by Graeme Smith
I had almost forgotten about that souvenir when a friend called me on November 18, 2009. “Turn on your television,” he said. Canadian news channels were going live with coverage of a parliamentary hearing on Afghan detainees. Richard Colvin, the diplomat who had struggled to fix the detainee system during his time in Afghanistan, had been summoned before a committee. By that point he had been promoted to an intelligence liaison job in Washington, but the committee asked him to delve into his archives and talk about what the Canadian embassy in Kabul knew about detainees in the earlier years of the war. Colvin said the torture went even beyond the methods I had reported, and described the transferred detainees being burned, knifed and raped. More importantly, he maintained that senior military and diplomatic officials decided to ignore warnings about the system in 2006 and 2007. “As I learned more about our detainee practices,” Colvin said, “I came to the conclusion that they were contrary to Canada’s values, contrary to Canada’s interests, contrary to Canada’s official policies, and also contrary to international law; that is, they were un-Canadian, counterproductive and probably illegal.”
Colvin’s testimony implied that Canada had knowingly broken international law, and it caused another firestorm of debate in Ottawa about detainee policy. The arguments focused on the big question that I had failed to resolve in my earlier investigation: How much did the foreign troops know? I decided to invite an old friend for dinner. I cooked him a steak, poured drinks, and afterward I brought out the pen. He admired its meticulous decoration, and then, with a thoughtful expression on his face, he removed the cap and started sketching on a piece of paper. He drew a map of the Kandahar governor’s palace, and marked the location of a small outpost where Canadian liaison officers lived. I nodded my head; I knew the place. He indicated a small office across a grassy courtyard, not far from the Canadians. “This was a torture chamber,” he said. I had never visited that part of the palace, but I had heard the stories about the governor’s bodyguards. I had even interviewed a detainee in Sarpoza prison who claimed the governor supervised his torture over a period of eighteen days at the palace, but we had never published that story. Part of the problem was that we lacked corroboration for the prisoner’s claims, and partly we were afraid of retribution by the governor against our local staff. Years later, holding my souvenir pen, my friend listened to my audio recording of that interview and confirmed my suspicions. Yes, he said, the governor held prisoners in his palace. Yes, he said, those inmates were tortured. He had personally seen one hapless prisoner hanging from the ceiling, “trussed like a chicken.” I pressed him on the question that still bothered me: Did any of the foreign troops know about the torture? My friend said he wasn’t sure. He suggested that I ask the Canadian soldiers themselves.
Over the next few weeks, I looked up several of my buddies from Kandahar. The liaison officers who worked near the palace were often smart guys, given the delicate task of managing relationships with the governor and Afghan security forces. With detainee issues making front-page news across the country, they knew why I was getting in touch. All of them said they did not see or hear any indications of torture by Afghan authorities, but that such tactics would be unsurprising. It was a violent country, they said; it was unreasonable to expect the Afghan forces to maintain high standards of conduct when they faced insurgents who regularly beheaded their captives. I was particularly curious about the soldiers’ relationships with the governor and his men. Other sources had confirmed that the palace guards were rounding up and violently interrogating suspected insurgents, and I wanted to know if the soldiers who worked near the palace, just a few minutes’ walk from the front door, knew anything about such activity. After all, they were so friendly with the governor that they played Xbox video games with him, and offered him breakfast cereals that would improve his daily intake of dietary fibre. The officers also cultivated close relationships with Afghan security officials, including the local intelligence chief. They needed information to save lives on the battlefield, so they avoided asking questions about how the Afghans conducted their interrogations.
In each of these conversations, I pulled out the prisoner’s pen and explained its history. I talked about what I learned from the detainees in Sarpoza prison, and the scars on inmates’ bodies. Every time, I got something like a shrug from the Canadian soldiers. They had varying degrees of understanding about what happened inside the governor’s palace—one of them told me that the governor’s men had borrowed extra plastic ties for their captives’ wrists—but all of them maintained that NATO was only supporting the sovereign government of Afghanistan. They couldn’t understand why the media were “freaking out” over the detainees. “I made a point of never asking how they got the information,” an officer said. “If they had told me about torture, it would have impeded my ability to get the intelligence we needed about the Taliban.”
These officers seemed like reasonable men. They exuded the kind of trustworthiness that you find in the best soldiers. If you need to give somebody a gun and ask him to protect your life, that’s the kind of person you want. But I came away from these conversations weighed down with sadness. Somebody high up the ranks put these soldiers in that little outpost in the governor’s front garden. Somebody told them to make friends with the Afghan authorities. Those orders came down from a military leadership that should have known how distasteful such arrangements were, how closely these troops were co-operating with torturers. The Canadians clandestinely listened to the governor’s cellphone conversations: recording, transcribing, and translating, analyzing. That intelligence was passed up the chain of command. My great fear is that somewhere in the buzz of information, there was a terrible calculation, a decision to avoid fighting by the rules. These days, when I look at my souvenir pen, I’m not reminded of how our journalism resulted in minor improvements in the detention system. I feel grief and rage. I imagine the man who sat in a Kandahar prison and looped copper wire through all those little beads. I think about how we failed him.
