U.S. Army Sgt. Pedro Rodriguez-Ortiz provides security in Khowst province, Afghanistan, Feb. 27, 2010. Rodriguez-Ortiz is assigned to Charlie Troop, 1st Squadron, 33rd Cavalry Regiment. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Jeffrey Alexander

The stated goal of the US-led War in Afghanistan, according to the Obama Administration, is to defeat the Taliban and establish a stable democratic government over the entire country. Critical to that goal is establishing a professional Afghan army and police force that is not corrupt, and that has the respect of the Afghan people.

But reports out of Canada suggest that far from creating such a military and police force, the so-called International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) is turning a blind eye to the thuggish criminality of those organizations, both to avoid growing opposition in ISAF member countries, and to avoid offending those organizations in Afghanistan.

The issue in question is routine rape and sodomy of children by Afghan soldiers and police operating on Canadian-run bases in the Kandahar region.

As reported last fall in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, Canadian military chaplains and some soldiers have been complaining as far back as 2006 that Afghan security forces have been sodomizing young boys on their base. These military whistle-blowers charge that the military brass has been ignoring or burying their complaints, fearing the bad publicity they could generate.

The paper reports that Canadian military police have also complained, as reported by Brig.-Gen. J.C. Collin, commander of Land Force Central Area, that they were being told “not to interfere in incidents in which Afghan forces were having sex with children.”

According to the paper, the Canadian military command has argued that, even though sex with children is against the law in Afghanistan, the practice is culturally accepted and that the Canadian forces “should not get involved in what should be seen as a ‘cultural’ issue.”

Makes you wonder what other “cultural” issues involving Afghan security forces that the Western occupiers might not want to get involved in. Perhaps the oppression of women? That’s certainly part of the culture. How about bribery and extortion? Based on the evidence–that the police in Afghanistan are a wholly corrupt entity, and that the army is not much better–arguing that corruption is “culturally acceptable” would be easy to do. How about drug dealing? Again, that appears to be quite the culture in Afghanistan.

Kudos to the Canadian grunts, MPs and chaplins who found the sexual abuse of children more than they could stomach, and who brought their concerns to public attention at home in Canada when their own commanders sought to cover it up.

It makes me wonder, though, why here in the hyper-moralizing US, we haven’t heard a peep from our troops about similar behavior by Afghan forces on US-run bases.

It’s hard to believe that a practice so common on a Canadian base that it provoked such outrage among Canadian soldiers is not also occurring elsewhere.

This leaves us with two possibilities:

US soldiers and marines are just not as willing to go outside the chain of command and go public with their complaints, or

The US media are not interested in investigating this kind of story. It involves only Afghans, and who cares about Afghans? What American journalism covers is Americans. (Remember the big spate of stories about the sex escapades of guards at the US embassy in Kabul?)

I’d say it’s probably a combination of the two.

At any rate, the picture painted of Afghanistan’s army and police in the Ottawa Citizen article does not bode well for any plan that hinges on their taking over from US and ISAF troops any time soon…or for the fate of young children of Afghanistan, if and when they do.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

The documentary evidence paints a very different picture.

We all know that it was blonde bombshell Joanne Herring (played by Julia Roberts in the film) who recruited Wilson to the “cause of the Afghans.”  However, it would really be more accurate to state that Mrs. Herring, as Honorary Consul for Pakistan, actually recruited Charlie Wilson to the “cause of the Pakistanis.”

What is the “Cause of the Pakistanis?”

Since the mid-1970s it has been Pakistan’s policy (not the Soviets’) to destabilize Afghanistan and destroy its infrastructure by training, paying, supplying and deploying Islamic fundamentalist guerillas to keep Afghanistan too weak to assert re-negotiation of the 1600 mile border between the two nations, known as the Durand Line.  The Durand Line, is named for Sir Mortimer Durand, who arbitrarily drew it on a map in 1893, dividing the Pashtun and Baloch ethnic regions and cutting Afghanistan off from the sea.

The people who live along this line do not recognize it, and have been fighting separatist rebellions against the Punjabi dominated Pakistani government since the formation of Pakistan in 1947.  If the Pashtuns and Balochi peoples ever achieve their goal of independence or repatriation into Afghanistan, Pakistan stands to lose everything west of the Indus River, in other words, over half of its territory.  Though logical, their endless pursuit of the destruction of Afghanistan is nonetheless diabolical.

Follow the Bouncing Drill Bit

In 1978, Joanne Herring, then married to Robert R. Herring, the founder of Houston Natural Gas (later known as ENRON), was offered the position of Honorary Consul for Pakistan to the United States.  Mrs. Herring told me that the government of Pakistan first asked her husband to accept the position, but when he declined and recommended her instead, they accepted her, because, as she put it, “They hemmed and hawed, and I’m sure they thought, what can we do?

