Page 2 of 2 Terror comes at night in Afghanistan
By Anand Gopal
Its modern life as a prison began in 2002, when small numbers of detainees from
throughout Asia were incarcerated there on the first leg of an odyssey that
would eventually bring them to the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. In the years since, however, it has become the main destination for those
caught within Afghanistan as part of the growing war there.
By 2009, the inmate population had swollen to more than 700. Housed in a
windowless old Soviet hangar, the prison consists of two rows of serried
cage-like cells bathed continuously in white light. Guards walk along a
platform that runs across the mesh-tops of the pens, an easy position from
which to supervise the prisoners below.
Regular, even infamous, abuse in the style of Iraq's Abu Ghraib
prison marked Bagram's early years. Abdullah Mujahed, for example, was
apprehended in the village of Kar Marchi in the eastern province of Paktia in
2003. Mujahed was a Tajik militia commander who had led an armed uprising
against the Taliban in their waning days, but US forces accused him of having
ties to the insurgency. "In Bagram, we were handcuffed, blindfolded, and had
our feet chained for days," he recalls. "They didn't allow us to sleep at all
for 13 days and nights." A guard would strike his legs every time he dozed off.
Daily, he could hear the screams of tortured inmates and the unmistakable sound
of shackles dragging across the floor.
Then, one day, a team of soldiers dragged him to an aircraft, refusing to tell
him where he was going. Eventually he landed at another prison, where the air
felt thick and wet. As he walked through the row of cages, inmates began to
shout, "This is Guantanamo! You are in Guantanamo!" He would learn there that
he was accused of leading the Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (which
in reality was led by another person who had the same name and who died in
2006). The US eventually released him and returned him to Afghanistan.
Former Bagram detainees allege that they were regularly beaten, subjected to
blaring music 24 hours a day, prevented from sleeping, stripped naked and
forced to assume what interrogators term "stress positions". The nadir came in
late 2002 when interrogators beat two inmates to death.
The US Special Forces also run a second, secret prison somewhere on Bagram air
base to which the Red Cross still does not have access. Used primarily for
interrogations, it is so feared by prisoners that they have dubbed it the
"black jail".
One day two years ago, US forces came to get Noor Muhammad outside of the town
of Kajaki in the southern province of Helmand. Muhammad, a physician, was
running a clinic that served all comers - including the Taliban. The soldiers
raided his clinic and his home, killing five people (including two patients)
and detaining both his father and him. The next day, villagers found the
handcuffed corpse of Muhammad's father, apparently dead from a gunshot.
The soldiers took Muhammad to the black jail. "It was a tiny, narrow corridor,
with lots of cells on both sides and a big steel gate and bright lights. We
didn't know when it was night and when it was day." He was held in a concrete,
windowless room, in complete solitary confinement. Soldiers regularly dragged
him by his neck and refused him food and water. They accused him of providing
medical care to the insurgents, to which he replied, "I am a doctor. It's my
duty to provide care to every human being who comes to my clinic, whether they
are Taliban or from the government."
Eventually, Muhammad was released, but he has since closed his clinic and left
his home village. "I am scared of the Americans and the Taliban," he says. "I'm
happy my father is dead, so he doesn't have to experience this hell."
Afraid of the dark
Unlike the black jail, US officials have, in the past two years, moved to
reform the main prison at Bagram. Torture there has stopped and American prison
officials now boast that the typical inmate gains seven kilograms while in
custody. Sometime in the early months of this year, officials plan to open a
dazzling new prison - which will eventually replace Bagram - with huge, airy
cells, the latest medical equipment and rooms for vocational training. The
Bagram prison itself will be handed over to the Afghans in the coming year,
although the rest of the detention process will remain in US hands.
But human-rights advocates say that concerns about the detention process still
remain. The US Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that inmates at Guantanamo cannot be
stripped of their right to habeas corpus, but stopped short of making
the same argument for Bagram. (US officials say that Bagram is in the midst of
a war zone and therefore US domestic civil rights legislation does not apply.)
