America's Secret Afghan Prisons

Image by Truthout.org via Flickr

January 28, 2010

The research for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. This article also appears online at TomDispatch.com. You can listen to an interview with Anand Gopal here.

One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town's bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost's dusty streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaargoers for ransom.

But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat handwritten note on Red Cross stationery to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. US forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn't know when he would be freed.

In the past few years Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan's rugged heartland have begun to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In its attempt to stamp out the growing Taliban insurgency and Al Qaeda, the US military has been arresting suspects and sending them to one of a number of secret detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families. These night raids have become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The raids and detentions, little known or understood outside the Pashtun villages, have been turning Afghans against the very forces many of them greeted as liberators just a few years ago.

One Dark Night in November

November 19, 2009, 3:15 am. A loud blast woke the villagers of a leafy neighborhood outside Ghazni, a city of ancient provenance in the country's south. A team of US soldiers burst through the front gate of the home of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for Afghanistan's agriculture minister. Qarar was in Kabul at the time, but his relatives were home, four of them sleeping in the family's one-room guesthouse. One of them, Hamidullah, who sold carrots at the local bazaar, ran toward the door of the guesthouse. He was immediately shot but managed to crawl back inside, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Then Azim, a baker, darted toward his injured cousin. He, too, was shot and crumpled to the floor. The fallen men cried out to the two relatives--both of them children--remaining in the room. But they refused to move, glued to their beds in silent horror.

The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates and forced open closets. Finally they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. The Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of Al Qaeda.

They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, US forces released Rahman's cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.

"We've called his phone, but it doesn't answer," said his cousin Qarar, the agriculture minister's spokesman. Using his powerful connections, Qarar enlisted local police, parliamentarians, the governor and even the agriculture minister himself in the search for his cousin, but they turned up nothing. Government officials who independently investigated the scene in the aftermath of the raid and corroborated the claims of the family also pressed for an answer as to why two of Qarar's family members were killed. American forces issued a statement saying that the dead were "enemy militants [who] demonstrated hostile intent."

Weeks after the raid, the family remains bitter. "Everyone in the area knew we were a family that worked for the government," Qarar said. "Rahman couldn't even leave the city, because if the Taliban caught him in the countryside they would have killed him."

Beyond the question of Rahman's guilt or innocence, it's how he was taken that has left such a residue of hatred among his family. "Did they have to kill my cousins? Did they have to destroy our house?" Qarar asked. "They knew where Rahman worked. Couldn't they have at least tried to come with a warrant in the daytime? We would have forced Rahman to comply."

"I used to go on TV and argue that people should support this government and the foreigners," he added. "But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so? I don't care if I get fired for saying it, but that's the truth."

The Dogs of War

Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one of a series of prisons on US military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance. They are small holding areas, often just a clutch of cells divided by plywood, and are mainly used for prisoner interrogations.

In the early years of the war, these were but way stations for those en route to Bagram prison, a facility with a notorious reputation for abusive behavior. As a spotlight of international attention fell on Bagram in recent years, wardens there cleaned up their act, and the mistreatment of prisoners began to shift to the little-noticed Field Detention Sites.

Of the twenty-four former detainees interviewed for this article, seventeen claim to have been abused at or en route to these sites. Doctors, government officials and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, an independent Afghan body mandated by the Afghan Constitution to investigate abuse allegations, corroborate twelve of these claims.

One of these former detainees is Noor Agha Sher Khan, who used to be a police officer in Gardez, a mud-caked town in the eastern part of the country. According to Sher Khan, American forces detained him in a night raid in 2003 and brought him to a Field Detention Site at a nearby US base. "They interrogated me the whole night," he recalled, "but I had nothing to tell them." Sher Khan worked for a police commander whom US forces had detained on suspicion of having ties to the insurgency. He had occasionally acted as a driver for this commander, which made him suspicious in American eyes.

