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Afghanistan: The Brutal and Unnecessary War the
Media Aren't Telling You About
By Joshua Holland
27/02/08 "AlterNet" -- - They say journalists provide the first
draft of history. With the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan,
that draft led to an almost universal consensus, at least among
Americans, that the attack was a justifiable act of
self-defense. The Afghanistan action is commonly viewed as a
"clean" conflict as well -- a war prosecuted with minimal loss
of life, and one that didn't bring the kind of international
opprobrium onto the United States that the invasion of Iraq
would lead to a year later.
Those views are also held by
many Americans who are critical of the excesses of the Bush
administration's "War on Terror." But there's a disconnect
there. Everything that followed -- secret detentions, torture,
the invasion of Iraq, the assault on domestic dissent -- flowed
inevitably from the failure to challenge Bush's claim that an
act of terror required a military response. The United States
has a rich history of abandoning its purported liberal values
during times of war, and it was our acceptance of Bush's war
narrative that led to the abuses that have shattered America's
moral standing before the world.
In his book,
The
Guantánamo Files, historian and journalist Andy
Worthington offers a much-needed corrective to the draft of the
Afghanistan conflict that most Americans saw on their nightly
newscasts. Worthington is the first to detail the histories of
all 774 prisoners who have passed through the Bush
administration's "legal black hole" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But
his history starts in Afghanistan, and makes it abundantly clear
that the road to Guantánamo -- not to mention Abu Ghraib --
began in places like Kandahar.
AlterNet recently asked
Worthington what that road looked like at its point of origin.
Joshua Holland: I think
most Americans believe that we went into Afghanistan to rout
anti-American or anti-Western "jihadi," but your book captures
the fact that the U.S. entered on one side of a long-standing
civil war that had nothing to do with any sort of "clash of
civilizations" between East and West. Can you give us some sense
of what that conflict was about?
Andy Worthington: Sure,
it's a very good question, actually. Briefly, the roots of the
conflict lie in the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion in
the 1980s, when the United States, via Pakistani intermediaries,
and the Saudis vied to fund the mujahideen -- Afghan
warlords and their soldiers, backed up by a rather smaller
number of Arab recruits.
At the end of the 1980s, when
the Soviet Union withdrew, the country was plunged into a civil
war, as the various warlords, pumped up with billions of dollars
of U.S. and Saudi aid, fought each other to gain control of the
country. Tens of thousands of civilians died, and crime and
human rights abuses were rife.
Largely in response to this
lawlessness, the Taliban -- initially a group of ultraorthodox
religious students from the south of the country -- rose up to
cleanse the country by creating a pure Islamic state. Their
project, too, was soon derailed by brutality and by a religious
fundamentalism that shocked the West, but it was the struggle
between the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance
that attracted thousands of foreign foot soldiers to Afghanistan
in the 1990s, summoned by fatwas issued by radical sheikhs in
their homelands, which required them to help the Taliban in
their struggle against the Northern Alliance.
Osama Bin Laden, who had been
living in Saudi Arabia and Sudan in the post-Soviet period,
returned to Afghanistan in 1996 and became involved in funding
military training camps and building up his plans for a global,
anti-American jihad, but -- although there was some overlap
between Al Qaeda and parts of the Taliban leadership -- the vast
majority of the recruits, as I've indicated, were involved not
in a grand "clash of civilizations" but in a provincial
inter-Muslim civil war.
Holland: That's an
important point. There's a common belief that a seamless
integration existed between the Taliban and Bin Laden's group,
and that integration justified our attacking Afghanistan, a
nation-state, in "self-defense." But in reality, the Taliban was
busy fighting this inter-Muslim civil war and had little or no
role in Al Qaeda. Let's go a bit further: just how much overlap
was there?
Worthington: According to
a senior intelligence official interviewed by the journalist
David Rose in 2004, the overlap was very small. Rose was told,
"In 1996 it was nonexistent, and by 2001, no more than 50
people." Now this official was referring to an overlap of fairly
high-level people in both organizations, and certain
commentators have pointed out that Al Qaeda's "Arab Brigade" of
around 500 soldiers contributed to the Taliban's military
strength, but, to return to what we discussed before, this was
in the context of an inter-Muslim civil war, and not a war
against the United States.