Unlike Guantanamo, inmates there do not have access to a lawyer. Most say they
have no idea why they have been detained. Inmates do now appear before a review
panel every six months, which is intended to reassess their detention, but
their ability to ask questions about their situation is limited. "I was only
allowed to answer 'yes' or 'no' and not explain anything at my hearing," says
Rehmatullah Muhammad.
Nonetheless, the improvement in Bagram's conditions raises the question: Can
the US fight a cleaner war? This is what Afghan war commander General Stanley
McChrystal promised this summer: fewer civilian casualties, fewer of the feared
house raids, and a more transparent detention process.
The American troops that operate under North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) command have begun to enforce stricter rules of engagement: they may now
officially hold detainees for only 96 hours before transferring them to the
Afghan authorities or freeing them, and Afghan forces must take the lead in
house searches. American soldiers, when questioned, bristle at these
restrictions - and have ways of circumventing them.
"Sometimes we detain people, then, when the 96 hours are up, we transfer them
to the Afghans," says one US Marine, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"They rough them up a bit for us and then send them back to us for another 96
hours. This keeps going until we get what we want."
A simpler way of dancing around the rules is to call in the US Special
Operations Forces - the Navy SEALS, Green Berets and others - which are not
under NATO command and so are not bound by the stricter rules of engagement.
These elite troops are behind most of the night raids and detentions in the
search for "high-value suspects".
United States military officials say in interviews that the new restrictions
have not affected the number of raids and detentions at all. The actual change,
however, is more subtle: the detention process has shifted almost entirely to
areas and actors that can best avoid public scrutiny: special forces and small
field prisons.
The shift signals a deeper reality of war, American soldiers say: you can't
fight guerrillas without invasive raids and detentions, any more than you could
fight them without bullets. Through the eyes of a US soldier, Afghanistan is a
scary place. The men are bearded and turbaned. They pray incessantly. In most
of the country, women are barred from leaving the house. Many Afghans own a
Kalashnikov. "You can't trust anyone," says Rodrigo Arias, a marine based in
the northeastern province of Kunar. "I've nearly been killed in ambushes but
the villagers don't tell us anything. But they usually know something."
An officer who has worked in the Field Detention Sites says that it takes
dozens of raids to turn up a useful suspect. "Sometimes you've got to bust down
doors. Sometimes you've got to twist arms. You have to cast a wide net, but
when you get the right person it makes all the difference."
For Arias, it's a matter of survival. "I want to go home in one piece. If that
means rounding people up, then round them up." To question this, he says, is to
question whether the war itself is worth fighting. "That's not my job. The
people in Washington can figure that out."
If night raids and detentions are an unavoidable part of modern
counter-insurgency warfare, then so is the resentment they breed. "We were all
happy when the Americans first came. We thought they would bring peace and
stability," says former detainee Rehmatullah. "But now most people in my
village want them to leave." A year after Rehmatullah was released, his nephew
was taken. Two months later, some other villagers were grabbed.
It has become a predictable pattern: Taliban forces ambush American convoys as
they pass through the village, and then retreat into the thick fruit orchards
that cover the area. The Americans then return at night to pick up suspects. In
the past two years, 16 people have been taken and 10 killed in night raids in
this single village of about 300, according to villagers. In the same period,
they say, the insurgents killed one local and did not take anyone hostage.
The people of this village therefore have begun to fear the night raids more
than the Taliban. There are now nights when Rehmatullah's children hear the
distant thrum of a helicopter and rush into his room. He consoles them, but
admits he needs solace himself. "I know I should be too old for it," he says,
"but this war has made me afraid of the dark."
Anand Gopal has reported in Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor
and the Wall Street Journal. His dispatches can be read at anandgopal.com. He
is currently working on a book about the Afghan war. This piece appears in
print in the latest issue of theNation
magazine. To catch him in an audio interview with TomDispatch's Timothy MacBain
discussing how he got this story, click
here.
(The research for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative
Journalism.)
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