The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (16 page)

I never worried about whether the guards stayed awake at Kandahar Air Field, in their high towers, and it wasn’t a bad place to spend the evening if you learned to embrace its charms and eccentricities. Most of the nightlife was tame, considering the pressures that build with thousands of men and a small number of women sleeping inside a high-security perimeter. Some soldiers limited themselves to small indulgences like Cuban cigars, an embargo-flaunting pleasure for American troops. Shops on the base also carried a bewildering number of magazines devoted to guns, motorcycles and semi-naked girls. Kiosks sold shirts emblazoned with a red-and-blue image that resembled the Major League Baseball logo, except with a soldier aiming a rifle and the slogan “Major League Infidel.” If those shirts suggested some kind of relationship between sport and killing, the impression was reinforced by the video games most popular among the soldiers. They preferred noisy shooting games, and sometimes I would pause near the rows of big-screen televisions, marvelling at
the strangeness of men with automatic rifles at their sides, absorbed in computer simulations of their actual jobs. Perhaps it was relaxing to spend time in a virtual world where death was not permanent, and victory required only a certain number of kills.

The food at military bases was unspectacular, a basic calorie-delivery system, but one Thanksgiving the usual deep-fried stuff in the cafeteria was replaced with a spread of turkey, stuffing and other festive fare decorated with ice sculptures and fountains lit with coloured lamps. Soldiers shuffled into the cafeteria past a glowing replica of a bonfire, through the door of a fake wigwam, and sat down to dinner under the unsettling gaze of Native Americans made with paper mache. A huge Jesus stretched his arms in blessing over a gingerbread model of the airfield. It was a scene so rich with echoes of other invasions, other holy wars, that it seemed like a parody.

Many people on the base, including journalists, were required to sign a document promising to avoid what the military called “fraternization,” a rule the senior brass took seriously. They expelled several people for having sex—including, famously, a top Canadian general. But as the months stretched on, the war settling into a tailspin, the sense of purpose that once drove the soldiers faded into the background and the personnel seemed to focus a little more on pleasure. One soldier told me that everybody wanted the keys to the armoured personnel carriers, because their air conditioning and soundproofing made them useful for trysts. A rumour circulated that somebody had smuggled a Filipina prostitute onto the camp, which would explain the leggy woman I had seen lounging in the sunshine with no apparent duties, wearing rhinestone sunglasses and reading pulp novels, but I could never confirm it. Nor could I ever confirm the widespread rumour that a soldier from one of the smaller countries, perhaps Estonia, had consumed too much moonshine and accepted a bet to swim across Emerald Lake, a large sewage pond filled with chemicals that turned the sludge a bright emerald colour. The soldier apparently made it across, but ended up in hospital with skin
problems. I’m not sure about that story—especially the part about the moonshine, because bootleggers sold enough hard liquor that amateur brewing wasn’t strictly necessary. One night I rode in a contractor’s sport-utility vehicle as he made his rounds of the base to deliver bottles, his cellphone ringing constantly because a US military captain kept demanding to know when his illicit booze would arrive. Bottles clinked in the storage compartment and rolled under the seats as the smuggler crawled slowly along the gravel roads of the base, carefully observing the speed limit to avoid the military police.

Life settled into a new routine in the aftermath of the raid on my office. I spent most nights at the military base, often venturing into the city for research in the daytime. But passing between those two worlds on a regular basis sometimes felt jarring, as if crossing between parallel universes, and my sense of discomfort would only grow in the following months. I was about to investigate a dark side of the military presence in the south.

Inside Sarpoza prison

I keep a souvenir that reminds me of my worst days in Afghanistan. It’s a ballpoint pen, decorated with copper wire threaded into a pattern of beads. Somebody spent many hours making the cheap writing instrument into a work of art, and there’s something pathetic about the scuffed plastic and its glittering enclosure. You cannot touch this object without feeling the poverty of the craftsman. A prisoner gave me this pen during our investigation of conditions in Afghan detention facilities in the spring of 2007. That was the season when I began to seriously doubt the nobility of the war.

