by Ahmed Rashid
The military files regarding the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah at Bagram were leaked to the press only after it became known that the military unit responsible for their deaths had also carried out abuses at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.14 In the summer of 2002, Capt. Carolyn Wood, heading Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, was assigned to Bagram. The unit sorely lacked experience, and only two of Wood’s men had ever questioned prisoners before. Wood and her unit were to be redeployed to Iraq in March 2003 and later took charge at Abu Ghraib. Once the scandal there broke, it was clear that there had been considerable cross-fertilization in the pattern of abuses carried out by units who had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq.15
After a ponderously slow two-year-long military investigation, twenty-seven soldiers were implicated in the deaths of the two Afghans in Bagram. Fourteen soldiers were prosecuted nearly a year after the horrendous photos of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were released.16 The inquiry revealed that although the soldiers had little interrogation experience, they had received two days of training in peroneal strikes—disabling blows to the side of the leg just above the knee.17 Mullah Noor Habibullah, a strong defiant man and the brother of a Taliban commander, and Dilawar, twenty-two, a meek man with no connection to terrorism, died within a week of each other in December 2002 after being viciously tortured. Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the ceiling for four days and received at least one hundred peroneal strikes. The guards hit him repeatedly to hear him shout, “Allah,” which they seemed to find funny. Just before his death he could neither sit nor stand. His autopsy showed that his leg muscles were “crumbling and falling apart.”18 After he died he was declared innocent. Habibullah, who refused to be cowed and who spat at his interrogators, received even more strikes to the legs.
In court in the United States the defense for the soldiers lay in the ambiguous guidelines for torture the army was now operating under. The trials exposed the fact that with the GC no longer applicable, nobody knew where to draw the line. “The president of the United States doesn’t know what the rules are,” said Capt. Joseph Owens, a lawyer for one of the accused. “The secretary of defense doesn’t know what the rules are. But the government expects this Pfc. to know what the rules are!” he added.19 One soldier, Specialist Willie Brand, admitted to kneeing Dilawar more than thirty times because “I was fed up with him.” Brand was convicted of maiming and assault and could have received sixteen years in prison. Instead, his only punishment was a reduction in rank to private. One U.S. soldier was sentenced to two months in jail, another to three months, a third was demoted, and a fourth had his pay reduced. The stiffest punishment any of the culprits received was five months in jail. There was enormous anger in Kabul at the leniency of the sentences and the failure of the U.S. justice system to punish those responsible. Ahmad Nader Nadery, of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said, “These punishments are a joke with the Afghan people.”20
While all U.S. attention was focused on the abuse of prisoners in Iraqi jails such as Abu Ghraib, severe abuses continued in Afghanistan. Several Afghan prisoners died at U.S. SOF firebases, which the ICRC, the UN, and the Afghan government were barred from visiting. Conditions at these firebases were appalling and abuse was widespread. According to an investigation by the Crimes of War Project and the Los Angeles Times, an Afghan prisoner, Jamal Nasser, age eighteen and a recruit for the ANA, died under torture at a SOF firebase in Gardez in March 2003. Another, Wakil Mohammed, an unarmed father of two, was shot dead after he had surrendered. The cases were first reported as battlefield deaths, and an investigation by the U.S. Army was opened only two years later. The culprits belonged to the Alabama-based Twentieth Special Forces Group. Retired Afghan police colonel Syed Nabi Siddiqi, thirty-five, who was held by the same unit in 2003, was subjected to beating, kicking, sleep deprivation, taunts, and sexual abuse.21 In early 2003 ICRC officials complained to staff officers of Gen. Dan McNeill about this unit and five other firebases, including Camp Salerno and Camp Chapman, near Khost, where abuses were being reported.22 By 2005 the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission had logged eight hundred cases of abuse against Afghan prisoners at some thirty U.S. firebases.
