Illustration: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t

The UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) has released its October 2011 report on “Treatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghanistan” (PDF). Ten years after the US invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, and ostensibly dismantle the Al Qaeda forces linked to the 9/11 attacks, the regime in place is not only hopelessly corrupt and unable to provide security for its citizens, Afghan security forces in the National Security Directorate (NDS) have been charged by UNAMA with “systematically” torturing “detainees for the purpose of obtaining confessions and information” at a number of provincial facilities.

The report alleges that fully 46 percent of prisoners held by security forces, and approximately one-third held by Afghan national police (ANP), are tortured. Furthermore, “[n]early all detainees tortured by NDS officials reported the abuse took place during interrogations and was aimed at obtaining a confession or information.” Until last month, the U.S. routinely turned prisoners over to Afghan security forces, while NATO stopped turning over prisoners to a number of different Afghan facilities last July.

Controversies over allied forces releasing prisoners to Afghan security, where they reliably knew they would be tortured, have simmered for years now. As Marcy Wheeler highlighted in an article on the UN report today, according to UNAMA, “The US has not yet put in place a monitoring programme to track detainees it hands over to Afghan authorities.”

Turning prisoners over to forces or governments that are known to commit gross human rights violations, such as torture or murder of detainees, is a violation of international law, and of the US-signed Convention Against Torture treaty.

Torture of Children

Ten percent of the prisoners examined were minors. Nearly two-thirds of the children held by the NDS and ANP (62 percent) were tortured.

UNAMA’s report was statistically derived from a random sampling. Issues of possible falsification of torture evidence is addressed in the report, and the evidence was found to be credible. (Actually, the Executive Summary says the allegations have not been judged on their credibility. But the Methodology section of the report states, “In a number of cases, UNAMA interviewers observed injuries, marks and scars that appeared to be consistent with torture and ill‐treatment or bandages and medical treatment for such injuries as well as instruments of torture described by detainees such as rubber hoses.” The report adds that “UNAMA rigorously analysed patterns of allegations in the aggregate and at specific facilities which permitted conclusions to be drawn about abusive practices at specific facilities and suggested fabricated accounts were uncommon…”

UNAMA statisticians calculated the margin of error for the different samples they used ranged from approximately 5 to 9 percent.

Torture for Confessions

A major conclusion from the report is that much of the torture was specifically aimed at obtaining confessions from prisoners during torture. UNAMA notes, “Confessions are rarely examined at trial and rarely challenged by the judge or defence counsel as having been coerced.” Hence, there’s very little to constrict government prosecutors in using torture to get their confessions, and confessions are “[i]n most cases… the sole form of evidence or corroboration submitted to courts to support prosecutions.” There are few procedural safeguards for defendant prisoners, and what few there are are routinely ignored.

The following is testimony from one prisoner cited specifically in the report, Detainee 371 at Kandahar, interviewed last May:

After two days [in a National Directorate of Security (NDS) facility in Kandahar] they transferred me to NDS headquarters [in Kandahar]. I spent one night on their veranda. On the following day, an official called me to their interrogation room. He asked if I knew the name of his office. I said it was “Khad” [Dari term for the former NDS]. “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban; even stones confess here,” he said. He kept insisting that I confess for the first two days. I did not confess. After two days he tied my hands on my back and start beating me with an electric wire. He also used his hands to beat me. He used his hands to beat me on my back and used electric wire to beat me on my legs and hands. I did not confess even though he was beating me very hard. During the night on the same day, another official came and interrogated me. He said “Confess or be ready to die. I will kill you.” I asked him to bring evidence against me instead of threatening to kill me. He again brought the electric wire and beat me hard on my hands. The interrogation and beating lasted for three to four hours in the night. The NDS officials abused me two more times. They asked me if I knew any Taliban commander in Kandahar. I said I did not know. During the last interrogation, they forced me to sign a paper. I did not know what they had written. They did not allow me to read it.

According to the report, forms of torture included “routine blindfolding and hooding [i.e., sensory deprivation] and denial of access to medical care,” in addition to “suspension (being hung by the wrists from chains or other devices attached to the wall, ceiling, iron bars or other fixtures for lengthy periods) and beatings, especially with rubber hoses, electric cables or wires or wooden sticks and most frequently on the soles of the feet. Electric shock, twisting and wrenching of detainees’ genitals, stress positions including forced standing, removal of toenails and threatened sexual abuse…”

Alibiing the Afghan Government

Strangely, after describing the “systematic” use of torture by Afghan security and police forces, UNAMA declares the Afghan government innocent of use of torture as government policy. The report cites the fact that the NDS cooperated with the investigation, concluding “the use of torture is not a de facto institutional policy directed or ordered by the highest levels of NDS leadership or the Government. This together with the fact that NDS cooperated with UNAMA’s detention observation programme suggests that reform is both possible and desired by elements within the NDS.”

This is a surprising assertion, and of course, the international press has highlighted this supposed reassurance about the Afghan government in its coverage of the report’s conclusions. The cooperation of the NDS appears to have been equivocal at best. For one thing, as the report concedes, the NDS refused to allow UNAMA to visit its national counter-terrorism facility in Kabul, or interview prisoners there. Known as Department 90, it is where “high-value” prisoners are held. Information on Department 90 prisoners was gathered from those held elsewhere who previously had been held at the NDS Kabul facility.

Twenty-six of 28 prisoners who were determined to have been held at Department 90 were tortured, leading to a near 100 percent probability of being tortured there. One prisoner told UNAMA investigators, “When they took me to [Department] 90, I did not know where I had been taken. . . After two days, I learned that I was in 90 from my cellmates. There is so much beating at 90 that people call it Hell.” Five of the six children interviewed who had been held at Department 90 were tortured.

The Afghan government has long promised they would clean up their act regarding abuse of prisoners, and US agencies have covered up for them in the past. A 2006 RAND study, prepared for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, that torture and extrajudicial killings were in decline by Afghan authorities, and that US assistance had “somewhat improved” human rights practices by Afghan police. (RAND has a very stringent warning about quoting its material, or even providing links, but here’s the link the New York Times gave in its article on the UNAMA report.)

One can only conclude that the US government has been more than supportive of the torture policies within Afghanistan, only withdrawing funds when it was politically expedient to do so. Most of the stories on the UNAMA report have noted UNAMA’s mention of the so-called “Leahy law.” According to UNAMA, “legal provisions in the US Foreign Appropriations Act and Defence Appropriations Act prohibit the US from providing funding, weapons or training to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible evidence that such unit has committed gross human rights violations, unless the Secretary of State determines the concerned government is taking effective remedial measures” (emphasis added).

None of the press results and analysis thus far has noted this escape from accountability clause, wherein the Secretary of State can decide a foreign government — say, Afghanistan — which has committed “gross human rights violations,” is sincerely doing the best it can to address the issue. Indeed, parts of the UNAMA report appear to be written to allow just such an interpretation by the Obama/Clinton-led State Department.

So while the Americans and their allies in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have as of last month, “in response to the findings in this report, “stopped transferring detainees to certain installations as a precautionary measure,” the report also notes that a return to the previous transfer policy “would presumably require the US to resume transfer of detainees only when the Government of Afghanistan implements appropriate remedial measures that include bringing to justice NDS and ANP officials responsible for torture and ill‐treatment.”

But this doesn’t speak to the funding or arming of the Afghan security and police forces. Indeed, by indicating that portions of the government, including the NDS, are sympathetic and trying to change the abuse/torture situation, it would appear that ammunition is being provided to Secretary Clinton to conclude that a good faith effort is being made, and bypass the provisions of the Leahy Law. This would seem to be the point in concluding the torture is not “institutional,” and that “reform is both possible and desired by elements within the NDS.”

But anyone reading this report could hardly come to this politically convenient conclusion. In fact, senior NDS officials admitted “they have investigated only two claims of torture in recent years, neither of which led to charges being pursued against the accused NDS official.” Nor would NDS officials “provide UNAMA with any information on any other disciplinary or criminal action against NDS officials for torture and abuse.” This doesn’t sound like desired elements for reform to me.