We don’t want to offend this man, because they hoped that he might drill for oil in our country.”  Coincidentally, also in 1978, two American oil companies, Occidental Petroleum and Union Texas Petroleum, received permission to explore for oil in Pakistan.  They had each been granted a 30% share in their Pakistan concession, with Pakistan’s national company, OGDC, holding the remaining 40%.  In 1981 Union Texas made its first big strike and Oxy’s first Pakistan well came in shortly thereafter.  The Pakistan Army courteously agreed to truck the crude from the field to the refinery in Karachi.

Sen. Humphrey and the Burning Question of Pakistani Control of Distribution

It’s commonly known that the United States agreed to let Pakistan control distribution of U.S. assistance to the Afghan Resistance during the 1980s to hide our hand and avoid sparking World War III with the Soviet Union.  This policy was known as “plausible deniability.” One member of Congress who was very involved with our support for the Afghans was Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-NH).  Sen. Humphrey called the “plausible deniability” strategy “silly”, because anyone who cared knew that the Americans were backing the Afghan Resistance.

In fact, he stated that, throughout the 1980s, he and other members of Congress were “constantly lobbying, importuning, the White House and the CIA to take more direct control” of the distribution of U.S. assistance to the Afghans, rather than continuing to allow Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (“ISI”) to control it. According to Sen. Humphrey, members of Congress were well informed that the factions receiving the lion’s share of American largesse were consistently guilty of killing more Afghans than Soviets.

Sen. Humphrey’s statement begs the question:  If members of both houses of Congress, and from both parties (Wilson was a Democrat), were lobbying the White House to change the policy of allowing Pakistan to control distribution of U.S. assistance, why did the Reagan Administration persist in allowing Pakistan to control distribution of our military, financial and humanitarian aid to the Afghans?

Back to that Bouncing Drill Bit

According to Mrs. Herring, she went to Afghanistan shortly after the Soviet invasion, where she was so horrified by the atrocities she witnessed, and so impressed by the brave determination of the Afghan freedom fighters, that, upon her return to the “free world,” she worked feverishly to recruit her powerful friends in Washington to the noble cause of the Afghans.  We have all been saturated with the story of how, inspired solely by their desire to evict the evil communist empire in Afghanistan, Joanne Herring, Charlie Wilson and their friends at the CIA defeated the Soviet Union and brought an end to the Cold War.

Provocatively, one of Mrs. Herring’s first statements to me when we sat down for her interview was, “We turned to Charlie [Wilson], cuz he was an old friend of the oil business.”

Later in her interview for this documentary, Mrs. Herring told about how, shortly before George H.W. Bush’s inauguration as Vice President, her late husband arranged for a meeting between her and Mr. Bush. She stated that their meeting, which was supposed to be for only 15 minutes, actually lasted for two hours, during which time Mr. Bush was very polite, and didn’t say anything.  Then, a few days later, at a party in her honor, her lifelong friend, James A. Baker, III (Ronald Reagan’s new Chief of Staff), took her by the arm and confided, “We’re gonna give ‘em a lot of good stuff!”

Wilson + Supron = Wilson + Union Texas

As mentioned above, in both the book and movie, CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, we are told that Mr. Wilson was living on $700 a week.  However, his 1981 Financial Disclosures show that, as of May 1982, he was holding between $100,000 to $250,000 worth of shares in an oil company called Supron, which he had purchased in March and September of 1981.  On $700 a week?  That’s a man who knows how to stretch a penny!

Coincidentally, in April of 1982, Union Texas Petroleum purchased a controlling interest in Supron, and in October of that year, Congressman Wilson made his first official visit to Pakistan.  Owning a plump share in Pakistan’s oil business could not fail but to heighten the good Congressman’s sympathy towards the Pakistani point of view.  Such sympathy is further evidenced by the fact that, upon retiring from Congress in 1996, Wilson promptly became a high paid lobbyist for Pakistan, to the tune of over $300,000 per year.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former oil & gas lobbyist explained to us, “That was how it was done.”  This same gentleman told how James A. Baker, III completely controlled all information received by President Reagan.  He described how, anytime the President was speaking with someone who might impart information contrary to Baker’s preference, either by phone or in person, Mr. Baker interrupted the President’s conversation.

And what about the venerable Mr. Baker?  James A. Baker, III’s 1981 Financial Disclosures reveal that, on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in January of 1981, his new Chief of Staff took the time to sell his daughter’s shares in Occidental Petroleum.  Occidental was, and is, a publicly traded company, while its Pakistan partner, Union Texas, was still privately held at that time.  Though far from incriminating, the timing of this particular stock sale at least merits a raised eyebrow.

However, the 1981 Standard & Poor’s Directory shows that Baker Botts (founded by James A. Baker, III’s great-grandfather) was the primary law firm for Union Texas Petroleum Corp.  Baker Botts is among a handful of powerful Houston law firms which establish corporations to serve the purposes of the members of the firm – a format which is precisely opposite to the traditional legal-business relationship.