My interest in the prisoners started a year earlier, as the fighting escalated. A translator for a Canadian television network brought a videotape to Kandahar Air Field, purported to show the confession of a Taliban commander. The video showed an exhausted man, with shackles on his bare feet, mumbling a brief description of a bombing. The translator had previously worked for US special forces, and he said the videotape came from his friends in Afghan intelligence. My colleagues weren’t sure what to make of the video because it contained little information, and the prisoner appeared to be taking cues from somebody off-camera. We asked the translator, “Was he tortured?” Yes, he replied, the man was beaten.

That story never went public because we couldn’t get enough details, but other troubling hints of prisoner mistreatment continued to emerge in the following months. Twice that spring, journalists travelling with troops in Kandahar heard about Afghan forces planning to kill a captive on the battlefield. After the second incident, a few reporters visited the Kandahar offices of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and asked the local director, a gentle old man, whether prisoners were mistreated in Afghan custody. The director answered yes, about 30 per cent of them are abused. He was probably understating the problem, but at the time the figure seemed shockingly large. It implied that NATO forces were capturing detainees and handing them over to local authorities who regularly abused them: a war crime, forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. A few days later, I sat down with the top NATO commander in the south, Brigadier-General Fraser, and asked him whether his soldiers respected the Conventions. The national forces under his command—British, Canadian, Dutch—had separate agreements with the Afghan government, but most of them stipulated that any prisoners taken by NATO soldiers should be quickly transferred to local custody. The Americans set up long-term detention facilities, but this merely delayed the problem until the US forces eventually transferred inmates to the Afghans down the line. Sooner or later, the NATO countries would rely on the Afghan government to accept prisoners and treat them humanely. The commander assured me the system was working. He hunched toward the voice recorder on the table between us, looked me in the eye, and spoke with deliberate slowness: “We respect the laws and the rights of individuals,” he said. “We will make sure those rights are maintained and nothing bad happens to those people.” The commander ignored a press officer who made nervous gestures. While in charge of all NATO forces in the region, Brigadier-General Fraser wore the uniform of the Canadian military, and the subject of detainees was politically radioactive in Canada—a country that prided itself as a
champion of human rights—so the commander showed courage by speaking about the topic. But it’s worth remembering what he told me that day, June 2, 2006, because it was a prelude to the scandal that erupted a year later. The general’s denial—“Nothing bad happens to those people”—could not have been more emphatic. He reacted angrily to my suggestion that Canadian forces were handing over prisoners into a system that was infamous for torture, though earlier that spring, the US State Department had published reports that Afghan authorities routinely mistreat detainees, noting that “torture and abuse consisted of pulling out fingernails and toenails, burning with hot oil, beatings, sexual humiliation, and sodomy.” But the brigadier-general told me those things were not happening in the south. When I asked how he could be certain, he replied curtly: “The ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] follows up on those issues.”

A few days before the commander gave me those assurances, in fact, a Canadian diplomat wrote to his superiors about serious complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross concerning a lack of co-operation from the military in Kandahar. An e-mail marked “secret,” which leaked out years later, warned Ottawa that the local ICRC representative was having difficulty getting his phone calls answered.

Meanwhile, in my conversation with the brigadier-general, I kept trying to understand his personal feelings about the issue. “I’m just asking you about the morality of it,” I said. “I mean, you’re not ignorant of these things. You know where these guys end up. And you know that where these guys end up isn’t up to international standards, by any means.”

“Well, I guess I’d ask you, what would you do? You’re asking me to say …” The commander trailed off. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me.”

“I’m asking, is it moral?”

“Is what moral? To hand Afghans over to Afghans?”

“Well, okay, maybe even better: Is it legal for Canadians to be putting Afghans in a system where we know they face a high percentage chance of abuse or torture?”

The military commander paused. My recording shows fourteen seconds of silence in the room. He continued: “We have procedures that are prepared to hand over potential detainees to legitimate authorities that we are comfortable with, that will do the right thing.”

“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.