by Graeme Smith
After thirty of these interviews, I felt exhausted but excited. We drove out through the tall black gates of the prison, and I swivelled around in the front seat to tell my translator that we were finally done with the investigation, and our work would change things. He gave me a condescending look, and said it didn’t matter how many prisoners we interviewed or what kind of articles we published. I disagreed, and gave him an impassioned speech about the values of Western democracies. I predicted that people at home in NATO countries would not be pleased to hear that their Afghan allies were torturers. Diplomats had been predicting the same thing: in December 2006, a secret memo from the Canadian embassy reported concerns that detainee practices did not conform with international law, and that public outcry about abuse could “kill the whole mission.”
When I published my findings, Canadians were especially upset about instances when troops may have known that Afghans were torturing their prisoners. In two cases, men had told me they were screaming loudly during torture by Afghan police at a small base where Canadian and local forces lived side by side. One of these men, an impoverished farmer with a thin face, described three days of interrogation without any meals at an outpost in western Kandahar. Between beatings, he said, Canadian soldiers visited him and offered advice about how to avoid mistreatment. “The Canadians told me, ‘Give them real information, or they will do more bad things to you,’ ” the farmer said, smiling sadly, showing me where the interrogators had punched out his teeth.
Other detainees said they were confused about whether the Canadians knew about the torture, and I decided to finish my main article about detainees with that note of uncertainty. I described the puzzlement of a former detainee who said the Canadian troops had treated him gently as they tied his hands and loaded him into a troop carrier—a soldier carefully placing a hand over his head and preventing the detainee from bumping his skull on the metal sides of the vehicle as it bounced along a dirt road. The gesture made him wonder why the soldiers had bothered to protect him from minor bumps when the Afghan police would beat him viciously later the same day. That anecdote reinforced the most troubling question for the NATO forces: How much did the foreign troops know? Were they sending prisoners into the torture chambers for the purpose of having them violently interrogated, preferring their urgent need for intelligence over concerns for human rights? Or, as with other aspects of the mission, were they unwitting allies of an Afghan regime that preyed on its people?
I hoped it was the latter. As years passed and secret documents emerged, however, I started to think the NATO forces had turned a blind eye. I can’t prove that any international forces knowingly colluded with torturers, but there was such a gap between public and private discussions that it made me suspicious. It made me angry, too, because I knew a lot of soldiers who never wanted to get involved with anything so nasty. These men and women get sent to faraway places and grind through their daily tasks in the belief that they’re obeying leaders who think carefully about their orders. Most soldiers are not experts in international law: they trust their commanders. Reading the behind-the-scenes arguments about detainees, in the reams of documents that later emerged amid scandals and legal action, it’s hard not to conclude that the commanders violated that trust.
Those troubling little gaps between public statements and the well-known but unspoken reality started to emerge in the aftermath of our stories. In public, the government dismissed the detainees’ complaints as Taliban propaganda. Ministers claimed that if any torture existed in the Kandahar prisons, it would have been reported by the AIHRC, the country’s own watchdog commission. The AIHRC gets millions of dollars from foreign donors such as Canada, and works with help from the United Nations to keep track of human rights issues. When my investigation was published, on April 23, 2007, Canada’s defence minister stood up in parliament and declared that AIHRC monitoring was enough. “I have the personal assurance of the leader of the human rights commission in Kandahar,” said the minister, Gordon O’Connor. The next day, I published another story revealing that the assurances were empty: the AIHRC was not allowed into the Kandahar intelligence prison. But the government stuck by its message that the AIHRC was the best safeguard against abuse in the system. On April 25, Canada’s prime minister responded to questions about whether AIHRC monitoring was sufficient. Here is Stephen Harper’s full answer, as noted in the parliamentary record:
Mr. Speaker, military leaders in Afghanistan are constantly in contact with their counterparts and with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. So far, they have not indicated to us that they have encountered these problems. Of course, we made it clear that we are there to help to any extent necessary.
I watched the prime minister speak those words, on live video streamed to my laptop at a military base in Kandahar, and shook my head in amazement. It was common knowledge that the AIHRC was well-intentioned but weak, with only three investigators who struggled to map the bewildering array of detainee issues in the southern region. I wasn’t the only person who felt shocked by the government response; one of my sources, a Canadian official, said he wished the politicians would pay more attention to the e-mails coming from Afghanistan before opening their mouths. I never fully understood what he meant until, years later, investigators released a batch of government e-mails about detainees. Two days before the prime minister said he had no indications of problems, the Canadian embassy in Kabul filed a classified report that confirmed the AIHRC having “access problems” at facilities where Afghan intelligence held prisoners. “The commission is unable to monitor the condition of detainees,” the document says.
In fact, the commission office in Kandahar faced much bigger problems than a lack of access. The staff themselves felt threatened in the aftermath of our stories. I had quoted the AIHRC’s local director offering a frank description of what prisoners said they experienced in the custody of Afghan intelligence agents. “The NDS is torturing detainees,” he told me. “I’ve heard stories of blood on the walls. It’s a terrifying place: dark, dirty and bloody. When you hear about this place, no man feels comfortable with himself.” But when my articles caused a scandal, he started giving interviews saying he had no knowledge of any torture. I visited him that week and asked him why he had reversed his position. His eyes watered and his voice quavered, but he continued saying he had no evidence that the NDS mistreated prisoners. The AIHRC’s lead investigator at the time, Amir Mohammed Ansari, had been helping me for weeks but suddenly stopped answering his phone. We had some idea the AIHRC was feeling pressure; a source in the Kandahar governor’s palace said he overheard a phone call from Hamid Karzai in which the Afghan president screamed at the Kandahar governor, upbraiding him for allowing the detainee issue to hurt relations with his foreign supporters. Immediately after that conversation, my source said, the governor in turn called the AIHRC director and screamed at him. Such anger must have been especially frightening for staff members at the human rights commission, who had first-hand knowledge of the unpleasant fates that awaited those who crossed the local authorities. But I didn’t realize the extent to which Kabul spelled out its threats until I later saw a confidential government document outlining a phone call from the NDS director to the acting head of the AIHRC on April 25, 2007. The intelligence chief accused the human rights group of espionage and threatened to arrest the AIHRC’s director in Kandahar “for being an Iranian spy.”