The interrogators blindfolded him, taped his mouth shut and chained him to the ceiling, he alleges. Occasionally they unleashed a dog, which repeatedly bit him. At one point they removed the blindfold and forced him to kneel on a long wooden bar. "They tied my hands to a pulley [above] and pushed me back and forth as the bar rolled across my shins. I screamed and screamed." They then pushed him to the ground and forced him to swallow twelve bottles of water. "Two people held my mouth open, and they poured water down my throat until my stomach was full and I became unconscious," he said. "It was as if someone had inflated me." After he was roused, he vomited uncontrollably.

This continued for a number of days. Sometimes he was hung upside down from the ceiling, other times he was blindfolded for extended periods. Eventually he was moved to Bagram, where the torture ceased. Four months later he was quietly released, with a letter of apology from US authorities for wrongfully imprisoning him.

An investigation of Sher Khan's case by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and an independent doctor found that he had wounds consistent with the abusive treatment he alleges. American forces have declined to comment on the specifics of his case, but a spokesman said that some soldiers involved in detentions in this part of the country had been given unspecified "administrative punishments." He added that "all detainees are treated humanely," except for isolated cases.

The Disappeared

Some of those taken to the Field Detention Sites are deemed innocuous and never sent to Bagram. Even then, some allege abuse. Such was the case with Hajji Ehsanullah, snatched one winter night in 2008 from his home in the southern province of Zabul. He was taken to a detention site in Khost Province, some 200 miles away. He returned home thirteen days later, his skin scarred by dog bites and with memory difficulties that, according to his doctor, resulted from a blow to the head. American forces had dropped him off at a gas station in Khost after three days of interrogation. It took him ten more days to find his way home.

Others taken to these sites seem to have disappeared entirely. In the hardscrabble villages of the Pashtun south, where rumors grow more abundantly than the most bountiful crop, locals whisper tales of people who were captured and executed. Most have no evidence. But occasionally a body turns up. Such was the case at a detention site on a US military base in Helmand Province, where in 2003 a US military coroner wrote in the autopsy report of a detainee who died in US custody (later made available through the Freedom of Information Act): "Death caused by the multiple blunt force injuries to the lower torso and legs complicated by rhabdomyolysis (release of toxic byproducts into the system due to destruction of muscle). Manner of death is homicide."

In the dust-swept province of Khost one day this past December, US forces launched a night raid on the village of Motai, killing six people and capturing nine, according to nearly a dozen local government authorities and witnesses. Two days later, the bodies of two of those detained--plastic cuffs binding their hands--were found more than a mile from the largest US base in the area. A US military spokesman denies any involvement in the deaths and declines to comment on the details of the raid. Local Afghan officials and tribal elders steadfastly maintain that the two were killed while in US custody. American authorities released four other villagers in subsequent days. The fate of the three remaining captives is unknown.

The matter could be cleared up if the US military were less secretive about its detention process. But secrecy has been the order of the day. The nine Field Detention Sites are enveloped in a blanket of official secrecy, but at least the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations are aware of them. There may, however, be other sites whose existence on the scores of US and Afghan military bases that dot the country have not been disclosed. One example, according to former detainees, is a detention facility at Rish-Khor, an Afghan army base that sits atop a mountain overlooking the capital, Kabul.

One night last year US forces raided Zaiwalat, a tiny village that fits snugly into the mountains of Wardak Province, a few dozen miles west of Kabul, and netted nine locals. They brought the captives to Rish-Khor and interrogated them for three days. "They kept us in a container," recalled Rehmatullah Muhammad, one of the nine. "It was made of steel. We were handcuffed for three days continuously. We barely slept those days." The plain-clothed interrogators accused Muhammad and the others of giving food and shelter to the Taliban. The suspects were then sent to Bagram and released after four months. (A number of former detainees said they were interrogated by plainclothed officials, but they did not know if these officials belonged to the military, the CIA or private contractors.)

Afghan human rights campaigners worry that US forces may be using secret detention sites like the one allegedly at Rish-Khor to carry out interrogations away from prying eyes. The US military, however, denies even having knowledge of the facility.

