A young man named Dilawar set off from his home in his new taxi to find fares in a nearby town. His mother had asked him to fetch his married sisters and bring them home for the festival, but he said first he would go and earn some money since they needed to buy more fuel. They lived in a farming village called Yakubi, not far from Khost, in eastern Afghanistan. His father and brothers grew wheat, peanuts, and corn. Dilawar was a shy man who had never been to school. He was twenty-two, married, and had a two-year-old daughter, Rashida. He spent his free time sitting out in the fields chatting with his best friend and neighbor, Bacha Khel. He worked on the farm, driving the tractor, and earned money fetching stone from a nearby quarry and bringing it down in the tractor to market. Quarrying was heavy work, though, and so a few weeks earlier, the family had borrowed money to buy a taxi, a secondhand Toyota station wagon, for Dilawar to start a new job as a taxi driver.
He drove the forty-five minutes to Khost, passing the American military base, Camp Salerno, on the edge of the city. At the taxi stand in town, he found two passengers who lived in a village near his home, and at noon the three set off on the road back to Yakubi. As they passed the American base for the second time, the Afghans guarding the road pulled them over to search the car. When the guards found one of the passengers carrying a broken walkie-talkie, and then found a stabilizer, used to regulate electricity, in the trunk of the car, they detained the three. At nine o’clock that morning, Camp Salerno had come under rocket attack. The guards accused the three of involvement in the attack. They handed them over to American soldiers on the base and pulled the car into the base. Dilawar, who had never spent a night away from home, was about to spend the most terrifying days of his life.
On December 4, he was flown to Bagram Airbase and interned in the detention camp there. It was a makeshift jail set up inside a dilapidated two-story hangar, once used by the Soviet military as a machine repair workshop. The outer walls were clad in rusty metal sheets that covered the windows on both floors. No light or sound emanated from the building. Inside, eighty to one hundred people were held in pens divided up by chain-link fences the length of the ground floor. Prisoners were allowed to read the Koran but were forbidden to talk. Electric lights shone day and night. Interrogation rooms were on the second floor, along with a line of isolation cells. Dilawar was taken to one of the cells upstairs where new prisoners were held. A hood was placed over his head. His hands were cuffed and then chained to the wire mesh above his head, forcing him to stand with his hands stretched out and up. It was standard treatment, used to deprive new prisoners of sleep between interrogations. Several prisoners remember seeing Dilawar over the next few days. They did not know his name, but the interpreters told them he was from Yakubi. Abdul Jabar, a thirty-five-year-old taxi driver, was also from Yakubi and tried to whisper encouragement. He saw Dilawar struggling as guards were leading him down the stairs on the way to the bathroom. “He was very young and when they put on that hood, maybe he could not breathe,” Jabar suggested. When the guard released his chains, Dilawar lay down on the ground. “I was sure he was uncomfortable. I told him, ‘Don’t struggle because you make it worse for yourself. Don’t worry, you’ll be there a few days, and then you will be moved downstairs where it’s better.’ He was scared because he could not get enough oxygen.”6
All the detainees knew what happened upstairs in the isolation cells. A farmer and former mujahid, Hakim Shah, was held upstairs for sixteen days. For the first ten days, he was kept standing, stripped naked, with a hood over his head and his arms chained to the ceiling. “I had no clothes on at all. It was very cold. They did not let you sleep, day or night,” he said.7 He was let down to pray and go to the bathroom, and for interrogations, but then chained back up, day and night. The rooms were divided into cells by chain-link fencing covered with cloth. Military police guards would kick a soccer ball against the wire mesh or kick the door whenever a prisoner nodded off to sleep. By the tenth day, Shah’s legs had swelled so much that his shackles became tight and he lost all feeling in his legs and feet. A doctor came, and the guards released the shackles and let him sit down. Yet they still dragged him off for interrogations, naked and hooded.