Ten years after US and foreign forces invaded Afghanistan and installed a puppet regime, all the while jockeying for alliances among various warlord forces, has not improved the human rights situation in Afghanistan. Surely the Taliban and the various warlords cannot be counted upon to provide such improvement either. But there is one big difference. The Taliban are not foreign invaders. While such foreign invaders occupy the country, killing civilians and giving political and military support to a torture regime, no progress from within Afghanistan can take place.

Originally published in The Dissenter.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

Taliban religious police beating a woman in Kabul on August 26, 2001. Photo/Wikimedia

How ironic, of all people in the world, Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary defined the goal of terrorism succinctly. Lenin said: “the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.” A century has unfolded since Lenin’s practical conclusion. In modern era, America witnessed the act of domestic terrorism by Timothy McVeigh, a United States Army veteran also known as the Oklahoma City Bomber, who sympathized with militia movement and grew tired of his federal government. McVeigh killed 168 innocent civilians, including women and children, and injured 450; his action was the deadliest act of terrorism within the United States prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

When September 11 occurred, Osama Bin Laden became the overnight poster child of terrorism. With Bin Laden now serving as organic fish food at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, his co-conspirators, the Taliban continuously terrorize freedom. The Taliban are the perfect face of the modern terrorism in all of its glorious pathology. Why anyone takes them seriously is utterly beyond me. And yet for some, including Afghanistan’s leader, their bogus moral preening continues to resonate.

While Afghanistan’s president and his family are openly advocating for the Taliban to be recognized as a legitimate political movement, the Taliban’s actions clearly classify them as a terrorist organization which desperately preys on vulnerable minds. Boys as young as 12-years-old are recruited to become suicide bombers under the false pretense of promises which will never be delivered. And in turn, the Taliban boast about using these children as human bombs to slaughter civilians in universities and hospitals across Afghanistan.

When the Pakistan-backed Taliban regime collapsed in 2001, Afghanistan’s doors were open to all Afghans, regardless of their ethnicity or political affiliation. Even those who served during the dark days of the Afghan Communist era seized this opportunity and reintegrated themselves to help in rebuilding Afghanistan. The Taliban, however, resorted to terrorism to appease their Pakistani ISI masters to incessantly inflict terror on Afghans.

Although there is no broadly accepted definition for terrorism, a terrorist group such as the Taliban commonly is defined as a set of individuals belonging to a non-state entity that uses terrorism to achieve their goal. In the Taliban’s case, their objective is for the United States to leave Afghanistan, so Pakistan ISI can conveniently move back in, as in the late-nineties. While most terrorist groups are political by nature, their aim is to target civilians as the Taliban demonstrate this on daily basis.

Unfortunately, Afghan president’s 10 infelicitous years at the helm has failed to help him to grasp the basic notion that even terrorist groups that have ended, did so by pursuing their goals through politics. There is no need to rebrand them and fabricate an identity that genuinely doesn’t fit and is seriously incongruous with Taliban’s character. Today, Taliban’s ideological motivation, to kill Americans because they are Christian, no longer resonates with Afghans, unless Mr. Karzai stokes Afghans sentiment against the United States and appeal to their emotional intelligence.

Unlike Afghanistan’s president, the Taliban do understand that their goal of knocking America out of Afghanistan and the region is extremely unattainable and the only way they could envisage a political settlement and by some miracles find a voice in Afghan society after fifteen years of continuous atrocities, is to redefine their objective narrowly.

For a hypothetical moment, suppose, tomorrow the Taliban open up a political office in Afghanistan. One would highly doubt that Afghans will voluntarily join their political party as Taliban’s past track record is a clear indication of a savage cult that misunderstands Islam and has no respect for Afghan cultural values. No Afghan would want to be the subject of public flogging like livestock in exchange for a political discourse.

But the senseless Afghan war must end. If Mr. Karzai is truly genuine about bringing a well-deserved peace to Afghanistan, he must be genuine about the peace process. First, Mr. Karzai must discern between Afghanistan’s foes and friends. He must use the tools of democracy afforded to him at the sacrifice of the international community and the Afghan people, to delegitimize terrorist actions. For example: the Afghan Parliament must be encouraged to pass a law that forbids any Afghans to take arms against the Constitution of Afghanistan, punishable by death, with a final amnesty to all Taliban terrorist before the law is ratified. This will demonstrate to the Afghan people that Karzai’s government is a serious institution and true custodian of the Afghan Constitution.

Second, the Afghan government must work hard to reform mosques that have historically been used as a tipping point for major political upheavals. Whether it has been the Iranian regime or Pakistan ISI – they have easily manipulated these venues to propagate against reform and the progressive nature of a democratic society.

Third, the Afghan opposition leaders also have a stake in shaping the course of Afghanistan’s future. They must demonstrate to Afghans that individuals with Afghan blood on their hands will no longer be part of a new chapter. Allowing these nefarious characters to participate in political dialogue will afford the Taliban an opening to delegitimize their genuine cause. The opposition must also bring into their ranks many tribal elders and youth organizations that counter Taliban terrorist ideology. The new generation of Afghans, especially students who are introduced to the benefits of education are fundamentally opposing the Taliban mindset and their Pakistani-innovated Islamic values.

Wahid Monawar is former Permanent Representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations in Vienna, Austria. He is currently an associate of Zurich Partners. You can follow him on Twitter @Afghanpolicy.

Marines from India Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment and soldiers from the Afghan National Army take part in a firefight while an explosion occurs outside of Marjah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan on February 13th, 2010. The Marines from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment and ANA soldiers have been conducting Operation Moshtarak to eliminate Taliban presence and intimidation in the city of Marjah, Afghanistan. (USMC photo by Lance Cpl. Tommy Bellegarde)

The fighting is still underway in the town of Marjah, in what is being described as the first battle in Obama’s War in Afghanistan, or alternatively as the biggest battle of the US War in Afghanistan. But already, the US has lost that battle.

It lost it from day one, when troops fired missiles in to a Marjah house, killing 12 civilian occupants–half of them children. And it lost it further when another three more civilians were blown away by US-led forces. Finally, it lost the battle as much of the town has been simply destroyed by the fighting.

The supposed goal of the assault on Marjah was to demonstrate that the US would bring the wonders of good government and peace to the Pashtun tribal people who have endured a generation or more of war, and who have been living under the “cruel tyranny” of the Taliban in recent years. The new strategy of President Barack Obama and his hand-picked military leader in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was to show that the US military could fight the Taliban without causing civilian deaths and casualties. Protecting civilian lives would be a priority, they claimed.

The problem with such a strategy is that the whole reason American forces have been able to crush resistance, as they did in the lighting invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the overthrow of the Taliban government of Afghanistan in late 2001, has been their callous disregard for civilian lives, which have been coldly labelled “collateral damage.”

In the war in Iraq, and in Afghanistan until recently at least, the American war-fighting style has been for troops to go into an area, seeking to draw enemy fire, and then to call in long-range artillery or air support, and simply blow up the area with heavy explosives, devastating anti-personnel bombs that shower an area in flesh-shredding flechettes, burning white phosphorus projectiles, and a brutal rain of machine-gun fire from fixed-wing and helicopter gunships. Inevitably with such tactics, countless innocent men, women and children get killed and maimed.

In Iraq, US forces ended up killing far, far more civilians than actual enemy fighters thanks to this approach. While information about deaths in the Afghan War is harder to come by, it is likely that the same holds true there also. In addition to the well-known incidents, where air strikes have been called in which ended up butchering entire wedding parties in both Iraq and Afghanistan, or where farm families engaged in routine activties have been blown away thinking they were terrorists, US forces have for years thought nothing about assaulting compounds and killing the inhabitants, innocent civilians or not, children or adults, if it was thought that even one “terrorist” was in the building at the time.

Such tactics, reminiscent of what years ago used to be attributed to vicious military regimes like the German Nazis or the Imperial Japanese, have become the norm for US forces, as has the tactic of “spray and pray,” under which US forces, if they take fire or feel threatened, simply unload all their weapons in every direction, killing every living thing within range, including people who might be seeking shelter behind mud walls of their homes.