There were certainly major
divisions within the Taliban leadership regarding Bin Laden, and
even Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, was apparently unimpressed
by Bin Laden in the years after his return to Afghanistan. In
1998, Omar had even been planning to betray Bin Laden to the
Saudis, but when Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania, and the U.S. retaliated by launching cruise
missile attacks on training camps in Afghanistan, Omar drew
closer to Bin laden. Even so, the Taliban offered to hand over
Bin laden after 9/11 if proof was offered of his involvement in
the 9/11 attacks.
Holland: They were so
close in 1998 -- the deal had been done, and two jets carrying
Saudi Prince Turki and a group of Saudi commandos had actually
landed in Afghanistan and were waiting to pick up Bin Laden when
the deal soured.
Worthington: That's
right. And another clear sign of the lies involved in the
"seamless integration" you refer to happened on Oct. 7, 2001,
the first night of "Operation Enduring Freedom," when the U.S.
military announced that it had bombed 23 Al Qaeda training
camps. As I mention in the book, of the dozens of training camps
established in Afghanistan from the 1980s onwards, most were
funded by Pakistan and wealthy donors in the Gulf countries.
Some were run by Afghan warlords, others by Pakistani groups and
others by militant groups from other countries. Although bin
Laden had a few camps of his own, it was inappropriate to
describe all the training camps in Afghanistan as "Al Qaeda
camps."
Holland: OK, let me go
back briefly to an earlier point. Supporters of Bush's global
network of "black" prisons say that those who ended up in them
were "unlawful combatants." And you said that a lot of people
from around the Muslim world were drawn to serve as foot
soldiers in Afghanistan's civil war, but in the book, you also
make it clear that many were not even foot soldiers -- not
combatants at all -- but religious students, aid workers and
other adventurous young people, and many of them would later get
caught up in the chaos that followed the invasion and ended up
at Gitmo.
Worthington: Yes, that's
right. I'd say that between 70 and 100 of the foreign --
non-Afghan -- detainees had traveled to Afghanistan to provide
humanitarian aid to the Afghan people, to teach or study the
Koran, as economic migrants, or even because they were curious
about the "pure Islamic state" that, in some quarters, the
Taliban was alleged to have established. A similar number were
captured in Pakistan. Charity workers were captured near the
border, where they had traveled to provide assistance at refugee
camps, and others -- including missionaries, entrepreneurs,
economic migrants, refugees and students -- were actually
captured elsewhere in Pakistan, in towns and cities far from the
"battlefields" of Afghanistan.
And then, of course, there are
the Afghan detainees, who made up over a quarter of Guantánamo's
total population. Many of these were unwilling conscripts, who
were forced to serve the Taliban, and most of the rest were
picked up either on the basis of false intelligence -- because
the U.S. forces did not know who to trust -- or were handed over
by their rivals, in business or in politics, who told false
stories to the Americans.
Holland: And what was the
process by which the U.S. military sorted out one from the other
-- how did they distinguish between "enemy combatants" and the
poor suckers that were caught in the wrong place at the wrong
time?
Worthington: There was no
process. In all previous wars, the U.S. military has followed
the Geneva Conventions, and, in accordance with Article 5 of the
Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, has held battlefield
tribunals to separate the wheat from the chaff -- or the
fighters from the farmers. In the first Gulf War, for example,
the military held 1,196 battlefield tribunals, and nearly
three-quarters of the prisoners were subsequently released.
In Afghanistan, however, not
only were there no battlefield tribunals, but Chris Mackey, who
worked as a senior interrogator in the prisons at the airbases
in Kandahar and Bagram, where the Guantánamo prisoners were
processed, noted in his book
The Interrogators that every single Arab who ended up
in U.S. custody was sent to Guantánamo on the orders of senior
figures in the military and the intelligence services, who
received the lists of prisoners at their base in Kuwait.
Although only Afghans with
"considerable intelligence value" were supposed to be sent to
Guantánamo, Mackey also made it clear that it was not until June
2002, when around 600 detainees were already in Guantánamo, that
those in charge on the ground in Afghanistan came up with a
category of temporary prisoner -- "persons under U.S. control"
-- who could be held for 14 days without being assigned a number
that entered the system overseen by military officials in
Kuwait. It was the only way that they could deal with at least
some of the many innocent Afghans who ended up in their custody.
Holland: A few of the
stories you tell in the book really drive these points home, so
I'd like to just ask you to briefly tell us the stories of a
couple of detainees. According to the U.S. military, there were
three juveniles under 16 years of age who were held at
Guantánamo. Choose any of the three, and tell us how he ended up
at Gitmo.
