The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  “That’s the key,” I said, snapping my fingers. “You’re comfortable they’re doing the right thing?”

  “We have spent a lot of time developing that relationship, that we don’t hand them over to anybody.”

  “Okay, I understand you don’t hand them over to just anybody,” I said, trying to steer him back toward the question, “but are you comfortable that the authorities you’re handing them to are doing the right thing?”

  The commander paused again, and sighed. “We follow the agreement we have between the two nations. We make sure that all the conditions within those agreements—”

  I interjected, “That’s different from being comfortable that you’re doing the right thing. Right?”

  He talked for awhile about the importance of the military intervention in Afghanistan. As he ran out of breath, he finally answered my question: “You can’t say it’s comfort,” he admitted. A few seconds later, the press officer ended the interview.

  Looking back at that conversation, I’m ashamed that the brigadier-general’s answers didn’t inspire more questions. I wrote a small article about detainee policy and ignored the subject for the rest of the year. Most other journalists did the same. Detainees fell into the same black hole of secrecy that swallowed intelligence operations and special forces. It was common knowledge that bad things happened to prisoners who were handed over to the Afghans, but nobody talked about it. Perhaps the soldiers refused to even think about it. Military life does not usually reward curiosity; personnel are encouraged to “stay in their lane” or “watch their arcs,” and often refer to problems as being “above my pay grade.” All of these phrases are shorthand for shutting up and doing your job.

  When worrisome information did surface, journalists were usually inclined to give the military the benefit of the doubt; we were more apt to believe soldiers from our own country than accusers who did not speak our language. Two days after my interview with the commander, I showed a digital photograph to a Canadian military press officer. It was an image of an Afghan man in a hospital bed with his eyes closed, bleeding from the mouth. A human rights worker had taken the photo, and identified the man as Mullah Ibrahim, a suspected Taliban commander arrested southwest of Kandahar city in May 2006. Local sources indicated that the man was interrogated and beaten at the governor’s palace. But the governor vehemently denied any role in questioning prisoners, suggesting he had more important business. The friendly press officer promised to look into the case of Mullah Ibrahim, and returned with a story about the old man suffering a liver disease. The mullah was sick—not tortured—the officer reassured us.

  Years later, another Canadian officer laughed about journalists being so easily hoodwinked—“Of course he was tortured”—but I’m still not sure about Mullah Ibrahim, or several other detainees whose cases I did not fully investigate. Just asking questions about the issue drove a wedge between me and some of my military and diplomatic sources. Many friends who served as part of the mission still believe that I failed to understand the context around the torture debate. Afghanistan is a brutal country, they say, and it doesn’t make sense to hold NATO forces or their local allies to absurd standards. Perhaps some part of me believed the same thing in 2006, as I struggled to understand the war. Now I feel guilty for failing to act earlier. The guilt also cuts in the opposite direction: I can imagine the faces of my military buddies, men who risked their lives for the sake of something they believed in. They’re good people. They wanted to help Afghanistan, and I feel awful knowing that some of them will read this chapter and throw down the book in disgust. But those faces aren’t the ones that weigh most heavily on my conscience. What still bothers me are my memories of the people I met the following year: the detainees.

  My search for the men who survived the Afghan interrogations started with a phone call from my editor in March 2007. I was visiting Moscow, and paused underneath a giant statue of Lenin as I listened to my boss telling me that his curiosity had been piqued by a series of recent articles from our Washington correspondent, Paul Koring. For more than a year, Mr. Koring had doggedly hunted down details of Canada’s secret agreement for the transfer of prisoners to Afghan authorities, raising questions about legal safeguards. His reporting gained urgency as human rights watchdogs—including Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran, Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association—started digging into the file, questioning whether detainees were handled legally. At the same time, the Military Police Complaints Commission (MPCC) opened an investigation into the handling of prisoners. All of this caused a ruckus in Canada’s parliament, prompting questions about whether the country was respecting international law. The refrain from Canada’s politicians echoed the words of the military commander a year earlier: “Nothing bad happens to those people.” The official version was that Afghanistan treated prisoners in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, and not a single one suffered abuse or torture. My editor asked me if that was plausible. “No,” I told him, but I did not have details about the fate of transferred prisoners. He told me to drop everything and find them.

  I spent the next month looking for first-person accounts from Kandahar’s jails. Many former detainees were afraid to speak; I was a foreigner, and after being captured by foreigners they weren’t willing to risk another interrogation. Others said they did not want to talk about the Afghan intelligence service, the NDS (National Directorate of Security), whose ranks still contained many officers trained by the Soviet KGB. If people whispered its name, they usually called it “KhAD,” the acronym for the communist-era Ministry for State Security, infamous for torturing and executing prisoners. There was also the problem of travel: I was particularly interested in finding people who had been detained by Canadian troops, operating primarily west and north of Kandahar city, but those areas were too dangerous for me to visit. We offered lavish meals to anybody willing to risk the roads and drive into Kandahar, but few accepted the invitation. Some of my best local sources were tribal elders, but they weren’t much help because most of them were allied with the government and had no interest in picking a fight with the regime. The elders arranged a few meetings with former detainees: stilted conversations with people who had spent a short time in custody before getting bailed out by their friends or relatives. Nonetheless, some of them described torture suffered by their cellmates. It was clear that we needed to keep searching.

