The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (19 page)

The discussion eventually came around to a proposal that had already been considered: the idea that the NATO countries most heavily involved in the south—Britain, Canada and the Netherlands—should set up a prison under their own supervision. This concept seemed to get bogged down, however, because the Western countries did not want such a long-term commitment. That meeting, like many others, ended with no major proposals for action.

As other countries lamented the flaws in their detainee systems, Canada was still struggling to raise its own standards to the level of its counterparts. After the new transfer agreement was signed in May 2007, Canada started investigating what had happened to the roughly 130 detainees it had transferred by that point. Canadian officials knew what they would find—“we would note the likelihood if not inevitability that an impartial investigation will indeed confirm the allegations made in the
Globe & Mail
,” a secret memo said—but they plodded ahead nonetheless. Because they had not previously attempted to track the detainees, it was hard to find individual men inside the dilapidated Afghan cellblocks. Dozens of names on their list remained question marks, lost somewhere in the system. Nor was it easy for the Canadians to set up a monitoring regime for fresh
captives. It took five months to find a human rights investigator and send him to Kandahar, and when he finally started work in October 2007 the results were embarrassing. During one of his first visits to NDS headquarters in Kandahar, the Canadian government’s investigator took aside a detainee for an interview and asked him about his interrogation by Afghan authorities. The man’s answer was partially blacked out in government documents, but the uncensored parts show that the detainee complained he was beaten with electrical wires and rubber hoses. The questioning was so violent that he was knocked unconscious, the prisoner said. Most surprisingly, the detainee said the torture happened in the same room where he was meeting the Canadian investigator. In fact, he added, the interrogators usually left their torture implements under a chair in the room. “Under the chair, we found a large piece of braided electrical wire as well as a rubber hose,” the investigator reported. Then the prisoner showed a bruise on his back, and asked the Canadians not to reveal to his captors that he had complained.

This kind of information put the Canadians in an awkward position. They stopped transferring prisoners to the NDS for a few months, but did not reveal the move publicly. This allowed Canada to make a gesture toward obeying international law without facing negative publicity or uncomfortable questions from NATO allies—who were still handing over detainees to the same Afghan authorities, and who had the same obligations under the Geneva Conventions. But the secrecy broke in January 2008, when the information emerged in a court hearing in Ottawa over the legality of the transfer system. Other NATO countries were upset by the news; by implication, Canada’s actions suggested that its allies were committing war crimes. The Afghan government also expressed outrage, fearing that the insurgents could now make propaganda claims about the regime’s brutality. As a practical matter, too, the holding cells at Kandahar Air Field were ill-equipped to keep prisoners for longer than a few days. The Canadians eventually resumed transfers, although in the
following years they continued to secretly halt the handovers when they found evidence of problems in the Afghan system.

I drifted out of touch with detainee issues in Kandahar after finishing my assignment in the Afghanistan in early 2009, although I heard from human rights investigators that they remained worried that a two-tier system was emerging, as conditions somewhat improved for prisoners transferred from NATO custody but remained vicious for those captured by the Afghan forces. Local soldiers and police frequently worked side by side with foreign troops, so the international forces were also rumoured to be avoiding the hassle of taking prisoners by conducting “field transfers,” or giving Afghan forces the job of collecting detainees. Despite all the flaws, however, it seemed the local authorities had started to understand that torture was a sensitive subject for their international allies. My friends in Kandahar said prisoners were still beaten in the local jails, but the kind of abuses we had discovered were becoming less common. Among all the things that got worse during my years in southern Afghanistan, at least we could assume that the detainee system got better, however minimally. As I was getting ready to leave Kandahar for the last time, throwing away old junk in the media tent, I found the ballpoint pen that the prisoner had given me two years earlier—the copper wire still shiny, and the object retaining its strange beauty. I stowed the pen at the bottom of my suitcase, and when I returned home to Canada the pen got buried in a pile of spare change I kept in an upturned hat.