Joanne Herring and Charlie Wilson have been celebrated as the heroes of Afghanistan, but the Afghan people see them in a different light.  After a studio screening of CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, when asked by the producers what he thought of the movie, one Afghan gentleman replied, “That asshole destroyed my country.”  But then, that’s what the Pakistanis were paying him for.

Melissa Roddy is the director of CONFLICT OF INTEREST, a documentary film focused on underlying and previously unreported issues regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like several of the principals in the saga of that region, she is also a native Texan. In December of 2007 she achieved worldwide attention with the publication of a print article and documentary short exposing propagandistic misinformation in the movie “CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR.”

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

You had to love the headline the Philadelphia Inquirer put on the jump page of columnist Trudy Rubin’s Sunday commentary about word that the Obama administration is hoping to talk with at least some mid-level Taliban leaders about giving up the fight and “coming over” to the “government” side.

“Relax–No deal with Taliban is Imminent,” the headline read. “I suggest everyone take a deep breath,” Rubin wrote. “The US position toward talks with the Taliban has shifted somewhat, but no deal with top Taliban leaders is imminent, or even likely.”

Phew! Thank god for that! Imagine Americans actually sitting down and discussing peace just as we’re getting a good war on!

Fortunately, say Rubin and other journalists with good Washington connections (Rubin has for years been a big promoter of Gen. David Petraeus), America is only interested in talking with “low and mid-level Taliban” whom it hopes to “wean away” to our side with offers of jobs and money.

But really, what is the problem with actually negotiating with the real leaders?

It’s clear that this talk of limited talking with lower-level Taliban grunts is an act of desperation by a US side that recognizes that it is losing the war. The Taliban are not running from the fight as American forces ramp up with Obama’s escalation of troops and mercenaries. They are taking the battle to the US, with coordinated attacks right in Kabul, open firefights with US troops in the field, and increasingly brazen attacks all over the country.

The idea that the US doesn’t negotiate with its enemies is one of those stupid “We’re Number One!” mantras born of the World War II experience. There, the US and its allies refused to negotiate with the clearly defeated Axis powers. Germany was bombed into ruins and simply overrun by the US and its allies, including the Soviet Union marching from the east. Japan was not allowed to surrender. Its efforts to negotiate a settlement were brushed off by Washington so the US could vaporize two of Japan’s cities with its new A-bombs, firebomb Tokyo, and then accept a total surrender.

Since that time, total victory has been the model for American war making, except that of course there have been some big exceptions. The US ended up in a stalemate against North Korea and its ally China, and had to negotiate a cease-fire in place, which continues to this day. And of course in Vietnam, a war the US lost, it ended up having to negotiate its way out before its own forces were overrun.

The Afghanistan situation would appear to be closer to Vietnam than to Korea. There is no way the country can be divided up into a Taliban sphere and a US puppet-run sphere. First of all, the Taliban have the support of most of the Pashtun ethnic group, which is the largest by far in the country. Second, there is no “government” side–just a bunch of tribal groups and a US puppet regime–hugely corrupt and actually more of a mob than a government, that controls the capital of Kabul and a few other large towns.

The Taliban have already proven that they can defeat a foreign army–the Russians–who had more troops in their fight than the US will have even after Obama’s escalation is complete. And they know they are winning.

So it really isn’t in our interest to say we won’t talk with what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls “the really bad guys” in the Taliban.

Of course we’ll talk with them–eventually. We’ll have to, so we can extract our troops in an orderly fashion and claim to the American people that we have won “peace with honor.” The alternative would be to have to rush them out with the enemy hounding them as they leave, tail between legs.

Look for it. At some point, after enough young Americans have been killed or had their body parts blown off, after the country has spent one or two or three hundred billion dollars on the effort, after an increasingly frustrated military has cranked up the terrorizing and slaughter of innocent Afghanis as much as it can get away with, President Obama or whoever replaces him in the White House in 2012, will have to call for peace talks.

Then there will be the inevitable debate for months about the shape of the table, with the US insisting that one side be reserved for the puppet regime of Hamid Karzi, or whatever leader the CIA installs after Karzai is finally assassinated or maneuvered into exile in Switzerland–in order to preserve the illusion that there is an Afghan government side. And finally there will be the announcement of a power-sharing agreement, in which the Taliban will be given half the ministries, and Taliban forces will be merged into the national army.

The remaining US forces (our NATO “allies” will by this point be long gone) will then climb aboard their C-5 and C-17 transports and fly home and, after a brief respite, the Taliban will toss out the old puppet leadership and just take over control of the country.

What is so depressing about all this, is it could all be accomplished right now and would save both sides from suffering additional casualties.