The CIA ran its own secret detention centers, which were off-limits even to the U.S. military. One was situated at the former Ariana Hotel in central Kabul, just a few minutes’ drive from the U.S. embassy. The Salt Pit was at an old brick factory just outside Kabul. Here, in November 2002, Afghan guards employed by the CIA stripped naked a young Afghan detainee and chained him to the concrete floor in the middle of winter. He died the next day, ending up as a “ghost detainee,” one of an unknown number of people who just disappeared from the face of the earth because nobody could ask the CIA any questions. By 2005, thirty-three military personnel were facing charges of prisoner abuse, but only one civilian, David Passaro, forty, a CIA contractor, faced such charges. He went on trial in August 2006 on assault charges in connection with the death of Abdul Wali, the prisoner who died in June 2003 at the U.S. firebase in Asadabad.23 Passaro’s trial in Raleigh, North Carolina, included testimony on how he repeatedly hit Wali, a twenty-eight-year-old farmer, who was chained to the floor of his cell and was in such pain he pleaded to be killed.24 In February 2007, Passaro received an eight-year sentence, becoming the first U.S. civilian to be convicted of abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the worst aspects of the military’s lack of preparedness for the war in Afghanistan was the extent to which it had to rely on private contractors for simple tasks. Contractors carried out interrogations, ran jails, provided bodyguards, carried out drug eradication, trained the police and army, and built wells and schoolhouses—all tasks that used to be carried out by the U.S. Army, the State Department, or USAID. The contractors’ role was even greater in Iraq. With the kind of button-down security in place in Afghanistan, these people were virtually unaccountable. Government auditors could not check on their work while they continued to be paid vast sums. The use of private contractors by the CIA expanded enormously after 2002 as more tasks needed to be done by the military and the Pentagon had to conserve its soldiers for the upcoming war in Iraq. Subsequently the extensive use of contractors became the norm. DynCorp had won a $52 million contract to protect President Karzai and other Afghan leaders in 2003. Contractors now carried out secret interrogations and guarded prisoners.
The possession of such extensive powers with little oversight was open to abuse, brutality, and scandal, as in the astonishing case of two self-described American contractors and a journalist who were caught running a private jail in Kabul. When he was caught, their leader, Jonathan Idema, claimed to be working for the CIA. At his Kabul home, three Afghans were found hanging from the ceiling and five others badly beaten. Idema was a bounty hunter, but he had easily posed as a U.S. intelligence officer. He and his accomplices were sentenced by an Afghan court to long periods in jail.25
Britain’s MI6 worked with more discretion than the CIA but was equally untutored in the ways of Afghanistan. A UK government report in 2005 said that British agents had conducted more than two thousand interviews of suspects in Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and Iraq and that there were “fewer than 15 occasions when UK intelligence personnel” broke the law regarding interrogations. The report concluded that intelligence personnel “were not sufficiently well trained on the Geneva Conventions.”26 MI6 and CIA officers frequently conducted joint interrogations.
The most explosive policy adopted by the CIA was the process of rendition. Rendered prisoners were truly “ghost detainees,” with no rights, no prospect of a trial, and a future of permanent detention by unsavory regimes. CIA snatch teams could pick up prisoners anywhere in the world and transport them anywhere they liked. In spring 2002, the ICRC demanded that it be given access to prisoners under rendition. Instead, CIA lawyers further twisted legal boundaries by establishing a new category of prisoner: Persons Under Control, or PUC. Anyone held as PUC was automatically
denied access to the ICRC, and even his existence was denied.27 The ICRC became extremely frustrated with U.S. obduracy. In January 2004, after meeting U.S. officials in Washington, ICRC president Jakob Kellenberger went public saying he was deeply concerned about “the fate of an unknown number of people captured as part of the so-called global war on terror and held in undisclosed locations.”28 By now the ICRC was maintaining its own files on some 100 rendered prisoners who had simply disappeared. U.S. human rights lawyer Scott Horton said up to 150 people had been rendered by the CIA between 2001 and 2005.29
At least a dozen countries were involved in providing the United States secret detention facilities for rendered prisoners, including Azerbaijan, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, and Uzbekistan. PUCs were flown around the world to different locations on private jets belonging to dummy companies owned by the CIA. Journalists tracked seventy-five trips around the world that one jet made between 2001 and 2005.30 In the process of rendition, the guilty and the innocent disappeared for years. Maher Arar, thirty-five, a Canadian software engineer abducted by the CIA in New York in September 2002, was taken to Syria, where he was held for a year. He was never charged and was freed after protests by the Canadian government.