The Black Jail

Much less secret is the final stop for most captives: the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. These days ominously dubbed "Obama's Guantánamo," Bagram nonetheless now offers the best conditions for captives during the entire detention process.

Its modern life as a prison began in 2002, when small numbers of detainees from throughout Asia were incarcerated there on the first leg of an odyssey that would eventually bring them to the US detention facility in Guantánamo, Cuba. In later years, however, it became the main destination for those caught within Afghanistan as part of the growing war there. By 2009 the inmate population had swelled to more than 700. Housed in a windowless old Soviet hangar, the prison consists of two rows of serried, cagelike cells bathed continuously in light. Guards walk along a platform that runs across the mesh tops of the pens, an easy position from which to supervise the prisoners below.

Regular, even infamous, abuse in the style of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison marked Bagram's early years. Abdullah Mujahid, for example, was apprehended in the village of Kar Marchi in the eastern province of Paktia in 2003. Although Mujahid was a Tajik militia commander who had led an armed uprising against the Taliban in their waning days, US forces accused him of having ties to the insurgency. "In Bagram we were handcuffed, blindfolded and had our feet chained for days," he recalled. "They didn't allow us to sleep at all for thirteen days and nights." A guard would strike his legs every time he dozed off. Daily, he could hear the screams of tortured inmates and the unmistakable sound of shackles dragging across the floor.

Then one day a team of soldiers dragged him to an aircraft but refused to tell him where he was going. Eventually he landed at another prison, where the air felt thick and wet. As he walked through the row of cages, inmates began to shout, "This is Guantánamo! You are in Guantánamo!" He would learn there that he was accused of leading the Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (which in reality was led by another person who had the same name and who died in 2006). The United States eventually released him and returned him to Afghanistan.

Former Bagram detainees allege that they were regularly beaten, subjected to blaring music twenty-four hours a day, prevented from sleeping, stripped naked and forced to assume what interrogators term "stress positions." The nadir came in late 2002, when interrogators beat two inmates to death.

According to former detainees and organizations that work with them, the US Special Forces also run a second, secret prison somewhere on Bagram Air Base that the Red Cross still does not have access to. Used primarily for interrogations, it is so feared by prisoners that they have dubbed it the "Black Jail."

One day two years ago, US forces came to get Noor Muhammad outside the town of Kajaki in the southern province of Helmand. Muhammad, a physician, was running a clinic that served all comers, including the Taliban. The soldiers raided his clinic and his home, killing five people (including two patients) and detaining both his father and him. The next day villagers found the handcuffed body of Muhammad's father, apparently killed by a gunshot.

The soldiers took Muhammad to the Black Jail. "It was a tiny, narrow corridor, with lots of cells on both sides and a big steel gate and bright lights," he said. "We didn't know when it was night and when it was day." He was held in a windowless concrete room in solitary confinement. Soldiers regularly dragged him by his neck and refused him food and water. They accused him of providing medical care to the insurgents, to which he replied, "I am a doctor. It's my duty to provide care to every human being who comes to my clinic, whether they are Taliban or from the government."

Eventually Muhammad was released, but he has since closed his clinic and left his home village. "I am scared of the Americans and the Taliban," he said. "I'm happy my father is dead, so he doesn't have to experience this hell."

Afraid of the Dark

In the past two years American officials have moved to reform the main prison at Bagram, if not the Black Jail. Torture has stopped, and prison officials now boast that the typical inmate gains fifteen pounds while in custody. In the early months of this year, officials plan to open a dazzling new prison that will eventually replace Bagram, one with huge, airy cells, the latest medical equipment and rooms for vocational training. The Bagram prison itself will be handed over to the Afghans in the coming year, although the rest of the detention process will remain in US hands.