In fact, it makes so much more sense to do it now. If the US were, at this point, to call for talks with “the bad guys” at the top of the Taliban, it could negotiate a deal that would include carrots in the form of aid and reconstruction that could indeed lure the Taliban away from any global terrorist organizations that might want to seek their allegiance and assistance. It might take a little doing–after all the US has been aggressively trying to kill these very leaders using its ubiquitous Predator drones, and many of them have lost close family members to those drone attacks.

But at least there would be the chance of reaching some accommodation that would allow Afghanistan to start to recover from its decades-long nightmare of war and occupation. More war and more killing would merely mean that when the Taliban finally do drive the US out, they will be further embittered, further radicalized, and further filled with vengeance.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

In the hope of making the list more readily accessible — and searchable — than it is through a poorly photocopied Pentagon document, I reproduce it as a separate web page here, with commentary on some the prisoners I have been able to identify. This is very much a work-in-progress, of course, as the state of knowledge regarding Bagram is akin to that regarding Guantánamo back in 2005, before the prisoner lists and 8,000 pages of documents were released that allowed me to research and write my book The Guantánamo Files, and to begin a new career as a full-time journalist on Guantánamo and related issues.

In an article accompanying this post, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” I examined what the list — which contains only the prisoners’ names, and not their nationalities or the date and place of their capture — revealed about the small number of foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries, three of whom are currently waiting to see if the Court of Appeals will overturn the right to habeas corpus that was granted to them by Judge John D. Bates last March, and raised questions about the whereabouts of other known “ghost prisoners” who do not appear to have been included on the list.

In an article to follow, I’ll examine how the list reveals not only that around 3,000 prisoners have been held at Bagram in the last six years, but also how the majority of the prisoners listed were seized in 2008 and 2009 — and I’ll examine what this means with regard to the US administration’s detention policies and the Geneva Conventions, which were discarded by George W. Bush and have clearly not been reintroduced by Barack Obama.

Although I believe that I have had some success tracking down the stories of some of the 100 or so prisoners on the list who have been held at Bagram for between three and seven years, I have found few clues as to the identities of the majority of those listed, who, as mentioned above, were seized in the last two years. Most reports — by the US military or the media — of raids or skirmishes that led to the capture of those held have not furnished the names of those seized, and on the rare occasion that names have been provided it has tended to be because they are regarded as significant figures.

I have no idea whether the allegations against these men are true, but, more importantly, I have not failed to notice that the majority of the prisoners (often men identified by only one name) are clearly not significant figures at all, and my fear — which, I have no doubt, will be confirmed when more information emerges — is that many of them will be revealed to be victims of the same chaotic approach to the capture of prisoners that has done so much to lose the battle for the “hearts and minds” of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq for the last eight years, and which, with regard to the 218 prisoners seized in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2003 and sent to Guantánamo, I chronicled in The Guantánamo Files.

One sign that this is indeed the case was reported on NPR last August, when NPR’s Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman explained how Maj. Gen. Doug Stone had recently been sent to Afghanistan by Gen. David Petraeus, the overall commander of Afghanistan and Iraq, because he “liked the way Stone revamped the detention centers in Iraq, how he changed them for the better.” Bowman explained that Stone “went to Afghanistan with a team, interviewed detainees, visited detention facilities,” and produced a 700-page report, in which he estimated that “as many as 400 of the 600 held at Bagram can be released,” explaining that “many of these men were swept up in raids” and “have little connection to the insurgency.”

Bowman added that Maj. Gen. Stone “wants to focus on rehabilitation, just like he did in Iraq where he ran the detention system there. He had 21,000 detainees. But he found that most of these Iraqi detainees — as many as two-thirds — were not radicals, but mostly illiterate and jobless young people. Some were innocents and others worked for the insurgency because they just needed the money. And Stone worried that detaining them was only making matters worse, actually turning them into radicals.”

As Stone explained to NPR at the time:

Now you’ve got a bunch of moderates who really shouldn’t be in there in the first place. And I can hold them forever, but eventually they’re going to say, “Why are you holding me? What’s the fairness in this?” And eventually they’ll say something about America that we don’t want to hear. They’re going to say, “Wait a minute, you’re not here to better the population, you’re here to conquer us and you’re taking me hostage.”

If you have any further information about any of the men on this list, please feel free to email me, and I will incorporate the information into the list.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Photo: isafmedia / Flickr

This report was originally published on Truthout.org.

Two reports coming out of Afghanistan illustrate the depth of hypocrisy and subterfuge characterizing the US/NATO intervention in that country. One could cite a myriad of such examples, so immoral and wrong as the US war there.

In the first report, a 2009 human rights assessment prepared by Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department, obtained by The Canadian Press and reported at CBC News, revealed a skyrocketing suicide rate among Afghan women:

“Self-immolation is being used by increasing numbers of Afghan women to escape their dire circumstances and women constitute the majority of Afghan suicides,” said the report, completed in November 2009….