These tactics, while criminal in the extreme under the Geneva Conventions, which require that civilians in any conflict be protected, do work in the short term, which is why American forces have prevailed in their initial assaults. But long-term, they inevitably become self-defeating, since they only turn a population into bitter enemies, many with an understandable desire for vengeance.

Thus, the “new” strategy of trying to minimize civilian casualties.

But once US troops are denied their air support, and are barred by commanders from simply blowing away buildings from which they are taking enemy fire, because of fears that there may be civilians in those buildings, US forces lose any advantage they may have had over local enemy fighters. It becomes a battle of guns vs. guns and person vs. person, and becomes more of a case of who is more willing to die.

Clearly the Taliban then gains an edge. Its fighters, or at least many of them, believe they are fighting for Allah, or for their country’s survival and independence, or for both, and they are willing to die for those causes. What are American forces fighting for in Afghanistan? Hard to say. I suspect many, if asked, would say they have no idea. Some, I’m sure, would say they are “defending America” if asked thanks to their indoctrination, but I also suspect that as they survey the primitive society in which they are fighting, and see the poverty of the people, they will have a hard time perceiving Afghanistan as any kind of threat to their own country or families.

Some may say they’re avenging the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon “by Al Qaeda” in 2001, but then, even the US government admits that the foreign fighters of Al Qaeda have long ago left Afghanistan, and no Taliban were involved in the 9-11 attacks. So it’s hard to see American troops being willing to die for these trumped up “causes.” I suspect, again, that most US troops are understandably trying really hard mainly to make sure they don’t get hurt or killed.

And that’s why, in the end, the US is losing this war. It’s why those deadly Himars rockets were fired and why air assaults are being called in after all in Marjah, and why civilians are again being slaughtered by American forces in this battle.

It’s why, despite promises to the contrary from Gen. McChrystal and Commander in Chief Obama, the town is being wrecked.

And in the end, it will be all for naught, since the US is supporting a wholly corrupt and criminal regime in Kabul which will not follow up the ultimate “victory” in Marjah with some kind of honest and well-functioning government in the destroyed city.

We will no doubt see some photogenic reconstruction in Marjah when the fighting subsides. We’ll see some demonstration projects which will be dutifully praised by the journalistic shills flown in by Pentagon flaks. But the people of Marjah will remember the destruction of their town, and will remember their neighbors and relatives who were killed. And when the Taliban return to the town, as they inevitably will after the Americans withdraw or draw down, they will probably be welcomed, or at least tolerated.

The reality is that America cannot prevail in Afghanistan except by applying the massive, oppressive power of its military killing machine, with its robotic rocket-firing drone aircraft, its bombers and attack aircraft, its fixed-wing and helicopter gunships, its indiscriminate anti-personnel weapons, and its massive bombs. It cannot prevail, in other words, without terrorizing the population.

And even then, in the end, it cannot succeed.

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

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

Lately there is a loud chorus among pundits, proclaiming Afghanistan to be the new Viet Nam. Well, it’s not.  While the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan is certainly unique, it bears a great deal of resemblance to the former Yugoslavia.  It is oh so easy to chant “Troops Out!”  But the chanters have no clue the devastating consequences which would result if their wish were to become reality.

It is critical to understand the dynamics of this situation, because if U.S. and NATO military forces withdraw from Afghanistan before that country has had a real chance to recover from decades of war, hundred of thousands of Bosnians Afghan civilians will be killed.

The Durand Line

Understanding the Durand Line is fundamental to understanding the Af/Pak region.  In 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand drew a line on a map which cut the nation of Afghanistan in half, along with cutting it off from its coast along the Arabian Sea.  Prior to that time, Afghanistan actually extended east of the Indus River, which now runs down the center of Pakistan, a nation created in 1947.  From the Afghan point of view, the Durand Line Treaty became null and void when the British left India.  Great Britain saw things differently.  Instead, Pakistan was established.

In a nutshell, Pakistan is the story, Afghanistan is the result.

Pakistan is the Unwilling Alliance of Four Ethnic Groups

Pakistan is primarily comprised of four ethnic regions: Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Pashtunistan (which is subdivided into the Northwest Frontier Province ["NWFP"] and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas ["FATA"] including North and South Waziristan.  The largest ethnic groups are the Punjabis.  Pakistan is basically an oligarchy ruled by 22 Punjabi families.  The Punjabis also dominate the military of Pakistan, which is sometimes described as “an army with a country,” rather than the other way around, it is that pervasive in the daily lives of Pakistanis.

Ages before there was such a thing as the British Empire, Pashtun and Balochi tribesmen fought against Punjabi domination.  Yet, Punjabi domination is exactly the legacy that the British left them in 1947.

The Durand Line (the 1,600 mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan) divides both the Pashtun and Balochi ethnic regions. The people who live along the border don’t recognize it, partly because it was so arbitrarily drawn that it not only runs down the middle of towns, it cuts through the middle of properties.  One old Afghan hand told me, “There are places along the border where you can eat lunch in Pakistan, and then go to the loo in Afghanistan.”  Because of the Durand Line and their longstanding resistance to Punjabi domination, the Pashtun, Balochi and Sindhi peoples have been fighting separatist rebellions since Pakistan was created.  This is the most significant fact which is not reported in the news.  Understanding it helps to reveal the patterns in the chaos of the region.

The Taliban is a Pakistani Paramilitary Organization, NOT a Pashtun Movement

Because of these separatist rebellions, and the fact that two of these groups have brethren on the Afghan side of the border, with whom they long to unite, the Punjabi elite of Pakistan have for over three and a half decades acted on the belief that Afghanistan must be kept unstable and/or under their control.  They began recruiting and training Islamic (and Maoist) rebels in 1972 and sending them in to terrorize and destabilize Afghanistan, in order to keep the Afghans too preoccupied to assert re-negotiation of the Durand Line.  The mujahidin were part of this, and in 1994 Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (“ISI”) organized the Taliban for the same purpose.  The Taliban are not a Pashtun movement.  They are a Pakistani paramilitary group.  They receive their training, funding, weapons and supplies from the government of Pakistan.

Additionally, Pakistan uses the Taliban to suppress the Pashtun and Balochi separatist movements.  What you never hear on the news, but which I have learned by speaking with Pashtuns, is that the Pakistan Army is not fighting either the Taliban or Al Qaeda.  Rather, the Army works with both the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and another group called Hezb-e-Islami Hekmatyar (“HIG”) to suppress the separatists.  The Pakistan government is very careful to keep this information out of the news, because it would cause an international uproar and bring an end to the enormous financial and military assistance from the U.S. which it has long enjoyed.  Next time you read a news story about conditions in Pakistan, check the source.  It will invariably be a government official. But Pakistan also controls the news by simply murdering journalists who threaten to broadcast the truth.  Daniel Pearl was kidnapped two days before he was to leave the country, and ISI has a particularly nasty habit of assassinating Afghan journalists.

Afghanistan = Bosnia   Punjab = Serbia    and the Bush Administration’s Bad Math

Because of this situation wherein one ethnic group controls the military and uses it to oppress the other ethnic groups of the region, Af/Pak bears great similarity to the former Yugoslavia, with Punjab standing in for Serbia, while the Pashtun and Balochi regions, along with most of Afghanistan, can be seen as stand ins for Bosnia and Kosovo.  Afghanistan is nothing at all like Viet Nam.  It is like Bosnia.

The comparison to Bosnia is particularly apt when evaluating the U.S./NATO military mission.  Peace and security were successfully restored to Bosnia with a ratio of 1 soldier for every 50 civilians.  Under the Bush Administration, every one American soldier in Afghanistan was responsible for about 400 civilians.  1/50 worked. 1/400 is obviously impossible, and was clearly a recipe for failure from the outset.  The surge which President Obama just announced will bring the ratio down to 1/200.  What is clear to the soldiers, but misunderstood by the “Troops Out!” camp, is that a large army is actually safer than a small one.  Which sounds safer: walking into a biker bar alone, or walking into a biker bar with half a dozen friends?  The same is true in a combat zone.