But human rights advocates say that concerns about the detention process remain. The US Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that inmates at Guantánamo cannot be stripped of their right to habeus corpus, but it stopped short of making the same argument for Bagram (officials say that since it is in the midst of a war zone, US civil rights legislation does not apply). Inmates there do not have access to a lawyer, as they do in Guantánamo. Most say they have no idea why they have been detained. They do now appear before a review panel every six months, which is intended to reassess their detention, but their ability to ask questions about their situation is limited. "I was only allowed to answer yes or no and not explain anything at my hearing," said former detainee Rehmatullah Muhammad.

Nonetheless, the improvement in Bagram's conditions begs the question: can the United States fight a cleaner war? That's what Afghan war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal promised last summer: fewer civilian casualties, fewer of the feared house raids and a more transparent detention process.

The American troops that operate under NATO command have begun to enforce stricter rules of engagement: they may now officially hold detainees for only ninety-six hours before transferring them to the Afghan authorities or freeing them, and Afghan forces must take the lead in house searches. American soldiers, when questioned, bristle at these restrictions--and have ways of circumventing them. "Sometimes we detain people, then, when the ninety-six hours are up, we transfer them to the Afghans," said one marine who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They rough them up a bit for us and then send them back to us for another ninety-six hours. This keeps going until we get what we want."

A simpler way of dancing around the rules is to call in the Special Operations Forces--the Navy SEALs, Green Berets and others--which are not under NATO command and thus not bound by the stricter rules of engagement. These elite troops are behind most of the night raids and detentions in the search for "high-value suspects." Military officials say in interviews that the new restrictions have not affected the number of raids and detentions at all. The actual change, however, is more subtle: the detention process has shifted almost entirely to areas and actors that can best avoid public scrutiny--small field prisons and Special Operations Forces.

The shift signals a deeper reality of war, say American soldiers: you can't fight guerrillas without invasive raids and detentions, any more than you can fight them without bullets. Seen through the eyes of a US soldier, Afghanistan is a scary place. The men are bearded and turbaned. They pray incessantly. In most of the country, women are barred from leaving the house. Many Afghans own an assault rifle. "You can't trust anyone," said Rodrigo Arias, a marine based in the northeastern province of Kunar. "I've nearly been killed in ambushes, but the villagers don't tell us anything. But they usually know something."

An officer who has worked in the Field Detention Sites says that it takes dozens of raids to turn up a useful suspect. "Sometimes you've got to bust down doors. Sometimes you've got to twist arms. You have to cast a wide net, but when you get the right person, it makes all the difference."

For Arias, it's a matter of survival. "I want to go home in one piece. If that means rounding people up, then round them up." To question this, he said, is to question whether the war itself is worth fighting. "That's not my job. The people in Washington can figure that out."

If night raids and detentions are an unavoidable part of modern counterinsurgency warfare, then so is the resentment they breed. "We were all happy when the Americans first came. We thought they would bring peace and stability," said Rehmatullah Muhammad. "But now most people in my village want them to leave." A year after Muhammad was released, his nephew was detained. Two months later, some other residents of Zaiwalat were seized. It has become a predictable pattern in Muhammad's village: Taliban forces ambush American convoys as they pass through it, and then retreat into the thick fruit orchards nearby. The Americans return at night to pick up suspects. In the past two years, sixteen people have been taken and ten killed in night raids in this single village of about 300, according to villagers. In the same period, they say, the insurgents killed one local and did not take anyone hostage.

The people of Zaiwalat now fear the night raids more than the Taliban. There are nights when Muhammad's children hear the distant thrum of a helicopter and rush into his room. He consoles them but admits he needs solace himself. "I know I should be too old for it," he said, "but this war has made me afraid of the dark."

About Anand Gopal

Anand Gopal has reported in Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. His dispatches can be read at anandgopal.com. He is working on a book about the war in Afghanistan.

Hazaras Hustle to Head of Class in Afghanistan

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KABUL, Afghanistan — For much of this country’s history, the Hazara were typically servants, cleaners, porters and little else, a largely Shiite minority sidelined for generations, and in some instances massacred, by Pashtun rulers.

