Mustafa Qadri,
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 March 2011 12.52 GMT

The admission by Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistan president, of British complicity in torture on BBC2′s The Secret War on Terror should not surprise anyone. What is more disheartening is the prospect that authorities remain complicit in torture despite the denials and all that has happened over the past 10 years.

But perhaps that should not be surprising. Over the weekend, senior US state department spokesperson Phillip Crowley was forced to resign for saying the treatment of alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning was“ridiculous… counterproductive and stupid”. His comments came afterManning claimed to be stripped naked and forced to parade in front of his guards and placed on ‘punitive’ suicide watch.

President Obama has backtracked on one of the first promises of his tenure. When he approved the continuation of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp this month, despite an earlier promise to close the controversial facility within a year of coming to office, Obama effectively endorsed the inhumane and degrading treatment of 172 terrorism suspects that must surely be tantamount to torture. In Afghanistan, an even larger detention centre at Bagram airbase, known as the “New Guantánamo”, was touted as an alternative to the Cuban naval base. Now it appears both will be in continuous operation into the foreseeable future.

Bagram and Guantánamo are only two parts of an international network of detention facilities across the globe where western governments can escape the prying checks and balances that ought to be the measure of any civilised society.

Like the earlier claims within elite circles to have been fooled by Tony Blair’s dossier and the invasion of Iraq, assertions by British intelligence authorities that they did not know terrorism suspects would be tortured in Pakistan must be met with extreme scepticism.

Successive prime ministers have been happy to describe Pakistan as the centre of global terrorism, but it has also been a centre for western outsourcing of torture. For years, Amnesty International and several other rights groups have reported on the widespread use of torture at all levels of Pakistan’s law enforcement and security authorities, in neighbouring Afghanistan, and in every one of the countries used as rendition sites by Britain and the US. Officials in Whitehall cannot plead ignorance of this reality.

When British torture victim Binyam Mohammad revealed he was strung upside down and beaten with a strap after being sent to Pakistan by British intelligence, it should have immediately resonated with reports of the treatment of thousands of Pakistanis held in secret detention by their intelligence agencies.

“Never once,” said Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s leader for the first seven years after the September 11 attacks, did British authorities tell him not to torture terrorism suspects. He argues that the silence was tantamount to “tacit approval” of what Pakistan security authorities were doing.

In last night’s programme, former CIA chief Michael Hayden justified the use of waterboarding on terrorism suspects, as one of the “heroic choices” that unearthed a “treasure trove” of information.

One of the oldest devices used to conceal abuse is to clothe them in the language of necessary precaution. The eternal argument in favour of torture in secret detention facilities is that our world is a dangerous place and that extraordinary measures must be taken to maintain our safety.

But torture is an unreliable method for obtaining information on suspected terrorists. Study after study has shown that victims of torture will tell their tormentors whatever they want to hear to end their ordeal. Moreover, victims of torture are often so mentally and physically injuredby the experience that their value as witnesses is irreparably damaged, a key reason for the difficulty in convicting alleged terrorists the world over. Most important of all, torture and other abuse in detention is a moral aberration. Our support or involvement in these practices effectively signals that there is no distinction between us and the enemies we rightly describe as extremists.

Last year MI6′s Sir John Sawers arrogantly proclaimed that torture was not an abstract question “for philosophy courses or searching editorials”, but “real, constant, operational dilemmas”. Ironically, it is proponents of torture who are most liable to drift to abstractions and hypothetical scenarios to justify abuses such as waterboarding that destroy real lives and condemn democratic, plural societies like Britain to the scorn usually reserved for the most repressive regimes. Officials like Sawers use equally esoteric bureaucratic hurdles to maintain plausible deniability over their complicity in torture.

The detainee inquiry set up by David Cameron’s government is a welcome development. But it has regrettably stated that it is not obliged to comply with international and European standards of human rights. Last month Amnesty International and eight other organisations called on the British government to, among other things, ensure that the inquiry has a mechanism to independently decide what evidence should be made public, and powers to compel evidence.

“And this also has been one of the dark places of the Earth,” says Conrad’s protagonist in Heart of Darkness as he travels down the river Thames. And just as we learn in that cautionary tale, a sordid dark trail still links distant torture chambers to the heart of our governments. Unless and until that link is broken, and all individuals guilty of or complicit in torture are brought to justice, we cannot hope to keep our societies truly safe.

[This article first appeared in The Guardian on March 15, 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2011/mar/15/torture-pervez-musharraf-tacit-approval]

With the death of another Australian soldier in Afghanistan this week, what are the prospects for peace in the region? Mustafa Qadri reviews political and strategic developments

As the Australian Defence Force mourns its 11th soldier to die in Afghanistan, Private Benjamin Ranaudo, and more than 400 additional troops prepare to travel to the region, many Australians are asking what the future of the conflict holds.