The Bush Administration Screwed Up Afghanistan on Purpose

Another recipe for failure in Afghanistan can be seen in the Bush Administration purposefully allowing the leadership of both Al Qaeda and the Taliban to be airlifted out of Kunduz and later to walk across the border into Pakistan from nearby Tora Bora.  American Special Forces working with the Northern Alliance had succeeded in encircling the enemy in the town of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan in November of 2001.  They were ordered to stand down while Pakistan was given permission to airlift out the enemy’s leaders.  This event became known as the Evil Airlift.  What was not widely reported was the fact that the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership included many Pakistan Army officers.

As previously mentioned, from the point of view of Pakistan’s rulers, Afghanistan must be kept unstable in order to prevent Pakistan from falling apart.  There are solutions.  Afghanistan has expressed a willingness to accept the Durand Line as the border.  However, that doesn’t settle the internal issues in Pakistan.  The Punjabis have long been robbing the other provinces of their natural resources (primarily oil, gas and copper), without sharing an appropriate amount of the national treasure with those regions.  The Pashtuns, Balochis and Sindhis might be less inclined to fight for their independence if they were allowed greater control over their natural resources, and greater autonomy.

The Soviet Union Was Lured into a Trap

Pakistan created the mujahidin to destabilize Afghanistan.  This began during the 1970s.  When Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Carter’s National Security Adviser, he suggested that, if the United States provided additional funds and weapons to Pakistan’s Islamic (and Maoist) pawns in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union would very likely intervene to quell the situation.  Unfortunately for the Afghans, Brzezinski was right.

Pakistan insisted on controlling distribution of U.S. assistance to the Afghan mujahidin during the 1980s, and as a method of further ensuring instability in Afghanistan, never allowed the Afghan resistance to coalesce around a single organization.  Rather, ISI organized the Afghans mujahidin into seven parties, all based in Pakistan, and ordered the commanders of its favorite party, HIG, to attack their Afghan allies whenever they encountered them inside Afghanistan.  Thus the stage was set for these seven factions to compete for power in a brutal civil war as soon as the Soviets left Afghanistan.  Divide and conquer.

The Consequences of Military Failure for the Afghan People

It is well known that over one million Afghans died during the 1980s war with the Soviet Union.  What has not been reported is that, from the fall of the Afghan communist government in 1992 to the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, over 400,000 Afghan civilians were killed.

Circumstances are ripe for a repeat of the 1990s holocaust.  American and NATO soldiers are standing between the civilians of Afghanistan and another slaughter.  I speak regularly with Afghans all over the world, and they all believe that if the US/NATO withdraw militarily before Afghanistan has recovered enough to defend itself from Pakistan’s ongoing aggression, the civilian casualty rate will exceed 400,000.

The United States bears a great deal of responsibility for the destruction of Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s.  We have a duty to help Afghans rebuild their country and to defend them against their enemy whom we have long enabled.

I will save the stories of how the CIA created Al Qaeda, ISI created the Taliban, Pakistan used its oil fields to influence American policymakers and the long, long list of reconstruction fake outs from the past eight years for another day.  Suffice it to say; when President Obama says that this is not year eight of the Afghan war, but rather Year One, he is correct.

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.”

Department of Defense (DOD) file photo shows an unmanned Predator surveillance plane. Sources close to the jirga said the latest Predator strike, and reports that Washington was intensifying its aerial bombardment, were likely to reinforce sentiment in favour of the militants and make it even more difficult to achieve peace.

Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to a published report.

“Even if a precise account is elusive,” writes Jane Mayer in the Oct. 26 The New Yorker, “the outlines are clear: the C.I.A. has joined the Pakistani intelligence service in an aggressive campaign to eradicate local and foreign militants, who have taken refuge in some of the most inaccessible parts of the country.”

Based on a study just completed by the non-profit, New America Foundation of Washington, D.C., “the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President,” Mayer reports.

In fact, the first two strikes took place on Jan. 23, the President’s third day in office and the second of these hit the wrong house, that of a pro-government tribal leader that killed his entire family, including three children, one just five years of age.

At any time, the C.I.A. apparently has “multiple drones flying over Pakistan, scouting for targets,” the magazine reports. So many Predators and its more heavily armed companion, the Reaper, are being purchased that defense manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, of Poway, Calif., can hardly make them fast enough. The Air Force is said to possess 200.

Mayer writes, “the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.” Today, Mayer writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.” And according to Gary Solis, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Law Center, nobody in the government calls it assassination. “Not only would we have expressed abhorrence of such a policy a few years ago; we did,” Solis is quoted as saying.

David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency warfare authority who co-authored a study for the Center for New American Security, of Washington, D.C., has suggested the drone attacks have backfired. As he told The New Yorker, “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”

And because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, Mayer writes, “there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war.”

The New Yorker further reports the Obama Administration has also expanded the sphere of authorized drone assaults in Afghanistan. An August Senate Foreign Relations Committee report said the Pentagon’s list of approved terrorist targets held 367 names and included some 50 Afghan drug lords “who are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban,” Mayer reports. She quotes the Senate report as stating, “There is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds goes to Al Qaeda.”

It is the military’s version of the drone assaults that operates in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the C.I.A.’s drones hunt terror suspects in countries where U.S. troops are not based and is “aimed at terror suspects around the world,” Mayer writes. The C.I.A. effort was launched by Obama’s predecessor, and a former aide to President George W. Bush says Obama has left nearly all the key personnel in place.

Running the C.I.A. program is a team of operators that handle Predator flights off runways in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once aloft, the Predators are passed over to controllers at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., who maneuver joysticks and monitor events from a live video feed from the drone’s camera.

The magazine article reports the government plans to commission “hundreds more” of the drones, including “new generations of tiny ‘nano’ drones, which can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.”

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes”. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

The letter also included a statement by his lawyer, Michael J. Mone Jr., to a Committee of the US House of Representatives, in which Mone explained that Jabbarov was a refugee, living in northern Afghanistan with his pregnant wife, infant son, elderly mother and other Uzbek refugees at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001, and that he ended up in US hands “after he accepted a ride from a group of Northern Alliance soldiers he met at a roadside teahouse who said they would give him a ride to Mazar-e-Sharif. Unfortunately, instead of driving him to Mazar-e-Sharif, the soldiers took Oybek to Bagram Air Base where they handed him over to US forces, undoubtedly in exchange for a sizeable bounty.”

On Monday, the Irish Times revealed the identity of the second man, and although I respect his desire for privacy, and the chance to begin rebuilding his life after his long ordeal, as much as I recognize Oybek Jabbarov’s right to the same courtesies, I believe that, as with his countryman, it is useful to point out what is known of his story, as it is yet another example of an innocent man losing nearly eight years of his life in a cruel and experimental prison designed to hold human beings without any rights whatsoever.

As I explained in my article on Oybek Jabbarov, men like these two Uzbeks, just two of the many hundreds of innocent men who have been held in Guantánamo over the last seven years and nine months, were “mostly seized by the Americans’ opportunistic allies at a time when bounty payments for ‘al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects’ were widespread, and were then presumed guilty without any screening process by an administration drunk on its own exercise of unfettered executive power.”

The story of Shakhrukh Hamiduva

Unlike Oybek Jabbarov, whose lawyer fought tenaciously to establish his client’s innocence, and actively courted the media, Shakhrukh Hamiduva, the other man freed in Ireland, did not register on the media’s radar during his detention, although I mentioned him in my book The Guantánamo Files.

Nevertheless, his story — as accepted by a military review board that cleared him for release from Guantánamo in 2006 — bears striking similarities to that of his fellow countryman: a vulnerable refugee, preyed upon by unscrupulous Afghans following the US-led invasion, when substantial bounty payments were on offer for foreigners who could be presented to gullible US forces as “al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects.”

All that is known publicly of Shakhrukh Hamiduva is that he was born in Kokand, Uzbekistan in December 1983 (and that he was, therefore, probably under 18 years of age at the time of his capture), that he was one of the first prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo in January 2002, and that he gave the following account in December 2004 to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (the one-sided military boards established to review — and largely endorse — the administration’s contention that everyone who had ended up in US custody was an “enemy combatant” who could be held without rights).