After such threats, the Kandahar office of the AIHRC toned down its criticism of the government. The regional director was not arrested, although one of his assistants quit his job to escape the pressure. I’ve also wondered about the strange disappearance of his chief investigator, Mr. Ansari. A dignified man with a neatly trimmed grey beard, he frequently visited rural districts to investigate reports of civilian casualties. During one such trip into neighbouring Helmand province in 2007, he was kidnapped by unknown gunmen. His family paid a ransom several months later, but received nothing except his bloody identificatio
n card and directions to his grave. The corpse was beheaded, which fit the pattern of Taliban executions, but sources in Kandahar have speculated that his death may have been related to the fact that he helped me learn about the detainee system.
If Mr. Ansari died for the sake of protecting human rights in Kandahar, he probably did not take much comfort from the small victories that resulted from our work together. Still, I remember the expression on his face when I visited his office after our stories were published. Powerful people were angry that we had stirred up so much trouble, and he was receiving serious threats, but the look in his eye was triumphant. Here’s how I described it to a friend:
from: Graeme Smith
to: Kenny Yum
date: Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 7:08 AM
I visited Kandahar city again yesterday and was astonished by how creepy things got after word circulated that I had picked a fight with the police, secret police and governor. Suddenly I had fewer friends.… After months of threats, the raid on my office, the kidnappings, it’s all finally caught up with me. I’m scared.
… anyway, it’s worth it. You should have seen the expression on the face of the AIHRC investigator when I showed up in his office. His boss was there, so he couldn’t say much, but he was basically like, “It’s bloody, but we won. We can get into the jail now.” And that was really valuable to me, the idea that maybe somewhere in the basement of the secret police prison a torturer might ease up a little bit because he’s afraid of leaving bruises or scars that might get reported. Who knows whether that will really happen, but it’s a daydream that keeps me going.
I still cling to the hope that we did a bit of good. The Canadian government continued defending its practices, but Ottawa issued an urgent demarche to several levels of the Afghan government on the day we published our first story. The first point of the demarche was that Canada took our allegations of torture “very seriously.” A flurry of meetings happened in Kabul, Kandahar and Ottawa, as senior officials discussed how to react. One memo suggests that the government initially considered a show of outrage without substantial changes. The diplomat Richard Colvin, serving at the time as second-in-command at the Canadian embassy in Kabul, wrote a dissenting view: “However much we demarche the National Directorate of Security (NDS), phone Karzai … or issue press releases, in the field, the same practices will continue as before.” He recommended Canada should start monitoring detainees for signs of abuse in Afghan custody. He also reported to his superiors about meeting the Afghan chief of intelligence, who claimed that his NDS agents could not be blamed for any torture because “many of those beaten were first beaten by the police.” Colvin replied that Canadians did not care which Afghan security force had abused detainees, and suggested the spy agency should make a public declaration of its commitment to human rights. Instead, the NDS published a statement calling our reporting “baseless.”
Canada’s allies reacted to our reports with greater alarm. The US ambassador to Kabul expressed concern to the Canadians, as did the civilian head of NATO, who said the issue could have “enormous political implications.” The Red Cross told the Canadians they should not be surprised by our investigation’s results: “… the allegations of abuse made by those Afghans interviewed by Graeme Smith fit a common pattern,” said an internal report. (Those comments were censored from the Canadians’ final report with big diagonal pen strokes.)
Questions about detainees became an ongoing drama in Ottawa, where the affair was widely considered the first scandal faced by the minority Conservative government. The affair also fuelled an ongoing legal challenge to the detainee transfer system. A federal judge planned to hear arguments for an interim injunction banning the transfer of detainees on May 3, but adjourned the hearing when the government surprised the court with news that Canada had changed its policy. Earlier that day in Kabul, Canada had signed a new bilateral agreement with Afghanistan, providing more stringent safeguards on its detainee transfers. Most importantly, this included a promise that Canadian human rights inspectors would monitor detainees in Afghan custody—something the British and Dutch were already doing. It was an abrupt policy shift, and temporarily quelled debate about the issue in Canada.
In private, however, the NATO countries continued to argue about detainee policy. One telling example was an August meeting of representatives from countries with large contingents of soldiers in southern Afghanistan. They talked about better ways of monitoring prisoners, especially inside the secretive NDS facilities, with a computer database of inmates and improved access for human rights investigators. A diplomat from the European Union said those measures weren’t enough to protect against torture, and suggested that transfers should be halted entirely. The diplomats considered avoiding the NDS by sending prisoners into the custody of other Afghan security forces, but concluded that none of the local authorities were trustworthy. “The general view was that GoA [Government of Afghanistan] as a whole is deeply problematic,” a memo said. The meeting even heard that some Afghan elders preferred having their tribesmen captured by US special forces rather than NATO, because the Americans shipped their captives to their own detention centre instead of dumping them into the cruel Afghan system. That must have seemed ironic to the diplomats gathered in Kabul because several countries had taken pains to arrange their detainee transfers in a way that avoided American custody. In the age of Guantanamo, they had sensed political risk in participating in a US system they viewed as unaccountable and perhaps illegal. Unfortunately, the alternative proved worse.
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 with
out 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.
