My first exposure to Afghan prisoners was in November of 2001, when a dozen or so raggedy-clad and frightened men were put on display outside a primitive jail in Badakhshan by the Northern Alliance.
This was in complete violation of Geneva Protocols that forbid any public parading of detainees scooped up in combat. But nobody was paying attention to such formal rules of conduct; the Alliance, in fact, never would, as they went on to commit far worse acts, including many atrocities, on their gleeful march to Kabul – a seizure of the capital that Washington had vainly attempted to halt.
There's no telling Afghans how they must behave. This should always have been realized and has become painfully evident over the past eight years. If Afghan society had any regard for even the most minimal threshold of human rights, as the West understands them, there would have been no Taliban, no shelter for Al Qaeda, no invasion and, subsequently, no breast-thrashing over unchecked cruelties, corruption run amok and a culture stubbornly resistant to imported ethics.
They cleave to their own way of doing things, a society still largely petrified in the amber of medievalism: Revenge, atonement, summary justice – these all count for a great deal and go a long way toward explaining why the Taliban still has traction in Afghanistan. They brought peace and stability – if no longer – by imposing sentence without trial, settling disputes without mercy and countenancing no opposition.
Those detainees I interviewed so long ago had obviously been mistreated. They were broken men. All denied any Taliban involvement. And I felt pity for them, imagining the horrors they must have experienced at the hands of their captors.
About a week later, three journalist colleagues with whom I had been camping out at the Alliance "Foreign Ministry" compound – actually the home of assassinated leader Ahmad Shah Massoud – were slain during an ambush. They'd gone in a convoy to pick up Taliban fighters who allegedly wished to surrender. It was a set-up. What I understood then, from first-hand experience, was the rage of Afghans, particularly the mujahedeen who had been fighting for two decades, first against the Soviets, then in a civil war and finally against the southern-based Pashtun Taliban regime that had seized power with backing from Pakistan.
Our conflict protocols – as fine-sounding as they are, as entrenched in humanitarian ideals as they may be, as quid pro quo as they are intended, so that prisoners-of-war on all sides can be protected from abusive interrogation – do not transfer well to the harsh realities of Afghanistan. Indeed, this is tacitly acknowledged by the selective no-we-can't policies of the Barack Obama administration, which continues to permit rendition – outsourcing of interrogation to third nations – of terrorism suspects, in the full knowledge they may be subjected to torture. It's a realpolitik deal with the devil, one supposes, and if the result is a treasure trove of intelligence, as was apparently obtained by waterboarding No. 1 captive Khaled Sheikh Mohammed more than 300 times, so that an untold number of terrorist plots were thwarted, even an ultra-ethical man like this American president can apparently live with it. Before he had his transparently political epiphany, so could Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.
Where the Liberals today get the nerve to excoriate their Conservative rivals for allegedly disregarding warnings from diplomat Richard Colvin about the mistreatment of detainees transferred by Canadian troops to Afghan authorities is beyond comprehension. This file dates back to 2002 when then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien denied-denied-denied that commandos – the elite Joint Task Force 2 soldiers, Canada's only troops on the ground at the time – had been turning captives over to Americans in Kandahar. It was only after newspaper photos were published proving this to be so that Defence Minister Art Eggleton made the admission, telling a House of Commons committee he'd been informed promptly of the practice by military commanders and he'd delayed telling Chrétien.
Three years later, under Prime Minister Paul Martin, Gen. Rick Hillier formalized the detainee transfer protocol by signing an agreement with the Afghan government. Ottawa was loath to turn detainees over to American custody – the only other practical option – against the backdrop of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
In 2007, after newspaper reports of prisoners tortured in Kandahar, the practice was temporarily halted and the agreement rewritten to ensure some level of oversight. It was also in 2007 that Colvin wrote most of his contentious emails – the torture head's-up – which he claims were ignored in Ottawa.
Yet Colvin appears to have relied, for his information, on four primary sources: His own brief visit to the Kandahar prison in 2006, which he wrote seemed "to be in reasonably good condition," no abuse witnessed; an earlier report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, stating the Kandahar facility was the best of the four they'd inspected (though that might be damning with faint praise); discussions with NGOs and the diplomatic community in Kabul; and contact with journalists.
These revelations surfaced in a Globe story on Saturday by Christie Blatchford, who obtained what appears to be all of the emails – if heavily redacted – that opposition parties are demanding to see.
Now, there is no doubt in my mind that Afghan prisoners are mistreated, although I can't claim to know the extent of such abuse. In 2007, the Star toured Sarposa, the Kandahar prison, and interviewed several of the detainees (including some released) cited in a Globe story. Some of their accounts remained essentially unchanged; some differed wildly. Subsequent investigation by Afghan authorities confirmed one case of abuse – though I wouldn't put much faith in Afghans investigating Afghans.
I am dubious, however, of a diplomat relying on journalists and embassy compound chatter for information and using that, in part, as a basis for copy-all email memos. Further, those emails – on the evidence of passages published to this point – do not support the degree of alarm that Colvin has retroactively claimed. Nor does there appear to be, in any of that voluminous correspondence, an eyes-on grasp of the chaos on the ground in Kandahar in 2006 and 2007, when Taliban units engaged in traditional combat – standing and fighting, as they did during Operation Medusa – with Canadian troops taking into custody an unexpectedly huge number of prisoners.
What were they to do with them?
Nobody has answered that question. And few, I suggest – beyond those with an agenda that has nothing to do with protecting detainees from abuse – give a damn about Afghans, whether in chains or under Taliban tyranny.
Source:thestar.com
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