In his tribunal, Hamiduva explained that he left Uzbekistan because of religious persecution, and added that his father and five uncles had been jailed, and that another uncle had been killed. Nevertheless, he had to contend with a number of allegations whose provenance was not disclosed, but which were almost certainly produced as a result of the interrogations of other prisoners (or of Hamiduva himself), in circumstances that may well have involved coercion or bribery.

One allegation was that he had spent a year and a half in a training camp run by the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan, but he explained that he had spent that time at a refugee camp, which contained around 300 refugees. He also denied an allegation that he “willingly became a soldier in the Mujahideen Army,” and that he traveled to Afghanistan to “participate in jihad against the Russians and the Northern Alliance.”

In a statement provided to his Personal Representative (a military officer assigned to the prisoners for the tribunals instead of a lawyer), he explained that he had initially wanted to go to Turkey, but that he couldn’t get a passport because he was too young, so he decided to work with the Tajik authorities at the refugee camp instead.

This, he said, involved helping the refugees, and he added that the Tajik government then provided transportation to take him and other refugees to Afghanistan (actually deporting them, as they did with hundreds of Uzbek refugees in 1999, including Oybek Jabbarov and his family), where he helped some of them “to fix up things like cars or roofs” at a place in Kabul.

He also explained that, after five or six months, he hooked up with an Afghan “mentor,” who owned a garage and taught him to drive, and added that, after working for him for a while, he bought a car and started to work as a taxi driver, which was his occupation when he was captured.

Speaking of his capture, he said that he went to the United Nations in Pakistan (as there was no office in Afghanistan) to get help in returning to Uzbekistan. “They promised me they would be able to help me and send me back to my homeland, but nothing would happen to me and that I would be protected,” he said. “He [a UN official, presumably] gave me a piece of paper. I guess it was some kind of travel document so I would be able to travel along with.”

He explained that, after this visit, he returned to Afghanistan in his car with five or six Afghans from Mazar-e-Sharif, and added that he didn’t want any money from them; he just wanted them to give him directions. However, in the mountains he was stopped by armed Afghans who let his passengers go, but who took his car and handed him over to “the American general” — probably General Rashid Dostum, the Afghan Uzbek warlord who was working with US forces — at Mazar-e-Sharif.

He also explained to the tribunal that he told the Americans his story, and added that they saw his travel document and promised him that they would help him get home, but, after keeping him imprisoned for a month “in some kind of house” with about 15 Pakistanis, they were all transferred to the US prison in Kandahar, and after about a month and a half he was sent to Guantánamo.

Speaking of the nearly three years he had spent in the prison by the time of his CSRT, he told his tribunal, “They said that they were through with me and promise[d] to send me back to my homeland, that’s why I’m confused. When they brought me here for interrogation, I didn’t want to talk a lot to them … They didn’t treat me well here, that is why I didn’t tell them anything.” He added, “I just want to let you know that they torture me a lot here at the camp. They would not let me sleep through the night; they were tak[ing] me to interrogations. I saw them beating other detainees, breaking their arms and legs.”

When the tribunal asked why he was wearing orange (which meant he was uncooperative, as, by 2004, white uniforms had been introduced for “cooperative” prisoners, and tan for those who were somewhere in between), he explained, “I know that there are four levels of discipline. Every time I try to go one level up, they will do something to keep you in the level. I know that there are a lot of detainees who don’t want to talk to the interrogators and no matter what you tell them they are not going to change your level or change your clothes for that matter.

“I know that a lot of people have been tortured here at the camp … When I don’t exercise I feel very weak, that [is] why I try to exercise inside my cell but MPs don’t like it. That is the only [way] I can keep myself healthy here is by doing some exercise because when you get sick you don’t get any appointments here so what should I do? Every prison detainee should be allowed to exercise; I don’t understand why they don’t allow us.”

As with the story of Oybek Jabbarov, this is a disturbing account on a number of levels. With such limited information available, I have no idea if Shakhrukh Hamiduva, like Jabbarov, was threatened by Uzbek intelligence agents who were allowed to visit Guantánamo (although it seems likely), but enough information is readily available to demonstrate, yet again, that the phrase “the worst of the worst,” as used by senior Bush administration officials to refer to the supposed terrorists in Guantánamo, is more accurately applied to the kind of mistakes made by the administration, which in its myopic arrogance, was more than happy to detain randomly seized foreigners in Afghanistan, and to deprive them of any rights, even if they were under 18 years-old, and should, as juveniles, have been rehabilitated rather than being subjected to sleep deprivation, punished for trying to exercise in their cells, and forced to watch as other prisoners were beaten until they were hospitalized.

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.

Michael, let’s start with the heart of this – your assessment. How is it going?

MICHAEL WARE, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Very, very badly, Fareed. This is a mission by – politically and militarily in crisis. Politically, this nation is in limbo. They don’t even have finalized results to the outcome of last month’s presidential election because the result counting has been bogged down in a storm of substantive corruption allegations. That alone, no matter who is the winner, is going to strip the next administration of the legitimacy the American mission here was so desperately hoping the election would deliver.

Militarily, the entire war plan is up in the air and under review, and for good reason. On the ground, there’s simply not enough US or coalition, NATO troops, Afghan troops, Afghan police to put a significant dent in the Taliban war machine. Even what we dub as “Obama’s War,” this massive offensive in Helmand, is doing very little to the Taliban infrastructure. The Americans and the British there combined moving into Helmand are simply taking a small bite of what is really a very big apple down there in the south, and in no way is it affecting the Taliban’s command and control system or its border (ph) bases or supply systems.

So this really is a mission in crisis – Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Michael, you were in Iraq around the time of the surge. Make some comparisons, what – what is the Afghan army strike you like compared with the Iraqi army in 2006, 2007?

WARE: Well, there’s absolutely no comparison. As floored or as challenged as the Iraqi army might be, it is light years ahead of the Afghan National Army. The Afghan National Army is many, many, many years away from being able to stand up on its own two feet, even if America stayed in the country to underride it is we’re seeing in Iraq. That’s simply not going to happen any time soon.

However, we may soon see America drawing upon its lessons from Iraq. What we have here now in Afghanistan is a situation where we may look at the development of US-backed tribal militias who will go and fight the Taliban in the areas where America cannot fight. Now, militarily, these militias act as a force multiplier. They add to the – to the projection of power of the American forces, simply by weight of numbers. In terms of local knowledge, they are unparalleled and can do far more than any foreign troops, though also not only have much greater ability at attacking that Taliban war machine and starting to put some kind of a crimp in it, it will also be a form of confrontation between the United States and the Pakistani Intelligence Agency that allows the Afghan Taliban to take sanctuary in Pakistan – Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Michael, I agree with you. I think that is the key here, which is to replicate that element of the surge which was to draw – to divide the enemy, to draw some of these people into – in – to start fighting for the Americans. Why hasn’t it happened? It is something I’ve asked senior officials and I get a variety of answers. Some of them blame the Afghans, they blame Karzai. They say he didn’t want this (ph) started by going to Mullah Omar, which is a non-starter. Some blame the Americans. They say they’re sitting there waiting for a strategic advantage. On the ground, what does it look like to you? Why aren’t we making deals with locals?

WARE: That has been a spectacular failure here in Afghanistan, Fareed. I mean, over the past eight years America has proved particularly inept at addressing even just the tribal issue. Harnessing the power of the tribes or at least engaging in a significant way with them – yes, America has had its favorites in the beginning, either warlords or particular tribes who were attractive to it at the time of 9/11. However, the situation pre-9/11, pre-Afghan invasion has changed dramatically – without surprise – in these eight years, and America has been very slow to react to that situation.

I was at ISAF Headquarters just the other day, sitting down with some of the men addressing this issue, and I have to say there has been an awakening, and I think you’ll find that some kind of tribal militia solution that may include some of the old warlords in the Soviet era who defeated the Russia – the Soviet army here in the ’80s may become a part of the solution that General McChrystal offers to President Obama. Certainly, we have a senior Afghan government official, an official at cabinet level, who’s confirmed to us that the program has already began with pilot programs already underway with tribes in the south – Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Is there – is there a danger here that – that these tribes will use us for their own purposes? What’s the downside of this strategy?