The worst abusers of human rights received the most prisoners. The CIA never explained why it was choosing as its partners dubious regimes that had been condemned by the State Department for human rights abuses. “All I want to say is that there was ‘before 9/11’ and ‘after 9/11,’” said Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. “After 9/11 the gloves came off.”31 For the Bush administration, that was enough of an explanation.
With the United States leading the way in the abuse of prisoners and flouting the GC and international law, it was natural that their allies, such as Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, would follow suit. These countries carried out their own renditions and disappearances of prisoners, undermining their own legal processes and opening the way for local rulers to deal with domestic political opponents in the same manner. The deterioration of human rights in each country became linked to that government’s proximity to the CIA.
The international community had gone to great lengths to set up a credible government in Kabul, but the effort was totally undermined when the CIA used the fledgling government and the powerful warlords to run secret prison systems. Thus, captured Taliban were frequently transferred to the Riasat Amniat-e-Meli, or National Directorate of Security (NDS), which had been modeled on the KGB in the 1980s and was controlled by the Northern Alliance after 9/11. The NDS held dozens of Taliban and other rendered prisoners on behalf of the CIA, and was ordered not to disclose these prisoners to the ICRC.
Foreign diplomats in Kabul became aware that the NDS was holding such prisoners only in August 2002, when thirteen prisoners, including eleven Pakistanis, escaped from D-3, a secret NDS detention center in Kabul. Afghan soldiers who gave chase killed twelve of them. This incident, which has not been disclosed until now, was particularly embarrassing for the International Security Assistance Force because it occurred in a zone under its control. Human Rights Watch and other groups documented extensive use of torture and abuse by the NDS. The editor of a Kabul magazine whom I know well and who had published an offending cartoon of NA leaders was visited by NDS officials in his office and told bluntly, “Look, we have thirty bullets in our clip, we can shoot thirty bullets into your chest right now and there is no one who can stop us.”
In 2004, Karzai appointed Amrullah Saleh as the director-general of the NDS. A former intelligence aide to Ahmad Shah Masud and his liaison with the CIA before 9/11, Saleh was a young Panjsheri Tajik, but he broke with his own group to support Karzai and started to reform and modernize the NDS with help from the CIA and MI6. Saleh purged hundreds of officers, improved pay scales, and modernized training, turning the NDS from a factional into a national organization. Intelligence gathering seemed to have improved, because when the Taliban began suicide bombings in Kabul, the NDS caught several Taliban groups before they could set off their bombs. However, under Saleh, the NDS continued to carry out renditions on behalf of the CIA, and there were continuing reports of the NDS’s extensive use of torture even as late as 2008.
Until the summer of 2003, warlords and commanders on the U.S. payroll also maintained their own prisons, often holding them on behalf of the Americans. In Herat, the warlord Ismael Khan frequently used torture. Prisoners described how “beatings, hanging upside-down, whipping, and shocking with electrical wires attached to the toes and thumbs” were commonplace.32 A close friend of mine and a prominent lawyer in Herat, Rafiq Shahir, was arrested by Ismael Khan, who wanted to stop him from contesting a seat for the Loya Jirga in 2002. His family asked me to save his life. I telephoned several prominent officials in Kabul, asking them to intervene, but by the time Shahir was freed he had been whipped, beaten, and threatened with death. The scars on his back and stomach still show.33
The fundamentalist warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf maintained several prisons just outside Kabul. Hazrat Ali, a key ally of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, ran private jails, while his commanders indulged in robbery, kidnapping, and sexual violence against young boys, even as they served under the command of the U.S. SOF. The warlords terrorized civilians, knowing they would never be reprimanded by the Americans. U.S. forces were to establish the same systems of secret detention in Iraq, using Iraqi warlords and military units.34 The abuse of prisoners by U.S. jailers at Abu Ghraib was only a follow-on to what had already happened in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s military regime learned American methods most quickly. Initially Musharraf did not want to hold al Qaeda prisoners, as he feared a domestic backlash, so captured foreign prisoners were flown to Kandahar. But as more foreigners were caught—many of them innocent—the ISI set up its own detention centers. Foreigners were held in Kohat jail, in the North-West Frontier Province, where joint teams from the ISI, CIA, and FBI interrogated them. Pakistanis were held at Haripur jail, close to Islamabad, where the Americans had only limited access. By the spring of 2002 two hundred foreigners were being held in Kohat and four hundred Pakistanis in Haripur jail. Later, the army set up another jail, in Alizai, in the tribal areas, for those caught in FATA. Musharraf established anti-terrorist courts, which allowed the government to detain prisoners for one year without being charged.