  The breakthrough came when we got inside Sarpoza prison, a crumbling old jail on the west side of the city. Journalists weren’t allowed into the national-security wing, holding suspected Taliban prisoners. But after some negotiation, the warden named his price: three flashlights. I bought the Mag-Lites at a military store and donated them to the prison; shortly afterward, I found myself on a guided tour. The jailers tried to focus my attention on ways that the rich foreigners should assist the prison guards and improve their facilities. They watched carefully as I wrote down their requests: windows, doors, tables, chairs, beds and dozens of other necessities. Stepping through a series of barred gateways, we walked down hallways made of stone blocks, where prisoners cooked over gas canisters. The food supply was a problem; prisoners were given only a few pieces of bread each day, which they supplemented by purchasing their own meals. Pulling back the ragged curtains of the cells, he showed us that most prisoners slept on the floor, leaving them vulnerable to snakes, insects and other creatures that inhabited chinks in the masonry. Inmates had rigged up cloth shawls around the walls, jamming them in place with sticks, in an attempt to shield themselves from whatever crawled out. Similar cloths were pinned to the ceiling of some cells, for a different reason: “It’s to keep the ceiling from falling on us,” said a prisoner, who reached behind his sleeping mat and pulled out a handful of brick shards, tossing them at my feet. “These things fall on us while we sleep.”

  Despite its discomforts, weeks of visiting the prison taught me that the facility was actually pretty good by local standards
. For many detainees, arrival at Sarpoza meant relief from harsher captivity in the holding cells operated by the local police and intelligence service. At Sarpoza, prisoners spent their days playing games in the courtyard shaded by trees, or whiled away the hours by crafting beaded trinkets (such as the pen that I’ve kept as a souvenir). The relaxed atmosphere inside the prison meant I could spend long afternoons drinking tea inside the national-security wing, slowly persuading detainees to tell me about themselves. One by one they related their stories, lifted their shirts, showed me their scars. An indulgent prison official supervised all the interviews, allowing the prisoners to speak freely, but forbidding me from photographing them. All of them had frightful accounts of how they ended up in the rambling prison, and the nastier jails and holding cells they experienced before arriving.

  I interviewed thirty men who survived the detention system, some imprisoned at Sarpoza and others living free in Kandahar. A majority said they were captured by Canadian troops. The nationality of the forces was important because I was working for a Canadian newspaper, so we spent hours on detailed questions about the vehicles used by foreign soldiers; we could usually figure out that detainees were taken by Canadians from the description of their troop carriers. In other cases, the detainees’ stories suggested they had been grabbed by US special forces or Afghan security services. Many prisoners did not know, or care, which particular type of foreign soldier was involved. No matter who captured them, however, there was a clear pattern of abuse by the Afghan authorities. Over and over, in separate conversations, the men described how the international troops tied their hands with plastic straps, covered their eyes and handed them over to torturers. They described beatings, whippings, starvation, choking and electrocution. When compiling the list of torture techniques, I was careful to leave out stories that didn’t match the others. One prisoner, for instance, said he was shoved into a wooden box and tormented with boiling water; I didn’t publish that anecdote in the newspaper because I couldn’t cross-reference it. The stuff we could corroborate, of course, was bad enough. A majority of the people I interviewed had passed through the cramped cells in the basement of the Kandahar NDS office. Most of those held by the NDS for an extended time said they were whipped with electrical cables, usually a bundle of wires the length of an arm. Some said the whipping was so painful that they fell unconscious. Interrogators also electrocuted detainees, who described hearing the sound of a hand-crank generator and feeling the hot flush of electricity coursing through their muscles, seizing them with spasms. One man wiggled his hand in the air as he talked about it, making a limp gesture: “I was flopping like a fish on dry earth,” he explained. Another man said the police hung him by his ankles for eight days of beating. Still another said he panicked as interrogators put a plastic bag over his head and squeezed his windpipe.

  Some of the men who survived these ordeals looked like broken husks. With trembling hands, they whispered complaints of insomnia and chronic pain. Others lacked the physical capacity to complain, shuffling and mumbling through the stone hallways. One of these ruined men, a dark-haired prisoner wearing stained clothes, said he couldn’t remember much except the beatings. He had forgotten his own hometown, his family, his tribal affiliation, almost everything except his reduced existence in the archipelago of jails. He knew that he sometimes had difficulty using the latrines, but he couldn’t remember what kind of difficulty. One of his jailers explained that he could squat over the hole in the ground before defecating, but that he frequently forgot to pull down his pants. These cases upset the prison guards because they hated being surrogate parents. Some of the detainees were so badly impaired that somebody had to wash, dress and feed them. One guard confided that he felt the Afghan intelligence service was dumping human garbage into the prison.