WARE: What? You mean the tribes haven’t been using the Americans since day one to settle old scores, to mark rival as – rivals as enemies, or to have those who are not in, you know, the chosen five’s (ph) favor left out and ignored by the American attention? That’s not a new thing. Of course, that’s inherent in this solution. If that was – were to emerge. But that’s inherent anyway.

What I think is the greater problem is that, tactically, in the short term, significant engagement of the tribes and the old veterans of the Soviet war, if they can be turned against the Taliban would be stunningly successful. However, there will be a high price to pay going forward in the second and third tier effects (ph), and that’s what needs to be addressed. How do you manage these guys so they don’t get out of control? How do you accept responsibility? How is there any kind of accountability? How do you sell it to the Afghan people, to the international community? And eventually ordinary Afghans themselves, let alone the – the foreigners here, want to see a new state emerge, and how would the reestablishment of tribal forces or warlord forces affect that in the long term? So it’s certainly not an easy fit, but it may be the only one or an important part of the only solution that may present itself to President Obama, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: You were talking about the – the Afghan army and the Iraqi army. I just want to ask you one supplementary on that, which is American commanders do tell me…

WARE: I’ll take the supplementary.

ZAKARIA: American commanders do tell me that while the afghan army is much less disciplined than the Iraqi army, they’re real fighters, that they are courageous and – and they will – they will charge up the hill in the way that a lot of the Iraqi forces would not. Is that your experience?

WARE: Well, I – I mean, I’ll caveat by my answer before I go on by saying I had seen incredible bravery from Iraqi soldiers, but by and large you could argue that, yes, that’s true. I mean, these Afghans, when they decide to fight, they fight. And it’s on their home turf. That’s an important thing, too. So these Afghans can be fierce. I mean, it’s renowned as the – the famed graveyard of empires, this nation. And the current generations are, you know, are proving that to be true, be they on the Taliban side or on the government side.

It’s about harnessing that – that energy, that fervor, that fanaticism, that nationalism. And that’s what America has failed to do. Well, America’s rivals in the region – particularly Iran and Pakistan – are old hands and so adept at playing the tribal game here or at playing within the Afghan culture and extracting sometimes the best and sometimes the worst of it. America has failed to even be in the game, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Michael, I know you had a near-miss with an IED, with an improvised explosive device. First of all, did you have any – are there any lasting effects? You can obviously hear me, but what does it feel like?

WARE: It wasn’t my first IED, but it – it did – it did distinguish itself. I mean, I was particularly exposed in this case. I was in the back of an Afghan police gun truck rather than encased in the armor of an American humvee or – even better – a – an American Bradley fighting vehicle. So it was a very raw experience and – and watching the tape, again, of that incident had – what struck me is how quickly it all happened.

Even more crucially, the judges’ rulings were allowing justice to be seen to be done, unlike the secretive interagency Task Force established by Barack Obama on his second day in office, whose deliberations are, sadly, as inscrutable as those of Obama’s predecessor, even though the Task Force has at least taken the time to consult with lawyers and other experts.

As I recently reported in a series of three articles (here, here and here), despite persistent obstruction from the Justice Department, where Bush-era officials have been behaving as though Dick Cheney is still breathing down their necks, judges had, by the end of July, reviewed 33 cases, and in 28 of those had ruled that the government had failed to establish, “by a preponderance of the evidence,” that it was justified in holding the men.

The judges concluded that, amongst other failings, the government was relying on information provided by dubious informers, on multiple levels of hearsay that failed to stand up to outside scrutiny, and on a supposed “mosaic” of evidence from various sources that was also unconvincing.

Nevertheless, although these rulings confirmed what those, like myself, who have been studying Guantánamo in depth for many years, have always maintained — that the majority of the prisoners are either innocent men seized for bounty payments (or through the incompetence of U.S. forces and other government agencies) or low-level Taliban foot soldiers recruited to help the Taliban defeat Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance in an inter-Muslim civil war that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks — the courts still face a number of peculiar problems.

These problems have arisen not only because almost all of the government’s supposed evidence consists of the inherently dubious statements of informers, of multiple levels of hearsay and of feeble “mosaics” of intelligence (as mentioned above), but also because when the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights in June 2008, the justices failed to provide a clear definition of the extent to which prisoners were required to be involved in al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban to have their habeas appeals refused.

The “gossamer thin” case against Adham Mohammed Ali Awad

The resultant confusion was on full display in August, when three rulings were made. In the first, on August 12 (PDF), Judge James Robertson denied the habeas appeal of Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, a Yemeni prisoner, even though he conceded that “The case against Awad is gossamer thin,” and added, “The evidence is of a kind fit only for these unique proceedings and has very little weight.”

This was Robertson’s first habeas ruling, and in the hands of another judge, the ruling may well have tipped the other way. Certainly, the case was as “gossamer thin” as Robertson declared. Awad, who was just 19 years old at the time, was seized in Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan in late 2001. According to his own account, he had “traveled to Afghanistan in mid-September 2001 in order to visit another Muslim country for a few months,” but in early November 2001 “was injured and knocked unconscious during an air raid while walking through a market in Kandahar.”

When he woke up in the hospital, he said, he discovered that he had lost his right foot, “that he was heavily medicated, floated in an out of consciousness, slept constantly, and could barely sit up.” He added that he “remained in this condition until his capture.”

Over the long years of his detention, as I explained in a profile of Awad last year, the U.S. authorities have claimed that he “stated he went to Afghanistan to become a fighter,” have suggested that he received injuries “in a two-car collision, involving ten individuals, while trying to avoid coalition air strikes,” and have also claimed that he, “along with seven other Arabs suspected of being al-Qaeda, were reportedly armed with weapons and used a hospital as a safe haven to elude coalition forces.”

These allegations, which surfaced in the Unclassified Summary of Evidence during Awad’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, formed the basis of the government’s case in court, even though, by 2006, in a review board at Guantánamo, the authorities had dropped all mention of the car crash, Awad’s supposed al-Qaeda associates, and his involvement in the siege, and, instead, suggested only that he was “captured on 2 November 2001 when he was injured near the airport in Kandahar.”

Judge Robertson perceived that Awad’s case “relie[d] mostly on weaknesses and holes in the government’s evidence,” which, as noted above, he was swift to condemn for its “gossamer thin” nature, but although he noted that the government “relie[d] mostly on newspaper articles” for background information about the hospital siege, which took place from early December to late January and ended with the deaths of the seven al-Qaeda fighters, and although he gave “no weight” to the “only first hand evidence offered by the government” — an interview with a man (whose name was redacted), who “claimed that he led the group that had taken Awad into custody”, whose report he dismissed as “internally inconsistent” and “completely unreliable” — he nevertheless concluded that “it appears more likely than not that Awad was, for some period of time, ‘part of’ al-Qaeda.”

To reach this conclusion, Judge Robertson was required to accept the government’s supposed evidence that Awad had attended Osama bin Laden’s Tarnak Farms training camp, an allegation that was based on a variation of his name, “Waqas” (he was sometimes listed by the Pentagon as Waqas Mohammed Ali Awad), being found on a list associated with the camp.

Although Judge Robertson refused to accept the government’s claim that Awad trained at the camp, finding it to be “unsupported,” noting, “we do not know the purpose of the list or when it was written,” and adding that the translator “claimed only that it was ‘possibly’ a list of trainees,” he returned to the allegations of Awad’s presence at Tarnak Farms to substantiate his conclusion that “it appears more likely than not that Awad was, for some period of time, ‘part of’ al-Qaeda.”

He noted that the names of the other men killed in the siege and Awad’s purported alias, “Waqas,” were closely grouped together on the list, and inferred from statements provided by another man who was present in the hospital and was also taken to Guantánamo (a Saudi released in 2007) that Awad and “Waqas” were one and the same.