The director of a burn unit at a hospital in the relatively peaceful province of Herat reported that in 2008 more than 80 women attempted suicide by setting themselves on fire, many of them in the early 20s.

It’s not as if the plight of Afghan women under the US-backed Karzai government hasn’t gotten some attention. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) recorded 184 cases of self-immolation by Afghani women in 2007, versus 106 in 2006. In Herat alone, in the first six months of 2008, 47 women, desperate from an escape from a life of domestic servitude, violence, rape, injustice, and other crimes, set themselves on fire and ended up in the emergency room of the local hospital. Ninety percent died from their serious burns.

The police and judiciary do not launch any formal investigations to determine the causes and motivations of suicide and self-burning by women, according to the AIHRC.

As a result, men who force and provoke women to self-immolation and other forms of suicide remain immune from all legal and penal repercussions.

To delve into the statistics only reveals a more doleful picture: almost 90 percent (!) of Afghan women have been victims of violence, 60 percent of all marriages are forced. The US-backed regime has made some token moves to assist women, such as creating police task forces staffed by women officers. But the female officers aren’t allowed to do any outreach. Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai infamously supported a law that allows for spousal rape. (Afghanistan is not alone in this, however, as Bahrain, too, “offers women no protection from spousal rape.”)

US/NATO-Backed Afghan Regime Practices Torture

As the US plans to transfer administrative control of its Bagram detention facility to the Afghanistan government, a separate scandal links the Afghan government to the torture and murder of a prisoner in its custody. According to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), Afghan citizen Abdul Basir was tortured while in custody of Afghani security forces last December, and killed when he was pushed or thrown out a window. His family was told he committed suicide. But HRW has posted pictures of the tortured marks on Basir’s body.

It wasn’t easy to try and get an investigation of Basir’s death in Afghanistan – from this brave new government (“elected” by massive fraud) that has guaranteed justice and due process to the Bagram prisoners, once they get their hands on them. According to HRW’s report on Basir’s death:

An NDS official told family members that Basir’s father, Zalmai, signed a statement confirming that Basir had committed suicide and that an autopsy was not required. The family told Human Rights Watch that NDS officials told them that if they buried the body, Basir’s brothers and father would be released.

However, concerned that the marks on Basir’s body may have been signs of torture, the family took the body to the Forensic Department of the Health Ministry where an autopsy was carried out. The findings have not been made public. The family reported that security agency officials later came to the house where the body was held and gave them a message to bury the body. When the family tried to take the body to parliament, they said, agency vehicles blocked their way.

While the Afghan defense ministry assures the world press that “all international conventions on prisoners’ rights would be implemented” once it gets control of Bagram, the many reports of arbitrary arrest, torture, and other ill-treatment by Afghan security forces suggest otherwise. In fact, there is nothing very trustworthy about either the Afghan government or its US/NATO backers, who have averted their eyes from anything that would besmirch the credentials of their war purposes in Afghanistan.

This leads the leaders of the Western alliance to some pretty strange places. Take Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Talking to interviewers for the French-language television network TVA about the many reports that prisoners captured by Canadian forces and turned over to Afghani authorities were tortured, even killed, Harper said:

“We are speaking here of a problem among Afghans. It’s not a problem between Canadians and Afghans. We’re speaking of problems between the government of Afghanistan and the situation in Afghanistan. We are trying to do what’s possible to improve that situation, but it’s not in our control.”

For Harper, the system of transferring prisoners to the Afghans “works very well,” though he admits there are “problems from time to time.” As an example of some of these problems, read the over 40 redacted emails (PDF) sent from former Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin to then-Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay alleging the torture of detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons.

While trumpeted as a blow against the idea of turning Bagram into a second Guantanamo, the likelihood is that things will not get any better for the 700 plus prisoners at the US facility there. Nor does it speak to the ongoing management by Special Operations forces of a black site prison, also on the Bagram Air Base. US Special Operations forces are granted special privileges to hold prisoners in indefinite detention. Evidence of torture at the SO black site prison, published in both The New York Times and The Washington Post last November, has not produced any follow-up in terms of Congressional hearings or further investigations. Instead, the handover of the Department of Defense’s primary Bagram detention site appears likely to even further reduce oversight and investigation into the plight of prisoners there, once under Afghan jurisdiction, as the promises of the Afghanistan government are not to be trusted.

Meanwhile, the propaganda from Washington continues unabated. “Surge turning tide against Taliban, says McChrystal,” blared ABC news on Monday. But no amount of propaganda is going to fill up the moral bog that is the US war in Afghanistan. Whether its targeted assassinations, leading to rounds and never-ending rounds of assassination and bombings, as at Khost, or the counterinsurgency attacks that target school-age children, as at Ghazi Khan, the campaign in Afghanistan has nowhere to go but down.