After much anticipation, the United States has finally started to reveal its political and military strategy in the country.

Soon after entering office, President Obama delivered on an election campaign pledge by boosting troop numbers from around 30,000 to 50,000. Last month the Administration removed General David McKiernan as its army chief in Afghanistan. McKiernan, who was effectively responsible for all foreign and Afghan forces in the country, was considered too much of a traditionalist to tackle the unconventional tactics used by the Taliban in the country. He was replaced by the Special Forces-trained General Stanley McChrystal who is counted as an expert in counter-insurgency warfare.

Along with a major upscale in so-called targeted missile strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Pakistan, American and British-led forces of predominantly Afghan National Army soldiers have, since the beginning of July, commenced the most ambitious ground invasions of the Taliban heartlands of south and east Afghanistan in the past five years.

Operations Khanjar (Pashto for “sword strike”) and Panchai Palang (Pashto for “Panther’s claw”), the respective American and British ground assaults in the southern province of Helmand, are the first of these invasions. Their ostensible aim is to “flush out” the Taliban and create enough stability for reconstruction activities and voting in the August presidential elections to take place safely.

According to Operation Khanjar commander Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, the operations will differ from previous expeditions because “where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces”.

There is an inherently simple logic to this. In the past, foreign armies in Afghanistan would take over a region with overwhelming qualitative and quantitative military power only to quickly return to their fortress-like compounds. The Taliban — a loose term referring not only to the original members of the Taliban but also to a wide assortment of young tribesman lured by honour, anger or coercion — would merely melt into the civilian population or retreat to other areas such as the border regions of Pakistan. This time, Western planners hope that the decision to remain in remote captured areas and to develop infrastructure will prevent the Taliban from returning and reduce local sympathy for them.

But tensions between Afghans and foreign forces remain high.

The latest source of tension has been the murder of a police chief and five others in another vital province to the south, Kandahar, by private Afghan military contractor on the payroll of US Special Forces. Although the United States said the contractors acted alone, Afghan authorities held US forces responsible for the deaths.

And when Benjamin Ranaudo was killed last week, another Australian digger was seriously injured, along with three Afghan civilians, by an improvised explosive device in the central Afghan Baluchi valley. Australian forces have been involved in search and destroy and reconstruction missions in the area since 2005.

So far, 2009 has been the deadliest year of fighting for NATO forces in Afghanistan, with 207 killed since the beginning of the year. According to the website icasualties, the death toll for all of 2008 was 294. By contrast, US and ISAF officials claim that their forces have killed several hundred Taliban fighters in the same period. Although no official numbers are available, based on figures provided in media reports, Afghan National Army casualties are believed to number in the several hundreds too. Furthermore, up to 500 Afghan civilians have been killed in the fighting so far this year.

Despite the carnage, the war is expected to escalate and so are “hit and run” attacks by the Taliban— like the recent capture by insurgents of three Afghans and a US soldier in the eastern province of Paktika. Private Bowe Bergdahl soon appeared in a video calling for a withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan, a key Taliban demand over the past eight years.

Although visibly shaken in the video, which is believed to have been released by the pro-Taliban Haqqani network, Bergdahl certainly appeared to be in better spirits than the thousands of insurgents and civilians imprisoned by US and Afghan authorities. One of those prisons, at the massive ex-Soviet Bagram Airbase, has been dubbed Obama’s Guantanamo Bay. Allegations of physical abuse eerily reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are rife at Bagram.

As civil rights lawyer Kal Raustiala explains, the Obama Administration has taken a leaf out of the Bush White House arguing that US Constitutional protections of habeas corpus do not apply to Bagram Airbase because it is situated in a war zone.

That argument was defeated in the US Federal Court earlier this year. But the Obama Administration is appealing the decision and there are plans to expand Bagram’s prison complex, along with the infamous Pul-e-Chakri prison in the outskirts of Kabul.

“There are still perhaps as many as 18,000 people in legal black holes,” according to the UK-based charity Reprieve. Up to 1100 of those are believed to be held at Bagram while Pul-e-Chakri may contain as many as four times that number. They include suspected terrorists from other countries. Inmate numbers are expected to rise with the capture of more real or suspected insurgents during the fighting this year.

To its credit, however, US authorities may be on the cusp of a new program to improve Afghanistan’s moribund prison and justice systems. As the New York Times reports this week, a US military review has called for a sweeping reform of detention and interrogation practices at Bagram and across the Afghanistan justice system in order to douse Taliban recruitment among resentful prisoners. The review also recommends the separation of the most ardent insurgents from other inmates. Ultimately, the US would finance Afghan-run prisons that would teach prisoners vocational skills and more moderate interpretations of Islam.

In the long term, reforms such as these may prove more powerful than more boots on the ground.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/07/21/summer-campaigns-heat-afghanistan

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