The ISI was anxious to keep certain captured Pakistani militants away from U.S. interrogators, especially those who had fought on behalf of the ISI in Kashmir or Afghanistan or who had trained at ISI-run training camps. The ISI was naturally nervous about these extremists divulging information to the CIA. After the assassination attempts against Musharraf in December 2003, hundreds of militants were arrested in Pakistan, but the Americans were not given access to them. Omar Sheikh, the abductor of American journalist Daniel Pearl, was barred from being interrogated by U.S. agencies, and Islamabad ignored a U.S. extradition request for him. Yet Islamabad provided major help to the United States in its rendition program, holding al Qaeda suspects on behalf of the Americans until they were moved to other locations.
The extent to which the ISI interrogated and tortured prisoners on behalf of the CIA was revealed after Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian, was freed in June 2006. He had been arrested in Lahore by the ISI on May 9, 2004, and moved to a safe house in Islamabad run jointly by the ISI and CIA. The safe house contained specially built jail cells, and Jabour saw as many as twenty other prisoners there—many of them Pakistanis. Human Rights Watch documented the cases of half a dozen more Arab and Pakistani prisoners being held in the same safe house. Jabour was beaten and abused by his Pakistani guards and chained nightly to a wall. Other abuses included tying a rubber band around his penis and burning his arms and legs with a red-hot iron. He had two heart attacks while in detention.
Jabour was interrogated by CIA officers who included two young American women. The Pakistanis never tortured
him in the presence of the Americans—a clear indication of the rules under which the CIA operated: foreign intelligence agencies could not use torture in the presence of the CIA. Jabour was later moved to a CIA black site outside Kabul and then to Israel, where he was freed. He admitted to having trained at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 1998 and to helping Arabs escape from Afghanistan in 2003, but he was never a member of al Qaeda and had not fought against the United States.35
The secret prisons proved especially useful in 2004 after the Pakistan army launched military operations in Waziristan, where hundreds of tribesmen were arrested. In August 2004, the ICRC issued a démarche to Islamabad, demanding access to all prisoners captured in Waziristan, but it was rejected by Islamabad, which claimed that the war in Waziristan was not an armed conflict but criminality. The military was angry with the ICRC for its alleged failure to free the six hundred Pakistani prisoners still being held by General Dostum in northern Afghanistan. These prisoners were eventually freed in 2004, but they were rearrested by the ISI when they arrived back home.
Musharraf used the same harsh antiterrorism laws to deal with his political opponents at home. Asma Jehangir, head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), drew up a list of more than four hundred missing persons—people abducted, detained, or simply “disappeared” between 2001 and 2006. The HRCP began to document each case and appealed to the courts to free these prisoners. “The government is using the war on terror as an excuse to pick up and disappear hundreds of its political opponents, including those who are just critical of certain policies,” Jehangir told me. The disappeared include journalists, scientists, political workers, and nationalists, with the largest number being political activists from Sindh and the insurgency-hit province of Balochistan. Baloch nationalists claimed that more than seven hundred Baloch political workers disappeared in 2006. Using the courts to try to force the government to declare these people’s whereabouts led to the disappeared being moved from the custody of one intelligence agency to another, so that the government could maintain deniability.