Even its vaunted aim of improving the lives of Afghan women is proven to be a lie. As a statement by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) reported recently:

The US “War on terrorism” removed the Taliban regime in October 2001, but it has not removed religious fundamentalism which is the main cause of all our miseries. In fact, by reinstalling the warlords in power in Afghanistan, the US administration is replacing one fundamentalist regime with another. The US government and Mr. Karzai mostly rely on Northern Alliance criminal leaders who are as brutal and misogynist as the Taliban….

Last month, Malalai Joya, a former member of the Afghan parliament, told Michelle Goldberg of the Daily Beast that the situation for Afghan women is every bit as bad under Karzai as it was under the Taliban. Joya is also concerned that civilian casualties are fueling popular support for the Taliban.

Thus far, no significant antiwar movement has emerged to seriously challenge the Obama administration’s prosecution of the Afghanistan war. Meanwhile, the administration has clearly expanded its military operations to Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But support by the US electorate of this war policy appears shaky at best, as the population suffers under an unemployment rate approaching 20 percent, and an array of service cutbacks in many US states.

Whether protests against the economy will be linked to the bellicose policies of the Obama administration in its own version of Bush’s “war on terror” remains to be seen. But one doesn’t have to look very far to see that the premises of prosecuting a democratic, human rights war is no more tenable under Obama than it was under Bush.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor The Public Record, has been blogging at Daily Kos since May 2005, and maintains a personal blog, Invictus. E-mail Mr. Kaye at sfpsych at gmail dot com.

Made available in response to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the list contains the names of 645 prisoners who were detained at Bagram as of September 2009.

But the government blacked out other vital information requested by the civil rights group – including prisoners’ citizenship, length of detention, country where captured, and circumstances of capture.

The government’s previous position was that the public had no right to have this information.

Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said, “Releasing the names of those held at Bagram is an important step toward transparency and accountability at the secretive Bagram prison, but it is just a first step.”

“Hundreds of people have languished at Bagram for years in horrid and abusive conditions, without even being told why they’re detained or given a fair chance to argue for release,” she said.

But she added, “The information the government continues to withhold is just as vital as the names of prisoners. Full transparency and accountability” about Bagram requires full disclosure.

“The public has long been kept in the dark about what goes on at Bagram. It is time to shine a bright light on the secretive prison,” Goodnam said.

It was not clear whether the list of names also included those held in field detention sites around the country, where some detainees are taken initially before being placed in the general detainee population.

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records relating to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan in April 2009.

When documents were not forthcoming, the ACLU filed the FOIA lawsuit in September 2009, seeking the disclosure of documents related to the detention and treatment of prisoners at Bagram, records relating to the rules and agreements that govern the facility, and documents pertaining to the conditions of confinement and status review process afforded prisoners.

The U.S. government’s Bagram detention facility has been the focus of widespread media attention and public concern for many years, but very little information has been publicly available about the secrecy-shrouded facility or the prisoners held there.

The U.S. government has been detaining a previously-unknown number of prisoners at the facility since 2002. Some have been held for as long as six years without access to counsel or a meaningful opportunity to challenge their imprisonment.

The conditions of confinement at Bagram are reportedly primitive, with allegations of mistreatment and abuse continuing to surface; in fact, in 2002, two Afghan prisoners at Bagram were fatally beaten by U.S. troops.

The U.S. military has recently built a modern new prison to take the place of the dilapidated and inefficient original unit. The U.S. is in the process of handing management of this new facility over to the Afghan authorities.

Nonetheless, there is growing public concern in the U.S. and around the world that Bagram has become, in effect, the new Guantanamo.

Former detainees have described abusive treatment at the base, especially in the first two or three years it was in existence. But in the last several years, detainees who have been released described improved conditions.

While the majority of the detainees at Bagram are Afghan, a small number are foreigners who are accused of fighting with the Taliban. Also held there are a handful of detainees captured in other countries, according to human rights lawyers and military detention officials.

The current detainee population is about 750, according to military detention officials, but in September, when the information request was made, there were about 100 fewer detainees. The numbers have grown over the past few months because of the increased military operations by U.S. forces.

An investigation by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has revealed that former detainees at Bagram were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with dogs.

Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, told us, “The BBC investigation provides further confirmation of the United States’ mistreatment of prisoners at Bagram. These abuses are the direct consequence of decisions made at the highest levels of the U.S. government to avoid the Geneva Convention and forsake the rule of law.”

The Barack Obama administration has sought to deflect some of the heat it is getting from civil rights organisations and legal experts over its management of Bagram. For example, it recently announced a set of new procedures for conducting periodic assessments of the status of each prisoner.

But, according to Tina Monshipour Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, the only U.S. organisation actively litigating on behalf of Bagram detainees, “The ‘new’ procedures adopted by the Obama administration are not new at all, they appear to be exactly the same as the procedures created by the [George W.] Bush administration in response to prior court challenges by Guantanamo detainees.”