One day a soldier held him in a kneeling position, his arms behind him as a female interrogator kicked him hard in the thigh. “She kicked me with her boot. She was just asking me a question,” he said. The pain was excruciating, and he could not use his leg for about a week, he said. The blow, a peroneal strike, a disabling blow to the side of the leg above the knee, was a favorite punishment that the military police guards and some interrogators used to subdue prisoners or to stop them falling asleep.
Dilawar spent five days in isolation and received repeated blows to his legs. Hakim Shah said he saw him one day being made to sweep the big room downstairs. “He did not look healthy,” Shah said. “His face was a dark color. His feet were chained so he could not move well. He was looking very worried.” Parkhuddin, one of Dilawar’s passengers, who was detained at the same time, heard a man in a neighboring cell calling for his mother and father, and believed it was Dilawar.8 On December 10, Dilawar was found dead in his cell.
A week later, the U.S. military announced that a man had died of a heart attack in U.S. custody. It was the second death of a detainee in Bagram within a week. Another man had died on December 3 of a pulmonary embolism, we were told. The Army Criminal Investigation Command completed an inquiry into the deaths without seeking charges against any of the soldiers involved. I was nevertheless curious to find out more about these detainees and why they were still fighting American forces. It took us weeks to track down their families. When I visited his family in Yakubi in February, Dilawar’s brother, Shahpoor, showed me a death certificate they had been given along with the body. The certificate was in English, and the family did not understand fully what it said. It was dated December 13, 2002, and was signed at the bottom by Major Elizabeth A. Rouse, a pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology based in Washington, D.C., and medical examiner Lieutenant Colonel Kathleen M. Ingwersen from the Army Medical Corps based in Landstuhl, Germany. It gave the circumstances of death: “Decedent was found unresponsive in his cell while in custody.” Under “Cause of death” was typed, “Blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease.” Mode of death, it stated, was “homicide.”9
I gasped as I read it. I had been looking to learn more about the Afghans being detained. I had not expected to find a homicide committed by American soldiers.
We traced the other man who died in Bagram. He was from Uruzgan. His name was Habibullah, and he was the brother of a prominent Taliban commander. Reportedly related by marriage to the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Habibullah was not a combatant. He was about thirty-five years old. He had worked in an office in Kandahar during the Taliban government and, trusting Karzai’s call for the Taliban to go home in peace, had returned to his father’s house in the provincial capital of Tarin Kot after the Taliban fell. He was arrested from his house by the Afghan governor of Uruzgan, Jan Mohammad, and handed over to American forces. Although he may well have possessed information of interest to interrogators, his treatment seems to have been entirely one of beatings and kicking. He died within three days of arriving at Bagram. The U.S. military said at first that he had died from natural causes but later stated that he had died from a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot that stops the blood flow to the lungs. The clot, we later learned, was caused by heavy blows to his legs. His death certificate also gave mode of death as “homicide.”10
The alleged homicides of two Afghans in American custody passed almost unnoticed when I first reported it in March 2003.11 The attitude from U.S. officials toward detainees had been aggressive and accusatory from the start. President George Bush had said in January 2003 that “all told, 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries.” Many others had met a different fate, he added. “Let’s put it this way, they are no longer a problem to the Un
ited States and our friends and allies.”12 The American general public seemed to be just fine with that state of affairs. By March, the United States was absorbed in preparations to invade Iraq.
A criminal investigation into the deaths was reopened but took two years to reach a conclusion. No one was ever charged with homicide.13 Meanwhile, the military intelligence team in charge at Bagram was redeployed to another prison, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where they continued the same practices that were eventually exposed in the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2004.
