing meant trouble for the region.

"Mullah Naqib's Arghandab is currently acting as the dike protecting Kandahar from a surge of Taliban presence," Chayes wrote on her Web site. "And Arghandab, as Mullah Naqib proved during the anti-Soviet jihad, is a formidable place for a resistance movement to be based. Once well ensconced there, the Taliban would be nearly impossible to dislodge."

Chayes said by email Monday that Taliban plans for the Arghandab attack and the prison assault, were "obviously long in the making."

The Taliban last attempted a large-scale assault in Kandahar province in late 2006, a months-long engagement that killed more than 500 of its fighters. That marked the last time the Taliban fought in large formations. It has since increased the use of suicide and roadside bombs, and its fighters now move in smaller groups.

The assault comes one day after President Hamid Karzai angrily told a news conference that he would send Afghan troops into Pakistan to hunt down Taliban leaders in response to the militants that cross over into Afghanistan from Pakistan.

On Monday, hundreds of Afghans demonstrated in eastern Afghanistan in support of Karzai's threat.

Across the border, Pakistan summoned the Afghan ambassador and said it would "defend its territorial sovereignty" in a spat that marks a new low in relations between key partners in the U.S.-led war on terror.

U.S. President George W. Bush, speaking in London, said the United States can help calm the "testy situation." Bush said the mission for the U.S. remains to deny safe haven to extremists who want to kill innocent people.

"That's the strategy of Afghanistan. It needs to be the strategy of Pakistan," Bush said.

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