Missing throughout all this analysis was any reflection on whether it was true that Awad only arrived in Afghanistan in mid-September 2001, and if, therefore, it was likely that he would have been immediately recruited for training at an advanced facility in the few weeks before the US-led invasion began, which strikes me as close to impossible. Also missing was any recognition that, as the government claimed in 2006, Awad was seized before the siege began, or, if that was a typographical error (as was indicated in court), that he was injured on Dec. 2, when the siege began, and that he was booted out of the hospital by the al-Qaeda fighters inside (or, as the government put it, “Awad’s comrades gave him up because they could not care for his severely injured [redacted]“).

Even with the government’s spin, there is something suspicious about would-be al-Qaeda martyrs sending one of their own to be captured, rather than staying and being martyred instead, but rather than examining these questions, Judge Robertson ruled that “At the very least Awad’s confessed reasons for traveling to Afghanistan and the correlation of names on the list [redacted] clearly tied to al-Qaeda make it more likely than not that he knew the al-Qaeda fighters at the hospital and joined them in the barricade.”

Quite where this leaves Awad is unknown, as the government does not seem to have enough evidence for a trial, and may, therefore, consider him a suitable candidate for its proposal to legislate for new powers of “indefinite detention,” to be reviewed by Congress and judges, which are supposed to provide an acceptable veneer to what is nothing more than a continuation of the Bush administration’s despised policies.

To this end, what may disappoint Awad the most is that, although Judge Robertson described him as a “marginally literate” young man, who “has spent more than seven of his twenty-six years — since he was a teenager — in American custody,” and, moreover, stated, “It seems ludicrous to believe that he poses a security threat now,” he added, limply, “but that is not for me to decide.”

In doing so, he ignored an earlier ruling (PDF), in which Judge Ellen Segan Huvelle noted that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (the legislation passed in the week after 9/11 which authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against those “he determines” to have been involved in any way in the 9/11 attacks) “does not authorize the detention of individuals beyond that which is necessary to prevent those individuals from rejoining battle,” and ignored another ruling, in the case of a Syrian prisoner, Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, in which Judge Richard Leon ruled that whatever relationship al-Ginco may have had with al-Qaeda was “utterly destroyed.”

In al-Ginco’s case, this was because he had been tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy, but it was also noteworthy that Judge Leon stated that al-Ginco’s prior experience of al-Qaeda — “five days at a guest house in Kabul combined with eighteen days at a training camp — does not add up to a longstanding bond of brotherhood.”

Instead, however, Judge Robertson raised and dismissed a little-voiced question — whether it is appropriate to continue holding men who were seized in connection with a specific conflict (the overthrow of the Taliban and the installation of a new government, which came to an end years ago) — by stating, “Combat operations in Afghanistan continue to this day and — in my view — the President’s ‘authority to detain for the duration of the relevant conflict’ which is ‘based on long-standing law-of-war principles’ has yet to ‘unravel.’”

Mohammed al-Adahi and the al-Qaeda mirage

One judge who may have dealt more robustly with the “gossamer thin” evidence in the case of Adham Mohammed Ali Aawad is Judge Gladys Kessler, who, on August 21, granted the habeas appeal of Mohammed al-Adahi, a Yemeni who was 39 years old when he was seized on a bus in Pakistan (PDF). I described the broad outline of al-Adahi’s story in my book The Guantánamo Files as follows:

Married with two children, al-Adahi had never left the Yemen until August 2001, when he took a vacation from the oil company where he had worked for 21 years to accompany his sister to meet her husband … As he told his tribunal, “In Muslim society, a woman does not travel by herself.” After flying to Karachi, they traveled to Kandahar, where his brother-in-law was living. Al-Adahi stayed in Afghanistan for a month, “to ease his sister’s transition to life in Afghanistan,” and then made his way back to Pakistan, where he was arrested by soldiers while traveling on a bus. “They were capturing everybody with Arabic features,” he said. “I gave them my passport and that shows that I’m an Arab. They said, ‘why don’t you follow us, we need you at the Center.’ From that point on they brought us over here.”

However, while this was a fair précis, the government believed that it could establish a case that al-Adahi was actually a member of al-Qaeda, for a number of reasons that appeared, on the surface at least, to be plausible. As Judge Kessler explained, “There is no question that the record fully supports the Government’s allegation that Petitioner had close familial ties to prominent members of the jihad community in Afghanistan.”

The brother-in-law, it appears, was “a prominent man in Kandahar,” who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan, and Judge Kessler also noted that it was “undisputed” that Osama bin Laden “hosted and attended [the] wedding reception in Kandahar,” that al-Adahi “was briefly introduced to bin Laden,” and that “A few days later, al-Adahi met bin Laden again and the two chatted briefly about religious matters in Yemen.”

However, Judge Kessler refused to accept the government’s contention that these familial ties and the two brief meetings with bin Laden proved that al-Adahi “was part of the inner circle of the enemy organization al-Qaeda,” and accepted instead that there was no reason to doubt that al-Adahi’s visit was, as he stated, to accompany his sister to her wedding (and also to receive medical treatment for a back problem). She noted also that he had not tried to hide the fact that he had met bin Laden, and that he had, in addition, stated that it was “common for visitors to Kandahar” to do so.

As in May, when she granted the habeas appeal of another Yemeni, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, Judge Kessler had serious doubts about the manner in which the government established its case, which focused primarily on its claim that its various allegations should be considered as part of a “mosaic” of intelligence, to be viewed as a whole, rather than being examined in isolation.

Dismissing this approach, she stated that, although she understood that “use of this approach is a common and well-established mode of analysis in the intelligence community … at this point in this long, drawn-out litigation the Court’s obligation is to make findings of fact and conclusions of law which satisfy appropriate and relevant legal standards as to whether the Government has proven by a preponderance of the evidence that the Petitioner is justifiably detained.”

She proceeded to stress that “the mosaic theory is only as persuasive as the tiles which compose it and the glue which binds it together,” and that, “if the individual pieces of a mosaic are inherently flawed or do not fit together, then the mosaic will split apart.” Having dealt with the government’s first “tile,” she methodically dismantled the others, refuting a claim that al-Adahi had “stayed at al-Qaeda and/or Taliban guesthouses during his stay in Afghanistan,” and demolishing the government’s “central accusation”: that al-Adahi’s brief attendance at al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) helped to confirm that he occupied “some sort of ‘structured’ role in the ‘hierarchy’ of the enemy force.”

Noting his claim that he “pursued training at al-Farouq to satisfy ‘curiosity’ about jihad, and because he found himself in Afghanistan with idle time,” she took particular exception to the government’s claim because, “After seven to ten days at al-Farouq, the camp leaders expelled al-Adahi for failing to comply with the rules.”

Referring, incredibly, to the case of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, the Syrian who was tortured by al-Qaeda (and whose case the Justice Department had pursued in the habeas courts until it was thoroughly humiliated by Judge Richard Leon in June), the government’s lawyers attempted to claim that, because al-Adahi was not imprisoned and tortured as a spy after he was expelled (like al-Ginco), this proved that he was being given preferential treatment because of his ties to al-Qaeda.

However, Judge Kessler concluded instead that it was more likely that he “was being protected by a concerned family member” with considerable influence, and that “it most certainly is not affirmative evidence that al-Adahi embraced al-Qaeda, accepted its philosophy, and endorsed its terrorist activities.”

She was also dismissive of an allied claim — that al-Adahi was an instructor at al-Farouq in February 2000 — noting that the only source for this allegation was another prisoner at Guantánamo, for whom “the record contains evidence that [he] suffered from ‘serious psychological issues,’” and dismissed another claim — that al-Adahi was a bodyguard for bin Laden — by pointing out that this claim had been made by another prisoner who “suffers from serious credibility problems that undermine the reliability of his statements.”

It seems probable, from references to a “report of torture by the Taliban” in the case of this witness, that he was Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, who, as Judge Kessler noted, admitted in August 2005 that he had “lied in the past.” She also noted that “interrogators had expressed concern that he was being manipulated by another detainee,” and quoted from a report stating that “before being placed next to that detainee [he] had never made any of the claims that he made to interrogators, including the accusation against al-Adahi.”