I had almost forgotten about that souvenir when a friend called me on November 18, 2009. “Turn on your television,” he said. Canadian news channels were going live with coverage of a parliamentary hearing on Afghan detainees. Richard Colvin, the diplomat who had struggled to fix the detainee system during his time in Afghanistan, had been summoned before a committee. By that point he had been
promoted to an intelligence liaison job in Washington, but the committee asked him to delve into his archives and talk about what the Canadian embassy in Kabul knew about detainees in the earlier years of the war. Colvin said the torture went even beyond the methods I had reported, and described the transferred detainees being burned, knifed and raped. More importantly, he maintained that senior military and diplomatic officials decided to ignore warnings about the system in 2006 and 2007. “As I learned more about our detainee practices,” Colvin said, “I came to the conclusion that they were contrary to Canada’s values, contrary to Canada’s interests, contrary to Canada’s official policies, and also contrary to international law; that is, they were un-Canadian, counterproductive and probably illegal.”

Colvin’s testimony implied that Canada had knowingly broken international law, and it caused another firestorm of debate in Ottawa about detainee policy. The arguments focused on the big question that I had failed to resolve in my earlier investigation: How much did the foreign troops know? I decided to invite an old friend for dinner. I cooked him a steak, poured drinks, and afterward I brought out the pen. He admired its meticulous decoration, and then, with a thoughtful expression on his face, he removed the cap and started sketching on a piece of paper. He drew a map of the Kandahar governor’s palace, and marked the location of a small outpost where Canadian liaison officers lived. I nodded my head; I knew the place. He indicated a small office across a grassy courtyard, not far from the Canadians. “This was a torture chamber,” he said. I had never visited that part of the palace, but I had heard the stories about the governor’s bodyguards. I had even interviewed a detainee in Sarpoza prison who claimed the governor supervised his torture over a period of eighteen days at the palace, but we had never published that story. Part of the problem was that we lacked corroboration for the prisoner’s claims, and partly we were afraid of retribution by the governor against our local staff. Years later, holding my souvenir pen, my friend listened to my audio recording of
that interview and confirmed my suspicions. Yes, he said, the governor held prisoners in his palace. Yes, he said, those inmates were tortured. He had personally seen one hapless prisoner hanging from the ceiling, “trussed like a chicken.” I pressed him on the question that still bothered me: Did any of the foreign troops know about the torture? My friend said he wasn’t sure. He suggested that I ask the Canadian soldiers themselves.

Over the next few weeks, I looked up several of my buddies from Kandahar. The liaison officers who worked near the palace were often smart guys, given the delicate task of managing relationships with the governor and Afghan security forces. With detainee issues making front-page news across the country, they knew why I was getting in touch. All of them said they did not see or hear any indications of torture by Afghan authorities, but that such tactics would be unsurprising. It was a violent country, they said; it was unreasonable to expect the Afghan forces to maintain high standards of conduct when they faced insurgents who regularly beheaded their captives. I was particularly curious about the soldiers’ relationships with the governor and his men. Other sources had confirmed that the palace guards were rounding up and violently interrogating suspected insurgents, and I wanted to know if the soldiers who worked near the palace, just a few minutes’ walk from the front door, knew anything about such activity. After all, they were so friendly with the governor that they played Xbox video games with him, and offered him breakfast cereals that would improve his daily intake of dietary fibre. The officers also cultivated close relationships with Afghan security officials, including the local intelligence chief. They needed information to save lives on the battlefield, so they avoided asking questions about how the Afghans conducted their interrogations.

In each of these conversations, I pulled out the prisoner’s pen and explained its history. I talked about what I learned from the detainees in Sarpoza prison, and the scars on inmates’ bodies. Every time, I got something like a shrug from the Canadian soldiers. They had
varying degrees of understanding about what happened inside the governor’s palace—one of them told me that the governor’s men had borrowed extra plastic ties for their captives’ wrists—but all of them maintained that NATO was only supporting the sovereign government of Afghanistan. They couldn’t understand why the media were “freaking out” over the detainees. “I made a point of never asking how they got the information,” an officer said. “If they had told me about torture, it would have impeded my ability to get the intelligence we needed about the Taliban.”