Worthington: Well, first
of all, there were actually far more than three detainees who
were under 16 years of age, and all of these detainees should
have counted as juveniles -- and been treated accordingly -- in
any civilized society.
The three you're talking about,
however, are three Afghan boys who were aged 12, 13 and 14 at
the time of their capture. Two were captured in a raid on the
compound of a minor Afghan warlord named Samoud, whose many
enemies seem to have included the Taliban, and the other --
14-year-old Mohammed Ismael Agha -- was actually delivered to
U.S. forces by the Taliban. He'd been looking for work with a
friend and had been obliged to spend the night at a Taliban
outpost. In the morning, the Taliban soldiers asked them to join
them, and when they refused, they were delivered to the nearest
U.S. base.
Holland: The military
says that efforts were made to provide "for their special
physical and emotional care," that they were housed "in a
separate detention facility modified to meet the special needs
of juveniles" and "were not restricted in the same manner as
adult detainees." Is that what you found?
Worthington: Up to a
point, yes. These three were, at some point, housed separately
in a block called Camp Iguana, and they were released in January
2004, although they should have been released much earlier. They
were the lucky ones, however. To give just one example, Agha's
companion, Abdul Qudus, who was also 14 years old, was not
released until 2005 or 2006, and there is no evidence that he --
or any of the other juveniles -- was held separately from the
rest of the adult population, or, for that matter, treated any
differently.
The most notorious case of a
juvenile in Guantánamo is, of course, the Canadian
Omar Khadr,
who was 15 years old when he was captured after a firefight in
July 2002, in which he allegedly killed a U.S. soldier. Khadr
was treated appallingly in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, and is
currently on trial in one of the administration's contentious
military commissions, in which it has recently been
revealed that
he might not even have been responsible for the death of the
U.S. soldier in the first place.
Holland: Who is Mohammed
Sadiq?
Worthington: Mohammed
Sadiq was Guantánamo's oldest prisoner. 88 years old at the time
of his capture, Sadiq was apparently seized because his nephew
had worked for the Taliban. U.S. forces bombed his house, took
all his belongings and delivered him to the prison at Kandahar
airbase. He was one of the first detainees to be released, in
October 2002, but the fact that he was sent to Guantánamo at all
was a disgrace, and it was reported, after his release, that he
was unable to come to terms with what had happened to him.
Holland: And, finally,
tell me who Abdul Razeq was?
Worthington: Abdul Razeq
was a severely disturbed schizophrenic who was kept isolated in
Kandahar, because, amongst other things, he had a tendency to
eat his own excrement. In a dehumanizing touch, the soldiers
referred to all the detainees as "Bob," and Razeq was known as
"Crazy Bob." He too was sent to Guantánamo, but was flown back
to Afghanistan in May 2002. Chris Mackey noted that he arrived
"strapped down in the center of the plane like Hannibal Lecter."
He was then placed in a maximum-security cell in a hospital,
where a journalist interviewed him. He was so disturbed that he
described the prison at Kandahar as a "hotel" and said that the
Americans had taken him to Guantánamo "to treat my mental
problems."
Holland: And the U.S.
thought these people were …
Worthington: "Enemy
combatants." That's how it worked. Everyone who ended up in U.S.
custody was an "enemy combatant." Essentially, when you look at
the lack of screening in Afghanistan and the failures of the
tribunal process that took place in Guantánamo from 2004 onwards
-- which Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, who worked on them, described
in an explosive
statement last year as reliant upon generalized and often
generic "evidence" that had nothing to do with the detainees in
question, and was designed merely to rubber-stamp their
designation as "enemy combatants" -- you realize that, in
connection with the "War on Terror," the presumption of
innocence has been done away with completely.
For the first four and a half
years after 9/11, every prisoner was effectively regarded as
guilty until proved guilty. After the tribunals, 38 detainees
were cleared for release -- although the administration, denying
the concepts of innocence and wrongful arrest, referred to them
as "no longer enemy combatants" -- and many more have been
cleared in the review boards that have taken place every year
since then, but for the 281 detainees who remain, it's apparent
that the "evidence" against them has never really been tested at
all.
Holland: As I was reading
the book, it struck me that not only did the American public --
not to mention the military and intelligence establishments --
have a totally false view of who the "enemy" was, but also that
there was a widespread belief that the Northern Alliance were
the "good guys." I didn't really sense any "good guys" in your
book -- who were we allying ourselves with?