More than anything else, detention at Bagram Airbase signaled to Afghans that they were an occupied country. A decade later, Karzai insisted on taking over jurisdiction of all Afghan detainees—years after he should have. Following the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah, the U.S. military did improve conditions in Bagram, and there were no further deaths in custody there. Yet Bagram remained a black hole for inmates. Some were detained for years without trial and without contact with family or lawyers. It was not until 2008 that families were finally able to talk to detainees through a secure video link organized by the Red Cross. Many inmates were unjustly held, fingered by malicious or misguided informers with flimsy evidence and hearsay that would never have held up in a court of law. But there were no courts. There was no way for families to appeal or protest detention. “We don’t know who to complain to,” Gul Shah Khan, told me in 2008. His son, Ahmad Murid, twenty-four, had been held in Bagram for two and a half years without trial or investigation. “There is no place to make an appeal, to say what is true and what is false.”
For nearly the entire duration of the war, Afghanistan had no Status of Forces Agreement with the United States, which would formalize the right of American forces to detain and imprison Afghans. The Obama administration did eventually introduce military tribunals at Bagram, but the Afghans still felt many of those held were unjustly detained. It was not until 2012 that the two presidents signed an agreement for all detention facilities to be handed over to Afghan authorities.
American forces were fighting a war and capturing insurgents. They had a right to expect them to be detained and kept off the battlefield. Yet they cast their net too broadly. Thousands of Afghans passed through the humiliation and pain of Bagram and other detention centers around the country. Of them, 220 Afghans were sent to Guantánamo Bay. Only a dozen of those were important Taliban figures. The rest were minor figures or ordinary Afghans who were wrongly arrested, accused by rivals, or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.14
Some of those detained and killed were influential tribal figures, and their mistreatment did great harm to America’s image in Afghanistan. Whole tribes were angered by the harsh treatment meted out to respected elders. As their elders were locked up or killed, Afghans withdrew from cooperating with U.S. forces and the Karzai government. A Pashtun nobleman in Khost warned me of the problem early on in 2003. Haji Spin Bacha Zadran was an upright figure in a black turban, sixty years old and a former mujahideen commander. He lived in a mud-walled fortress on the edge of the town and was the first commander in his community to surrender his weapons to U.S. forces in a gesture of support for the new government. Yet soon after, led by a local rival, American forces arrested Haji Zadran. He was transferred to Bagram with a black hood over his head and spent the night standing chained to a pillar. He was held and interrogated for a month in Bagram and Kandahar. He did not show anger afterward, but he told me he had warned his interrogators that they were alienating the population. “I told them they should not arrest innocent people. They should try to be close to the people and should not make the people angry. Now the people do not like them because they are arresting people who are not guilty.”
When American forces detained a tribal elder from Kunar and former peace envoy, Haji Rohullah Wakil, 1,500 tribesmen descended on Kabul to ask Karzai to intercede for his release. “He has great fame, his father, grandfather, and ancestors were tribal leaders. They mediated and solved problems between tribes. That is why they are so important and why they have support,” one of the elders, Ghulam Nabi, told me. “We need him urgently in our region. That is why we came to say he is innocent.” Karzai knew such men personally and risked losing the support of their tribal followers with such blunders. Yet even the president struggled to win their release from the Pentagon, which oversaw Guantánamo Bay detentions. Kunar was one of the most troublesome provinces, where U.S. forces fought a grueling insurgency. Men like Rohullah Wakil, who knew people on both sides, could have prevented much of the conflict. Despite repeated requests for his release, he was detained in Guantánamo for nearly six years.
One of the gravest missteps alienated an entire tribe in southern Afghanistan. One night in May 2002, American troops made an airborne assault on a village on the edge of the blistering hot red desert of Registan. Bandi Temur was a smuggling crossroads, where opium and heroin passed down from the poppy fields of Helmand and Uruzgan and across the desert to Pakistan and Iran. It was the home of Haji Berget, one of the first sponsors of Mullah Omar. He was a mujahideen leader and prominent smuggler, and his tribe, the Ishaqzai, dominated the opium business. Yet by 2002, Haji Berget was old and frail. Villagers said he was a hundred years old. That night he had wandered from his home to the village mosque and lay down on the cool stone floor. American soldiers shot him where he lay, with a bullet to the head. They took his body away along with fifty-five men detained in the village. They left behind a bullet mark and shards of his skull in a pool of blood on the mosque floor.