Unlike scars, these things don’t fade. Torture will remain a troubling mark on NATO’s history in Afghanistan. Fresh horrors continue to be revealed, followed by a shameful pattern of hand-wringing and uproar—and then a return to the routines of abuse. A British court ruled in June 2010 that it’s illegal for troops from the United Kingdom to transfer detainees into NDS custody in Kabul because of the high risk of torture, but allowed transfers in the southern provinces on condition of improved monitoring in local jails. Those detention facilities in the south showed no sign of improvement, however, when the United Nations conducted a landmark study of torture in Afghan custody in 2010 and 2011, sending interviewers to private meetings with 379 detainees at forty-seven detention centres across the country. The notorious NDS facility in Kandahar merited its own section in the final report, with two-thirds of respondents describing torture at the hands of interrogators. The abuses were similar to what I’d recorded in my investigation three years earlier, and most of the methods for inflicting pain remained consistent. As word leaked about the UN’s findings in September 2011, the NATO command suspended all transfers of prisoners into Afghan custody. Nobody could reasonably expect the freeze to last, however. Kate Clark, a well-known analyst, observed that “the scandal needs to be repeated, which makes it seem as if the amnesia over NDS torture is willful.”
This cycle of outrage and convenient forgetting seems likely to continue as the United States transfers prisoners as part of the handover to Afghan security forces in 2014. Even some human rights specialists throw up their hands when asked about this looming collision between principles and expediency. In theory, the foreign troops should never give detainees to authorities who practise torture; in practice, there is no obvious destination available for hundreds of prisoners as the international forces shut down their detention facilities. Apologists will point out that the new Afghan state is considerably less brutal than previous regimes; in the late 1800s, for example, petty thieves were puni
shed by having their hands chopped off and their bloody stumps plunged into boiling oil. The Taliban continued using amputation as a punishment into the 1990s, and also revived the old tradition of burying people alive. In that context, perhaps an Afghan system that flays captives with electrical cables could be viewed as a minor improvement. But that misses the essential distinction that the iron-fisted rulers of bygone eras did not have thousands of Western advisors looking over their shoulders. Afghans think about the current government, with some justification, as a creation of the international community and a living representation of modern ideas about democracy. The excesses of the NDS could be blamed, in the early years, on habits inherited from Soviet KGB trainers in the 1980s. But more than a decade of Western presence in the country means that some responsibility for the NDS actions must fall on its new partners. The United Nations noted that the NDS gets “technical assistance” and training from Germany, Britain and the United States, and pointedly referred to the fact that UN investigators tried and failed to get inside the notorious NDS Department 124, a holding facility located near the US embassy in Kabul and a building reputedly used as a base by the US Central Intelligence Agency. If the harsh practices of Afghan interrogators were only a matter of ancient customs, it would be reasonable to expect the nastiest reports to emerge from rural provinces that lack foreign supervision. But the opposite is true: among the detainees who had passed through Department 124, in the centre of Kabul, twenty-six of twenty-eight interviewed by the United Nations said they suffered torture—making such complaints more common than in Kandahar. One detainee said that Department 124 is commonly referred to as “Hell,” and another said that the torture included wrenching and twisting of genitals. This apparently happened within convenient walking distance of the nicely decorated apartments where US embassy officials sat behind their concrete blast walls. That proximity lies at the heart of the legacy problem in Afghanistan. The Westerners became intimately embroiled with a dirty war, and the filthy awfulness of it will remain a stain on their reputation.
Canadian artillery unit in Helmand province
CHAPTER 9
FIGHTING SEASON MAY 2007
The fighting season arrived in spring. Violence climbed slowly as the weather got warmer, then stagnated for a few weeks as everything paused for the opium harvest. Taliban fighters put down their guns and picked up farm tools. Then, at some point in April or May, the harvest finished and the young labourers turned into an insurgent army. You could almost pinpoint that moment—the end of harvest, the start of the fighting—to a particular week, depending on the maturity of the poppies. I couldn’t read anything in the rolling expanses of pink, purple and red flowers, but my local friends said the blooming fields in the spring of 2007 indicated that the violence would spike in the middle of May.
Military officials disagreed. The relative calm of the winter season had renewed their optimism, leading them to think that the Taliban were still reeling from their losses during Operation Medusa the previous year. The smart money inside the diplomatic compounds in Kabul and the military bases in Kandahar was betting that the insurgents had lost their momentum. Senior officials predicted the 2007 fighting season would bring less violence than the previous year, or at least nothing worse. I decided to spend a couple of weeks on the battlefield, testing that theory. My motivation wasn’t purely rational; researching local jails and the moral ambiguities of the NATO mission had left me yearning for the simplicity of battle. I had once joked with my colleagues that firefights don’t impress writers because there’s a limit to the narrative possibilities of “bang, bang, bang,” but at that point I wanted to immerse myself in the military’s narrow world. I wanted to forget about torture, wanted to leave behind those hard questions. I craved front lines, good guys and bad guys. I hopped a convoy and headed west.