Worthington: The short
answer is that, in an attempt not to get bogged down like the
Soviet Union did, the U.S. invasion involved just a few hundred
Special Forces operatives who hooked up with various Northern
Alliance leaders in northern Afghanistan and supported them with
money, arms and air power.
There were some principled
military commanders in the Northern Alliance -- not least Ahmed
Shah Massoud, the Alliance's charismatic leader, who was killed
by Al Qaeda assassins just two days before 9/11 -- but even
Massoud's men had been accused of atrocities over the years, and
what we should perhaps consider is that, at the base of
everything, Afghanistan is a disproportionately well-armed
country that has been psychologically brutalized by what is now
nearly 30 years of war.
Nevertheless, the invasion led
to some horrific events, in which the U.S. military was at least
partly complicit. In November 2001, after the surrender of the
city of Kunduz, Gen. Rashid Dostum, one of the Alliance leaders,
slaughtered hundreds, if not thousands of native and foreign
Taliban fighters by suffocating them in container trucks en
route to his prison at Sheberghan (death by container being a
fairly recent innovation that was practiced by both sides).
There appears to be evidence that U.S. forces were not unduly
put out by this turn of events, and that, moreover, they were
involved in the particularly brutal treatment of some of the
survivors at Dostum's prison.
In one sense, of course, all of
this could be regarded as part and parcel of the horrific
reality of warfare, but the U.S. record is no better in the
south of the country, where, in an attempt to foster support in
the Taliban's Pashtun heartlands, U.S. forces entered into
numerous dubious deals with various untrustworthy warlords,
which, in turn, led to many innocent Afghans being sent to
Guantánamo.
Holland: Now, in the book
you describe a scene of total chaos in the aftermath of the
invasion, and one of the common claims among so many of the
detainees who would end up at Gitmo was that they had been sold
to U.S. troops by these same allies -- or tribal leaders or
Taliban units or whoever encountered them -- for as much as
$5,000 per head. Essentially, there were real financial
incentives for claiming that some unlucky foot soldier or
Koranic student was a high-level Al Qaeda operative.
Worthington: Oh,
absolutely. The military's psyops teams came up with over a
hundred different leaflets and dropped millions of them all over
Afghanistan. Most of them fruitlessly offered rewards of $25
million for the capture of Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri
and Mullah Omar, but one in particular featured the following
message: "You can receive millions of dollars for helping the
anti-Taliban force catch Al Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is
enough money to take care of your family, your village, your
tribe for the rest of your life -- pay for livestock and doctors
and school books and housing for all your people."
And in Pakistan, the situation
was arguably even more corrupt. In his 2006 autobiography, In
the Line of Fire, President Musharraf boasted that, in
return for handing over 369 terror suspects (including many
transferred to Guantánamo), "We have earned bounty payments
totaling millions of dollars."
Holland: And those that
were turned over to the U.S. by various factions weren't lucky.
I think most people would be shocked at how abusive and violent
U.S. troops were towards the prisoners they held in Afghanistan.
Worthington: I think
you're right to raise that point, because Kandahar and Bagram
were really the front line in the "War on Terror," where
conditions were, I think it would be fair to say, primitive,
brutal and terrifying. In the early months, prisoners were
beaten, humiliated and prevented from speaking to one another.
The worst abuses, however, happened in Bagram from July 2002
onwards. That was when at least two prisoners were murdered --
including one, an innocent taxi driver named Dilawar, who is
featured in my book and is also the focus of Alex Gibney's
excellent documentary
Taxi to the Dark
Side.
And there were even worse
prisons in Afghanistan -- a number of secret, CIA-run prisons
(to this day no one knows exactly how many), including two near
Kabul. The "Dark Prison" was like a medieval torture dungeon,
but with 24-hour music and noise, and the other was the "Salt
Pit." Dozens of Guantánamo detainees passed through these
facilities, as well as other "ghost prisoners" who have
subsequently disappeared.
Holland: And that was a
model that was then taken to Abu Ghraib, as well as Gitmo?
Worthington: Sadly, yes.