“The idea of assigning a non-lawyer ‘personal representative’ who does not legally represent the detainee, but works for the military, is a step in the wrong direction,” Foster said.

She told us, “Only a lawyer who is independent from the government can effectively assist a detainee with his defense against allegations being made by the government.”

The Pentagon denied the BBC’s charges of harsh treatment and insisted that all inmates in the facility are treated humanely.

Another prominent human rights organisation, the British-based Reprieve, called on the British government to take action concerning two Pakistanis who it says Britain helped render there from Iraq.

“These men were never in Afghanistan until the UK and the U.S. took them there,” Stafford Smith told us. “It is the height of hypocrisy to take someone to Bagram and then claim that it is too dangerous to let them see a lawyer. Even Guant·namo Bay is better than this.”

Since coming to office a year ago, President Obama has banned the use of torture and ordered a review of policy on detainees, which is expected to report next month. But unlike its detainees at the U.S. naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the prisoners at Bagram have no access to lawyers and they cannot challenge their detention.

In April 2009, in a lawsuit brought in federal court by the International Justice Network, Judge John D. Bates ruled that three Bagram prisoners – two Yemenis and one Tunisian citizen – had the right to petition U.S. courts for their release because they were not Afghans captured on the Afghan battlefield.

But he also ruled that for a fourth appellant, a citizen of Afghanistan, rather than a Yemeni or Tunisian citizen held at Bagram, granting him legal rights might upset the relationship between the U.S. and Afghanistan.

Judge Bates dismissed the petition of Haji Wazir, an Afghan civilian held at Bagram without charge for more than six years. The judge ruled that because the petitioner was a citizen of Afghanistan, he had no right to petition the U.S. courts for his release.

Afghan government sources have said prisoners will have a right to appeal their detentions once the U.S. transfers its authority.

Senator Carl Levin, who visited Afghanistan earlier this week, said the training was crucial in the strategy to help Afghans take the lead in securing their own nation.

But as Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra reports from a NATO training camp in Kabul, building an effective Afghan military force is going to take a long time.

They have supported the use of military force in Iraq and Afghanistan; offered apologies for the CIA crimes of torture and abuse, extraordinary renditions, and secret prisons; and criticized efforts by the Obama Administration to reverse these policies and to rely on multilateral diplomacy and arms control and disarmament to resolve outstanding problems. The key writer in Hiatt’s stable has been David Ignatius, who is this year’s winner of the WashPost/Compost Award for the most incomprehensible and fanciful op-ed of 2009.

Ignatius’ winning op-ed was written last month. He sought to justify U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan that, he says, will lead to a “sovereign Pakistan that controls all its territory”; a “future common market between Pakistan and Afghanistan that can power economic development in both countries”; and a “stable structure for Central and South Asia in the 21st century.”

Ignatius believes that, just as the Mexican-American War “helped make the United States a continental nation” and the European wars of the 19th century “helped unify Germany and Italy,” the Af-Pak wars will stabilize a lawless tribal region that has been in turmoil for 150 years. There is no Afghan or Pakistani leader who genuinely believes that the current strife can lead to stabilization.

Indeed, there are few Afghan and Pakistani leaders who understand all the roles being played by Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda, various tribal leaders, and the Pakistani intelligence services, which have played key clandestine roles in multiple crises that have affected Kabul, Delhi, and Islamabad. If the local actors can’t comprehend all the major factions, U.S. leaders (and commentators) are not likely to do better.

Ignatius brings an unusual ignorance to the subject of Pakistan, which he treats as a normal nation-state. In reality, Pakistan is an artificial political entity that has long been both dysfunctional and unstable. In their partition of South Asia in 1947, the British hoped to create one region (Pakistan) that would provide military facilities to Britain. To accomplish this, the British merged five key ethnic groups that had never co-existed in the same body politic historically, according to Selig Harrison, a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy.

The Bengalis were the largest ethnic group, outnumbering the other four: the Punjabis, the Pashtuns, the Baluch, and the Sindhis. The Bengalis seceded in 1971, forming the independent state of Bangladesh. The Punjabis now outnumber the Pashtuns, Baluch, and Sindhis, but the three smaller groups have ancestral claims to more than 70% of Pakistani territory, ensuring continued ethnic and tribal strife.

The essential instability of the Pakistani state and the continued military conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan will make it impossible to create the network of institutions that Ignatius believes can “create a stable structure for Central and South Asia in the 21st century.” He wants unidentified American and Pakistani “statesmen” to “show the same vision and maturity” that post-World War II American and European statesmen used to create the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

These international institutions were born during WWII, however, in an effort to restore international order and prosperity at a time when the U.S. economy was booming and could finance postwar recovery and ensure currency stability. American leaders had a good understanding of the political and economic problems of Western and Central Europe; in contrast, U.S. leaders are basically ignorant about the frontier along the Afghan-Pakistani border and the tribal wastelands of Southwest Asia. The World Bank and the IMF have had their successes, but they have never been able to create positive economic development among the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world; both Afghanistan and Pakistan are key members of this unfortunate group.