At first, everything was peaceful. I spent a few days with an artillery unit on a hill known as Sperwan Ghar, southwest of Kandahar city. A road spiralled up the summit, which rose out of the surrounding farmland like a fairy-tale fortress, topped with US and Afghan flags. Everything you could see from the pinnacle of the hill had been a hot zone in the previous fighting season, when bodies littered a nearby road. Now the artillery was silent. Some of the platoons had not fired a single shot in months. The soldiers squatted on their mud parapets, peering down at villagers who wandered the fields with herds of goats, or collected the last of the poppy crop. The troops knew that the harvest would finish in the next week, and there wasn’t much they could do except watch the slow progress of days. The outpost baked in the sun.
The only enemies that showed up at first were the small creatures living in the crevices of the sandbag fortifications. One soldier forgot to shake out his sleeping bag before settling down at night and was bitten by a yellow scorpion. The sting numbed the right side of his body, and he was evacuated for medical treatment. A commander reassured the troops that he would return to duty soon, but the incident did nothing to ease the fear of pests. One night I was sitting with a few men on a makeshift porch, camouflage netting stretched across pine boards and plywood, leaning back against a wall of sandbags, when I heard a scurrying sound over my shoulder. A camel spider scuttled out of its burrow and paused a few centimetres from the trimmed line between a sergeant’s brush cut and his sunburned neck. I nudged him, and he jumped to his feet. Furry and brownish, the camel spider was legendary among foreign troops in Afghanistan. Many soldiers believed the arachnid was deadly, but this was just another of the false rumours about Afghanistan and its inhabitants. The sergeant jabbed at it with a pair of pliers, unsuccessfully, and the nimble thing slipped back into the sandbag wall. Another soldier brought a spray can of lubricant, flipped open a lighter, and scorched the whole area with his improvised flame-thrower. For a moment, a cluster of men watched smoke rise from the blackened fabric of the sandbags, inspecting for signs of life. I was sure the thing was dead, but the camel spider soon tumbled out of the sandbags and wriggled on the plywood, burnt and steaming. A soldier attacked it with a combat knife, cutting it into a dozen pieces. The corpse was tiny, barely enough charred legs and body to fill a matchbox. That night, the troops sprayed double the usual dose of repellants in their sleeping quarters. A chemical mist pervaded the bunker, curdling with the smells of sweat and foot fungus. I lay on my bunk, breathing the odours, reviewing the evening’s excitement in my mind and thinking about how the military sometimes fails to identify its real enemies. The camel spider had not posed any danger; while capable of painful bites, it wasn’t venomous. In fact, the arachnid was useful against genuine threats because it hunted poisonous insects and scorpions. But the troops were afraid and irritated, their skin covered with red bites from things that chewed on them while they slept. The camel spider was a convenient target. Its obliteration seemed in keeping with all of NATO’s misplaced fury.
Then again, Afghanistan breeds toughness. The following afternoon I joined a group of soldiers as they cheered two ants in a tug-of-war over a corn chip. The men were absorbed in this contest of insect strength; when somebody commented that the bugs seemed stronger in Afghanistan, everybody agreed. There was something urgent about the way the flies climbed on your face, worming their way into your eyes and nostrils, hunting for moisture. The flies were less skittish than the houseflies back home. You swatted at them and they circled back to buzz in your hair or sip the spittle from the corner of your mouth. If you wanted to get rid of them, killing was the only way.
The cigarette smoke also helped with the swarming flies. Soldiers played poker for cigarettes, the crumpled paper tubes trading hands so many times that they had to twist the tips to keep the tobacco from falling out. Sometimes they continued these games into the night, playing with headlamps under the stars, using red filters on their lights to make them less visible to Taliban in the fields beyond the perimeter. After months of deployment, they had exhausted most options for entertainment. Their stashes of men’s magazines were rumpled and used. I brou
ght them fresh copies of Maxim from a store at the airfield, but this was disappointingly tame for soldiers who had developed a taste for serious pornography. The troops had watched all the DVDs in their collections. They shared a laptop with intermittent access to a satellite modem, but there’s a limit to the number of times you can send your girlfriend e-mails about the weather during an unyielding series of sunny days. So the soldiers dealt another hand of cards, swatted flies, exhaled streams of tobacco smoke and waited for battle.
Just before it began, I caught a helicopter ride further west to an outpost in Sangin district of Helmand province. The base stood on a plateau overlooking a fertile valley, near a town that served as a hub for opium trafficking. There had recently been so few attacks that British troops boasted of their brigade commander feeling safe enough to casually shop in the bazaar. That spring they installed a new Afghan district leader and set up a few smaller patrol bases around the town. They hoped to start reconstruction work in the district and extend their security zone all the way up the valley to the Kajaki Dam so they could increase the supply of hydroelectricity to the south. As the harvest drew to a close, however, the troops saw signs that the fleeting peace was ending. Hundreds of young men appeared on the roads, crowded into trucks and cars. They were unarmed and got through NATO checkpoints by calling themselves farm labourers. Many of them obviously had been working the fields, because they had scarred hands and stained shirts, but the soldiers wondered where they were going next.