The team responsible for the worst violence at Bagram -- at the
time of the murders -- was actually transferred to Abu Ghraib,
and much of the institutionalized violence at Guantánamo was
inspired by the Afghan prisons. It's also worth noting, however,
what happened at Guantánamo in the fall of 2002. The
administration was disappointed by the quality of the
intelligence obtained from the detainees and decided that it was
because they had been trained by Al Qaeda to resist
interrogation, whereas in fact they were mostly innocent men or
foot soldiers and had no worthwhile intelligence to give. In an
attempt to "break" the detainees, the Pentagon authorized the
use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," including prolonged
solitary confinement, forced nudity, the use of extreme heat and
cold, sexual humiliation and the prolonged use of painful stress
positions. The commander at the time was Geoffrey Miller, and he
was later sent to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" the Iraqi
operations, with the results that horrified the world when the
scandal broke in April 2004.
Holland: Let me shift
gears here for a moment. Bush's apologists often excuse the
kinds of abuses you describe by claiming that the prisoners held
in Gitmo were "captured on the field of battle." Was that always
the case?
Worthington: No, not at
all. The overwhelming majority were not captured on any kind of
battlefield at all and, as an
analysis of
Pentagon documents by the Seton Hall Law School showed, were not
even captured by U.S. forces. Eighty-six percent were captured
by the Americans' allies, who then handed them over, or sold
them, as discussed above. It's also worth noting that several
dozen detainees were captured in 17 other countries, including
Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Egypt, the Gambia, Georgia, Indonesia, Iran,
Mauritania, Thailand and Zambia.
After 9/11, many countries were
willing to cooperate with the U.S. in an attempt to track down
potential terrorists, but it's also important to understand that
the administration put enormous pressure on these countries. For
example, this is what happened to the six Algerian-born Bosnians
who are still in Guantánamo. The U.S. government accused them of
planning to blow up the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. The Bosnians
then imprisoned them and investigated them for three months but
found no incriminating evidence whatsoever. As soon as they were
released, however, they were seized by U.S. agents and taken to
Guantánamo. The Bosnians were powerless to prevent it.
Holland: I think we've
come to the heart of your book. The administration says that
those housed in Gitmo are "the worst of the worst." But you
claim that of the nearly 800 human beings who the U.S. captured
or purchased, held incognito without any legal rights, regularly
beat and on a few occasions allegedly murdered, only about 40
were die-hard anti-U.S. terrorists. How do you arrive at that?
Wouldn't real terrorists claim that they were just innocents
caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Worthington: My claim is
based firstly on statements made by dozens of high-level
military and intelligence sources cited by the
New York Times in June 2004, when 749 detainees had
been held at Guantánamo. These officials said that none of the
prisoners "ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda,"
and "only a relative handful -- some put the number at about a
dozen, others more than two dozen -- were sworn Qaeda members or
other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner
workings."
Ten more detainees were
transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September
2004 -- although I have no doubt that they were not all
terrorists -- and another 14 "high-value" detainees -- including
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four of the other men
charged
recently in connection with the 9/11 attacks -- were transferred
in September 2006.
Forty might therefore be too low
a figure, but I'm confident that it's no more than 50. As a
percentage of Guantánamo's total population, that's just 6
percent, which, as a success rate, is both disappointing and
disgraceful.
Holland: Finally, you
argue that all of these policies were dictated at the highest
levels of the U.S. government. Can you explain briefly what
makes you think that?
Worthington: Sure. Dick
Cheney and his advisors -- especially David Addington, his legal
counsel (and now chief of staff) -- came up with the military
order in November 2001 that authorized the president to capture
anyone he regarded as a terrorist anywhere in the world, declare
them an "enemy combatant" and hold them without charge or trial.
That same document also established the military commissions.
Then Cheney and his cabal persuaded the president to accept that
the prisoners were not protected by the Geneva Conventions and
in August 2002's "Torture Memo" sought to establish that
interrogations constituted torture only if the pain endured was
"of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical
injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or
even death." This in turn encouraged the widespread use of
"enhanced interrogation techniques," which, at Guantánamo, were
explicitly approved by Donald Rumsfeld.
There are many fine, principled
Americans who attempted to resist these innovations, or spoke
out against them, but the most insightful quote I found about
the implications of these policies came from Milton Bearden, a
former CIA bureau chief, who told David Rose, "It doesn't matter
what distribution that memo had or how tightly it was
controlled. That kind of thinking will permeate the system by
word of mouth. Anyone who suggests that this and other official
memos on this subject didn't have an impact doesn't know how
these things work on the ground."
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