Incensed, Ishaqzai tribesmen marched on Kandahar and threatened to storm the governor’s office. “They are thinking of when the Russians came and killed a lot of people, and they are thinking that the Americans and British are going to repeat that,” General Akram Khakrezwal, the police chief in Kandahar, warned. Hundreds of tribesmen from three provinces turned out for Berget’s funeral, lining the hillside by his village. The tribe had threatened to withdraw its support for the Karzai government unless his body was returned and the villagers released, elders told me. The Ishaqzai thus became deadly opponents of the foreign forces across a swath of territory. Haji Berget’s sons took up arms and joined the Taliban. By targeting their leader, American forces had incurred the enmity of an entire tribe.
There was one American officer who seemed to understand Afghans better than most. Colonel John W. “Mick” Nicholson Jr., a lanky, energetic ranger and paratrooper, was commander of 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, in eastern Afghanistan in 2007 when I first met him. In his sixteen-month tour, he oversaw a threefold increase of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan in a serious push to combat the growing insurgency and cross-border infiltration. The extra troops came with a new orientation toward counterinsurgency and tactics designed to win over the Afghan population. Nicholson deployed troops to remote outposts in the mountainous province of Kunar where they tried to befriend the local populace, a policy that he defended as strategically, tactically, and operationally necessary. At the time, bin Laden and other high-level targets were thought to be hiding in the northeastern border region, and insurgents were using the region to filter in from Pakistan to target central regions around Kabul.
Nicholson’s tenure in eastern Afghanistan was one of the first and most impressive efforts to switch U.S. forces away from the broad sweeps and house raids of counterterrorism operations. By placing his troops way out in the regions among the community, he wanted to build a positive government presence. “Always seek to do no harm to the Afghan people because ultimately it is the people and their connection with the government that we are trying to nurture and grow,” Nicholson told troops at a change of command ceremony on June 1, 2007, at a small mountain outpost at Naray, in Kunar province. “Central government has never meant anything good or brought anything good to them,” he told me. “So we have to overcome the skepticism and we do that mainly through actions, not words,” he said. “You have to show them that you mean it.”
He would run with practiced rapidity through
the three stages of counterinsurgency strategy, what he jokingly referred to as the Nicholson Doctrine: separate the people from the enemy; connect the people to the government by providing security and basic assistance; and then turn that connection into an enduring relationship so the people see their future with the government, not with the insurgents.
Nicholson’s affinity for the Afghans may have had something to do with a family connection—a distant relative, Brigadier General John Nicholson, had served in the same tribal areas in the British imperial army. Or it was his own strong sense of right and wrong. That stood out with his public reaction to a calamity on March 4, 2007, when a U.S. Marine Special Operations Company ran amok along a busy main highway that runs from the town of Jalalabad toward the Pakistani border. The thirty-man platoon was hit by a suicide car bomb in the midst of heavy traffic at a village called Spinpul. One marine was wounded in the arm by shrapnel, but otherwise the unit was unharmed. Yet in the panic and confusion after the bomb, the Marines reacted ferociously, blasting through the supposed ambush, firing indiscriminately at passing cars, pedestrians, and even people working in the fields. Along a ten-mile stretch of road, they killed as many as nineteen people and wounded fifty others. One of those killed was a young bride, Yadwaro, only sixteen, who had been cutting grass for the family’s animals in the field outside their home. She hoisted the bundle onto her head and was walking back to the house when she was struck down by a Marines’ long-range machine gun. She fell dead across her own threshold. “They committed a great cruelty,” her father-in-law, Ghor Ghashta, said. Another victim was a neighbor, seventy-year-old Shin Gul, who was waiting beside the road to catch a ride to town to do some shopping. He was cut down on the spot. His body was so torn apart that his son, Mohammad Ayub, thirty-five, said he could not recognize him. “I saw a notebook in his pocket and then I knew it was him,” he said.
The Wrong Enemy Page 14