But increasingly they are people like Mustafa, a teenager who has traveled a rough road but whose future now looks as bright as any in this war-ravaged country. His course reflects the collective effort of the Hazara, who make up 10 to 15 percent of the population, to remake their circumstances so swiftly that by some measures they are beginning to overtake other groups.

Like many Hazaras of his generation, Mustafa, now 16, fled Afghanistan with his family in the mid-1990s. They settled in Quetta, Pakistan, living with other Hazara refugees outside the Taliban’s reach and getting a taste of opportunities long out of their grasp.

After the 2001 American invasion, his family returned, not to their home in impoverished Daykondi Province, but to Kabul, where his uneducated parents thought Mustafa and his siblings would get better schooling. “There was no opportunity for studying in Daykondi,” he said.

Mustafa is now a top student at Marefat High School in Dasht-i-Barchi, a vast, poor Shiite enclave in western Kabul of potholed dirt streets, unheated homes and tiny shops. Nearly every one of his graduating classmates will go on to college. Mustafa, an 11th grader who favors physics and mathematics, wants to study nuclear physics at a Western university.

“The Pashtun had the opportunities in the past, but now the Hazaras have these opportunities,” said Mustafa, whose school director asked that his last name not be published. “We can take our rights just by education.”

The Marefat school is a refuge for 2,500 Hazaras, many from families like Mustafa’s who fled their homeland in central Afghanistan for Pakistan and Iran in the 1990s and returned after the fall of the Taliban, which had massacred thousands of Hazaras, to make their lives in Kabul.

Since the 2001 invasion, an influx of Hazaras has changed the composition of the capital. More than a million Hazaras now live here, making up more than a quarter of the city’s population.

With a new generation of Hazaras attending school in relative security and motivated by their parents’ dispossession, their success could alter the country’s balance of ethnic power.

Image by Benjamin...B via Flickr

“The Hazara always wanted an open atmosphere to breathe, and now we have that,” said Mohammed Sarwar Jawadi, a Hazara member of Parliament from Bamian Province.

If there is a recent parallel it is the Kurds of northern Iraq. Once dispossessed and abused, they created a thriving new society after the imposition of no-fly zones in the 1990s and the ouster of Saddam Hussein almost seven years ago.

The Hazara resurgence is not so geographically concentrated. The principal Hazara provinces, while relatively safe, remain impoverished and, their leaders complain, are bypassed by the foreign aid sent to Pashtun areas as a carrot to lure people from the insurgency.

Instead, it is a revival built largely on education, an asset Hazaras could carry with them during their years as refugees.

“With education you can take everything you want,” says Qasim, one of Mustafa’s classmates, a 15-year-old Hazara who moved to Kabul, the Afghan capital, from the northern city of Kunduz five years ago because his parents wanted better-educated children.

The old Afghan rulers “wanted to exploit Hazara people, and they didn’t want us to become leaders in this country or to improve,” he said. But that will change. “By studying we can dictate our future.”

The Hazara gains have already been rapid. Two Hazara-dominated provinces, Bamian and Daykondi, have the highest passing rates on admissions exams for the country’s top rung of universities, according to officials from the Ministry of Higher Education. In the high school graduating class of 2008, three-fourths of students in Daykondi who took the test passed, and two-thirds in Bamian, compared with the national rate of 22 percent.

In a country that has one of the world’s lowest female literacy rates — just one in seven women over age 15 can read and write — the progress of Hazara women is even more stark, especially compared with Pashtun provinces.

Pashtuns, who are mostly Sunni, are the country’s largest ethnic group. While the Taliban insurgency rages in Pashtun regions, and many schools are attacked or forced to close, the enrollment of girls in Bamian schools rose by nearly one-third the past two years, to 46,500, as total school enrollment there grew 22 percent.

Total enrollment in Daykondi rose almost 40 percent to 156,000 over the past two years, and girls now make up 43 percent of students, said Mohammad Ali Wasiq, the Daykondi Province education director. More girls passed the entrance exam for the country’s top-rung universities from Bamian and Daykondi in 2008 than from 10 mainly Pashtun provinces combined.