These officers seemed like reasonable men. They exuded the kind of trustworthiness that you find in the best soldiers. If you need to give somebody a gun and ask him to protect your life, that’s the kind of person you want. But I came away from these conversations weighed down with sadness. Somebody high up the ranks put these soldiers in that little outpost in the governor’s front garden. Somebody told them to make friends with the Afghan authorities. Those orders came down from a military leadership that should have known how distasteful such arrangements were, how closely these troops were co-operating with torturers. The Canadians clandestinely listened to the governor’s cellphone conversations: recording, transcribing, and translating, analyzing. That intelligence was passed up the chain of command. My great fear is that somewhere in the buzz of information, there was a terrible calculation, a decision to avoid fighting by the rules. These days, when I look at my souvenir pen, I’m not reminded of how our journalism resulted in minor improvements in the detention system. I feel grief and rage. I imagine the man who sat in a Kandahar prison and looped copper wire through all those little beads. I think about how we failed him.

Unlike scars, these things don’t fade. Torture will remain a troubling mark on NATO’s history in Afghanistan. Fresh horrors continue to be revealed, followed by a shameful pattern of hand-wringing
and uproar—and then a return to the routines of abuse. A British court ruled in June 2010 that it’s illegal for troops from the United Kingdom to transfer detainees into NDS custody in Kabul because of the high risk of torture, but allowed transfers in the southern provinces on condition of improved monitoring in local jails. Those detention facilities in the south showed no sign of improvement, however, when the United Nations conducted a landmark study of torture in Afghan custody in 2010 and 2011, sending interviewers to private meetings with 379 detainees at forty-seven detention centres across the country. The notorious NDS facility in Kandahar merited its own section in the final report, with two-thirds of respondents describing torture at the hands of interrogators. The abuses were similar to what I’d recorded in my investigation three years earlier, and most of the methods for inflicting pain remained consistent. As word leaked about the UN’s findings in September 2011, the NATO command suspended all transfers of prisoners into Afghan custody. Nobody could reasonably expect the freeze to last, however. Kate Clark, a well-known analyst, observed that “the scandal needs to be repeated, which makes it seem as if the amnesia over NDS torture is willful.”

This cycle of outrage and convenient forgetting seems likely to continue as the United States transfers prisoners as part of the handover to Afghan security forces in 2014. Even some human rights specialists throw up their hands when asked about this looming collision between principles and expediency. In theory, the foreign troops should never give detainees to authorities who practise torture; in practice, there is no obvious destination available for hundreds of prisoners as the international forces shut down their detention facilities. Apologists will point out that the new Afghan state is considerably less brutal than previous regimes; in the late 1800s, for example, petty thieves were punished by having their hands chopped off and their bloody stumps plunged into boiling oil. The Taliban continued using amputation as a punishment into the 1990s, and also revived the old tradition of burying people alive. In that context, perhaps
an Afghan system that flays captives with electrical cables could be viewed as a minor improvement. But that misses the essential distinction that the iron-fisted rulers of bygone eras did not have thousands of Western advisors looking over their shoulders. Afghans think about the current government, with some justification, as a creation of the international community and a living representation of modern ideas about democracy. The excesses of the NDS could be blamed, in the early years, on habits inherited from Soviet KGB trainers in the 1980s. But more than a decade of Western presence in the country means that some responsibility for the NDS actions must fall on its new partners. The United Nations noted that the NDS gets “technical assistance” and training from Germany, Britain and the United States, and pointedly referred to the fact that UN investigators tried and failed to get inside the notorious NDS Department 124, a holding facility located near the US embassy in Kabul and a building reputedly used as a base by the US Central Intelligence Agency. If the harsh practices of Afghan interrogators were only a matter of ancient customs, it would be reasonable to expect the nastiest reports to emerge from rural provinces that lack foreign supervision. But the opposite is true: among the detainees who had passed through Department 124, in the centre of Kabul, twenty-six of twenty-eight interviewed by the United Nations said they suffered torture—making such complaints more common than in Kandahar. One detainee said that Department 124 is commonly referred to as “Hell,” and another said that the torture included wrenching and twisting of genitals. This apparently happened within convenient walking distance of the nicely decorated apartments where US embassy officials sat behind their concrete blast walls. That proximity lies at the heart of the legacy problem in Afghanistan. The Westerners became intimately embroiled with a dirty war, and the filthy awfulness of it will remain a stain on their reputation.