  Other inmates proved astonishingly sharp-minded, however. That turned out to be the case with a young man named Abdul Wali, whose memory was so good that I would eventually need two notebooks and two visits to record all of his details. At first, he was reluctant to talk. We found him in a cell of the national-security wing, a small man with curly dark hair, sweaty and matted. He played nervously with a broken wristwatch, kneading the metal bracelet through his fingers like a string of prayer beads. His situation was pretty much the same as everybody else’s, he said: He was accused of involvement with the Taliban, and denied it. No judgment had been passed, so he wasn’t sure how long he would stay imprisoned. Yes, he answered softly, he was tortured. He opened his shirt and showed scars on his chest. (He refused to show his naked back, although a human rights investigator—who later confirmed several aspects of his story—said the young man had more scarring on other parts of his torso.)

  His ordeal started when he was detained by Canadian troops in the summer of 2006 in a grape field southwest of Kandahar city. He had no reason to hate the foreign soldiers, he said, although it’s easy to understand why the Canadians thought he was a Taliban fighter. At age twenty-three, he fell into the category that the soldiers usually refer to as “fighting-age males.” He belonged to one of the smaller Pushtun tribes that often felt disenfranchised under the new government. His hometown was located in Helmand province, a long way from the field where he encountered the Canadians—itself an unlikely place to be lingering because of battles in those fields earlier in the day.

  None of those facts proved that he was an insurgent, Mr. Wali said. His alibi was that he needed to guard a farm that belonged to his brother-in-law. His relatives had abandoned their land as the fighting between Taliban and foreign soldiers grew more intense, but they assigned him to water the crops and prevent looting. Before the recent conflict, he said, he had been scratching out a living in a tailor shop with two of this brothers, mending garments for people forced by war and drought to live in a ramshackle camp in the desert. All the brothers lived with their wives and children in a mud house, fourteen people crowding into three rooms.

  He was relaxing in the shade when the Canadian troops surrounded him. They took off his green pinstripe vest and tore open the lining, finding nothing except his wallet, which was decorated with cartoon characters and the words Kiki & Coco. Like other detainees, Mr. Wali described how the Canadian troops tied his hands with plastic cuffs and kept him in the back of their armoured vehicle for two or three hours. The foreigners didn’t harm him, only asked questions through a translator and scribbled in a notepad. This was also typical of the stories I heard among the detainees; everybody praised the NATO troops for their good manners and gentle handling of prisoners. It was remarkable, because some of the detainees obviously had Taliban connections and they could, in theory, have scored propaganda points by claiming abuse at the hands of the so-called infidel armies. But like the others, Mr. Wali carefully specified that his torture started only after the Canadian troops handed him over to Afghan authorities. In fact, the beatings seemed to stop and start depending on whether the foreign troops happened to be nearby. Afghan forces and their international partners lived and worked closely together in forward bases, and it seems the Afghans had trouble keeping their interrogation methods secret. The captives noticed the uneasy relationship: “The foreign soldiers didn’t like to see beating,” Mr. Wali said.

  Things got worse as he was transferred deeper into the Afghan system, away from foreign eyes. At a district headquarters, police officers took him to a room with bare concrete walls and cud-gelled him with rifle butts, he said. They also jabbed him in the chest with the muzzles of their Kalashnikovs, which left him with the pattern of dark scars I saw on his chest. At one point, he said, about nine police officers pushed his face into the floor. One officer sat on the back of his head while the others pummelled him. A man in civilian clothes questioned him between beatings. He stayed in that cell for three days, with only two meals of tea and bread, then went onward to the dismal block of holding cells beside police headquarters in Kandahar city. Around midday, two officers took him upstairs to a room that overlooked a busy street—conven
iently disused, as senior police officers preferred to work on the side of the building that faced the inner courtyard, so they would be less vulnerable to bombs. The officers shut the windows and closed the yellow curtains, and Mr. Wali had a moment to contemplate what was about to happen while the officers searched for a suitable whip. They wanted to find a length of chain, but settled on a bundle of electrical cables. Mr. Wali was rolled onto his stomach and thrashed on his back and legs.

  They repeated the beatings on three consecutive days, then started asking for money. Stories of extortion and bribery were also common among the detainees; sometimes I got the impression that the only people remaining in Sarpoza were those who lacked the money or tribal connections to get released. Diplomats reached the same conclusion; in the same week that I was visiting the prison, a Dutch official told colleagues in Kabul that “any Talib could buy his freedom for ten dollars.” In Mr. Wali’s case, the police demanded payment to avoid transferring him to the feared Afghan intelligence service. He responded that he could not afford any bribes, and so they sent him to the NDS the same afternoon. There, the interrogators told him to pray and wash, then called him into an interview room. The man asking the questions had sickly greenish skin, Mr. Wali said. “He kicked me in the head, and I fell into a table. Blood came out my nose. He told me, ‘Don’t bleed on the carpet. Go wash your face.’ ” The NDS wanted his signature and thumbprint on a confession, admitting a role in the insurgency. Some interrogators also wanted money. He gave them neither. After a month of torture, they eventually dumped him in Sarpoza jail, where his wounds healed. When I met him, he had been waiting eight months for a formal sentence.