With the bulk of the government’s claims dismissed, it remained only for Judge Kessler to destroy the rest of the “mosaic” by noting that, with reference to the rest of al-Adahi’s time in Afghanistan after being expelled from al-Farouq, it was “only speculation” on the part of the government that injuries he received to his arm and leg in Kandahar were the result of combat, and not, as he stated, because of a motorcycle accident.

She also pointed out that, although the government attempted to pin “associational evidence” of militancy on a claim that al-Adahi “was captured while traveling in the company of Taliban fighters” on a bus in Pakistan, the only source for this was something al-Adahi himself had been told after his capture, when he “heard that there were members of the Taliban on the bus.”

Noting, in addition, that he was “unarmed” at the time of his capture, she concluded that “He appeared to be attempting to escape the chaos of that time by any means he could,” and granted his habeas appeal (although, as with all the cases of prisoners whose habeas appeals have been granted, the ruling provides no guarantee that he will actually be released).

Fawzi al-Odah: the Kuwaiti who trained for one day

On August 24, the government secured another shallow victory when Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied the habeas petition of Fawzi al-Odah, a Kuwaiti prisoner, agreeing with the government that it was “more likely than not” that he “became part of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan” (PDF). Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling was based on a dubious assemblage of information that relied more on inconsistencies in al-Odah’s account of his activities than it did on anything resembling concrete evidence, as she herself admitted, when she wrote that there were “significant reasons why the Government’s proffered evidence may not be accurate or authentic.”

She explained that some of it was produced “in circumstances that have not allowed the Government to ascertain its chain of custody, nor in many instances even to produce information about the origins of the evidence,” that other evidence was “based on so-called ‘unfinished intelligence,’ information that has not been subject to each of the five steps in the intelligence cycle (planning, collection, processing, analysis and production, and dissemination),” and that other evidence was “based on multiple layers of hearsay (which inherently raised questions about reliability), or is based on reports of interrogations (often conducted through a translator) where translation or transcription mistakes may occur.”

The basic facts of the case, as I explained in an article for the BBC’s website in December 2007, are as follows. Al-Odah, a 24-year old primary school teacher, whose father, a retired air force pilot, fought with US forces during the Gulf War in 1991,

took a short holiday from work and traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001 to teach the Koran and provide humanitarian aid. This was something he had done before, in other countries, and his family had had a history of providing humanitarian aid, establishing libraries and wells in various countries in Africa.

After establishing contact with the Taliban, which he said “was necessary because that was the government in Afghanistan at that time,” Mr. Odah said he had been “touring the schools and visiting families,” teaching the Koran and handing out money, until his activities had been curtailed following 9/11.

He said that in Kandahar the Taliban representative “told me that was a dangerous place because it was the capital for the Taliban,” and had advised him to go to Logar, in the east of the country, where he had stayed with a family for a month, and left his passport and belongings for safekeeping. “If the Afghans saw I had a passport indicating I was an Arab, and they saw the money and the camera I had, I would have been killed,” he added.

He had then moved to Jalalabad, where he had stayed with another family, who had given him an AK-47 assault rifle to protect himself, Mr. Odah said. He had then joined other people crossing the mountains to Pakistan, where he had handed himself in to the border guards, he added. Mr. Odah said he expected to be escorted to the Kuwaiti embassy, but had instead been handed over to US forces.

In dissecting al-Odah’s story, Judge Kollar-Kotelly took exception to apparent inconsistencies in his account of his journey to Afghanistan, suggestions that he had lied about his plans to teach, and about the length of time he intended to stay. She concluded, by comparing his route — to Dubai, and then to Karachi, Quetta, Spin Boldak and Kandahar — with the same route taken by jihadists that the record “supports a reasonable inference that al-Odah may have also been traveling to Afghanistan to engage in jihad, and not to teach the poor and needy for two weeks.”

She followed up by casting doubts on his claim that he innocently “sought to contact a Taliban official upon reaching Afghanistan and that he subsequently moved around the country at the direction of this official,” and on his explanation that he visited a training camp “supervised by the Taliban, where “he took one day of training on an AK-47 rifle.” Following the government’s lead, she suggested that it was “more likely than not” that the camp was in fact al-Farouq, and that al-Odah arrived there on September 10, 2001, the day before the 9/11 attacks, when the camp was closed down.

She also took exception to al-Odah’s apparent inability to explain why he had not left Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, why there was at least a month’s gap in his account of what happened afterwards, and why, three months after the attacks, he was captured, armed with an AK-47, having crossed the border into Pakistan from the Tora Bora region (where al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been engaged in combat with Afghan and US forces), in the company of a group of armed men who, according to “credible evidence” provided by the government, included one man “who had substantial ties to al-Qaeda.”

To be fair, it was understandable that Judge Kollar-Kotelly drew the inferences she did from the information provided, as her summing up made clear, when she explained that al-Odah “has admitted that he sought to meet with a Taliban official upon his arrival in Afghanistan; that he was subsequently brought by a Taliban official to a Taliban-operated training camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan; that he took one day of training with an AK-47 at this camp: that the Taliban official sent him to stay with an associate in Logar, Afghanistan, after September 11, 2001; that he surrendered his passport and other possessions to this individual; that he met with individuals who were armed and appeared to be fighters; that he accepted an AK-47 from these individuals; and that he traveled with his AK-47 into the Tora Bora mountains, remained there during the battle of Tora Bora, and was captured shortly thereafter by border guards while still carrying his AK-47.”

From this outline of events, the government certainly had a stronger case than it did with Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, but even if this analysis is correct, the end result is that, nearly eight years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States is still asserting that it has the right to hold a young man who spent just one day at a training camp, who did not flee Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks (perhaps because he feared reprisals if he was found escaping), who traveled with other men to Kabul, and then to Logar and then to Tora Bora and his eventual capture, with no evidence that he ever used the weapon he was given, and no evidence that his training involved anything more than firing a few rounds from an AK-47 in a practice session.

The long shadow of Salim Hamdan’s freedom

Back in January, when Judge Leon refused the habeas appeal of Ghaleb al-Bihani, a Yemeni who had worked as a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban, I made a comparison with the case of another prisoner, Salim Hamdan, which demonstrated to me that, although justice was finally within reach for some of the prisoners at Guantánamo, seven years after the prison opened, it was both farcical and unjust that Hamdan, a man who had worked as a driver for Osama bin Laden, had been tried in a Military Commission in which he was convicted of material support for terrorism, had served a five-month sentence delivered by a U.S. military jury, and was now a free man in Yemen, while al-Bihani, who had never even met bin Laden, and who had, instead, worked as a cook before the 9/11 attacks and had subsequently failed to teleport himself out of the country after the US-led invasion began, continued to languish in Guantánamo, with no end to his detention in sight.

As the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, I, like all those who oppose Guantánamo and everything it stands for, still hope that the small number of prisoners involved in the attacks, or in other terrorist attacks against the U.S., can be brought to justice, but I fail to see how rulings like those delivered last month in the cases of Adham Mohammed Ali Awad and Fawzi al-Odah contribute to that end.

I believe that, with just four months to go until President Obama’s deadline for closing Guantánamo expires, all concerned would do well to direct their attention towards the few dozen prisoners at Guantánamo who are alleged to have been directly involved in terrorism, and to stop trying to defend the detentions of all the other men still held; men who, at best, were foot soldiers in a specific conflict that, in contrast to Judge Robertson’s words, came to an end no later than November 3, 2004, when Hamid Karzai was elected as the President of post-Taliban Afghanistan.

When Salim Hamdan was freed from Guantánamo, I wrote that his release spelled the end of the Bush administration’s justification for holding prisoners who had no meaningful connection to al-Qaeda or international terrorism. Ten months on, I stand by those words, and note that, although judges have now granted the habeas appeals of 29 of the 36 prisoners whose cases they have considered, nothing about the cases of the other seven men prevents Hamdan’s freedom from casting a longer and longer shadow over their continued detention.

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.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal says success can be achieved, but with a revised strategy.

The call for a new strategy comes as US forces continue to suffer casualties, with August being the bloodiest month for them since the military operation began eight years ago.

The contents of McChrystal’s report will remain classified, but it is widely understood he wants to bolster local Afghan forces, shifting the focus from fighting the Taliban to protecting civilians.