Finally, Ignatius believes the U.S. buildup of troops in Afghanistan is the key to securing Pakistan’s control over its lawless tribal region. In fact, Pakistan understands that additional U.S. forces in Afghanistan will lead to increased warfare on the Afghan-Pakistan border and will ultimately drive more militants into Pakistani territory in Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier Provinces.

The suicide bombing of a CIA base along the border and the wave of bombings that have swept Pakistan over the past several months, including the eastern city of Lahore, are a reaction to the increased U.S. use of unmanned drone aircraft in Pakistani territory against al Qaeda and the Taliban. U.S. efforts to bolster border security in Afghanistan may well complicate the overall security situation in Pakistan. Moreover, the Obama Administration’s announcement of a troop buildup in Afghanistan, along with a timeline for withdrawal, presumably have emboldened both al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Pakistan has been masterful at playing off U.S. international anxieties in order to gain increased political and economic support. In the 1950s, the Pakistanis were handsomely rewarded for offering bases to U-2 spy aircraft; in the 1960s and 1970s, the Pakistanis received significant military and economic assistance for providing U.S. leaders with a clandestine entry into China to prepare President Richard Nixon’s summit meeting with Mao Tse-tung; in the 1980s, the United States overlooked Pakistan’s new nuclear weapons program in order to protect clandestine aid shipments to the Mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan; currently, the United States is so frightened by these same nuclear weapons that it is willing to overlook the myriad games that Pakistan is playing at our expense.

Goodness gracious, David Ignatius, why don’t these geopolitical realities register with you?

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, a member of the UAE royal family, claimed he was drugged by two other men, and therefore unaware of his actions, which included torturing the man with electric prods, driving over him and raping him.

Thee men who released the tape have been given five years in jail.

In a statement released to the New York Times, Tony Buzbee, an attorney for the Nabulsis, said:

The verdict is a farce, and shows why the world should have no confidence in the [United Arab Emirates'] justice system. This was a show trial, held completely in secret, with one objective: to relieve international pressure on the ruling family so that the pending military treaty with the U.S. would go forward. The fact is, and the evidence is clear, Sheikh Issa tortured numerous people and he ordered the torture to be videotaped. The sheikh’s abhorrent behavior also was not isolated. I offered the U.A.E. authorities additional videotape indicating that at least 20 other people were tortured by the sheikh. [...] The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, continues to coddle the U.A.E. and look past serious human rights and security concerns there.

The Times added:

The United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is a part, made an agreement with the United States, during the final week of the Bush administration last January, to [import] nuclear fuel for use in an energy program. The United States formally signed the agreement with the U.A.E. in December.

As my colleague Robert Worth explained last April, the agreement means that the U.S. will “share expertise, technology and fuel in exchange for a promise by the Emirates to abide by international safeguards and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.”

Mohammed Sulaymon Barre was released from Guantanamo on December 20, 2009, and returned to his family in Somaliland. Mr. Barre had fled Somalia during the civil war in theearly 1990s. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees granted Mr. Barre refugee status in Pakistan where he lived and worked freely for many years prior to his detention.

In November 2001, soon after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani authorities came to Mr. Barres house in the middle of the night and arrested him.

He is believed to have been sold to the United States for bounty at a time when the United States was offering sizable sums for the handover of purported enemies. Once in the custody of U.S. forces, Mr. Barre was sent to the U.S. military base at Bagram, where U.S. guards abused him and coercively interrogated him before transferring him to Guantánamo. He was never charged with any crime.

Earlier Monday, CCR…

…held a public briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. with activists and human rights attorneys to mark the beginning of the ninth year of detention without charge or trial at Guantánamo following a rally and march that morning. The briefing, titled “Obama’s Guantánamo,” addressed issues including the continued and worsening lack of transparency, resettlement for men who cannot return to their home countries, the threat of indefinite detention schemes in the U.S., the halt of transfers to Yemen and related responses to the recent terrorism attempt, and more.

Lakhdar Boumediene called in to the briefing from his home in France, and Omar Deghayes joined the briefing from his home in the United Kingdom. Mr. Boumediene was the lead plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case of 2008, Boumediene v. Bush brought by CCR and co-counsel , in which the Court affirmed that Guantànamo detainees have the right to file writs of habeas corpus in U.S. federal courts. He was released on May 15, 2009. As a child, Omar Deghayes settled with his family in the U.K. as a refugee from Lybia. Picked up in Pakistan and sent to Bagram and Guantánamo, he was blinded in one eye at the base in 2004. Mr. Deghayes was released from Guantanamo to the U.K. on December 19, 2007.