The Hazaras’ emphasis on educating girls as assiduously as boys, along with a stronger belief in gender equity than is common here, belies the perception of Afghan Shiites left by the passage last spring of a law for Shiites that condones marital rape. Its passage was seen as an effort by President Hamid Karzai to win support from Shiite clerics before elections.

But many Hazara men opposed the law, including officials at the school. A powerful Shiite ayatollah in Kabul condemned the school for its opposition, leading to violent, rock-throwing demonstrations, but only 22 of Marefat’s students dropped out as a result of the pressure, administrators say.

College-educated Hazaras, including women clad in white head scarves, are a growing presence in Western offices in Kabul. And Hazaras have flooded the security forces, and now are a disproportionate fraction of soldiers, while Pashtun representation continues to lag.

Pashtun leaders worry about how their own students are faring even as Hazaras excel, and some even fret whether rising Hazara influence could lead to the largely Shiite Iran having greater sway within Afghanistan.

“The government should work hard to make the opportunity for other places in the country to also go forward,” said Khalid Pashtoon, a Parliament member from Kandahar. He said he had no problem with Hazara gains in education, but added, “The only fear I have is if countries like Iran use it politically in their favor.”

Continued Hazara gains, of course, depend on the Taliban never returning to official power. Aziz Royesh, director of the Marefat school, says he worries how groups that have long held power in Afghanistan will adapt as Hazaras fill more places within the government, military and other influential professions.

“It will be very difficult for them to see that a new generation is coming,” said Mr. Royesh, 40, who fought the Soviet occupiers and never made it past the fifth grade. “Now they cannot use the force of government to prevent specific people from getting their civil rights and their human rights.”

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Quiet Goodwill In a Homeland The Writer Knows Too Well - washingtonpost.com

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The Author of "The Kite Runner" Returns, Incognito, to Afghanistan to Listen to Stories of Strife

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 20, 2009

KABUL -- A convoy of big white Land Cruisers roared into a dusty lane on the outskirts of Kabul last weekend. Chickens scattered, children gawked. A slight man in jeans stepped out, trailed by a film crew and several policemen with rifles. After hurried consultations, elders were produced and the visitor was ushered into a mud hut.

"Man namaindai shobe audat mohajirin astam," he said, politely but vaguely, in perfect Afghan Dari. "I am a representative from office of refugee assistance."

The elders did not know his name, but they knew an opportunity when they saw it, and they posed obligingly for the cameras as they poured out litanies of fear, frustration and despair.

They were mostly two-time refugees, Afghans who had returned after years of Soviet occupation and civil war only to find their villages ravaged by a new conflict involving Taliban insurgents, foreign troops and predatory ethnic militia bosses. Once more they had left their crops and flocks, this time fleeing to an impoverished capital that offered neither land nor work.

The elders complained to the visitor that American and NATO forces had barged into their homes, insulted their women, even bombed their villages. Yet they also begged him not to let the foreign troops leave. Their worst fear, they said, was that the law would collapse and their country would once more erupt into terrible ethnic conflict.

"Vale, vale, fomidam," the visitor said over and over, frowning sympathetically. "I understand. I understand."

All last weekend, he listened to families living in tents and huts and abandoned schools who expressed similar fears -- not of a foreign enemy, but of the bad blood and stubborn tribal enmities that still divide this multiethnic Muslim nation and could easily tear it apart.

What Khaled Hosseini could not tell the refugees was that he really did understand. He could not tell them that he had written a book called "The Kite Runner" about the historic ethnic tensions in Afghanistan, and had been excoriated for it by some as a sensationalistic slanderer of his native land. He could not tell them that the movie version of his book had been banned by the Kabul government last year as too sensitive to show to Afghan audiences, because it was too close to the truth.

Hosseini, a longtime California resident and best-selling author in the West, was here as the goodwill ambassador to Afghanistan from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. His mission was to raise awareness of the plight of Afghans among donors in Europe and the United States, to many of whom his name is a household word.

But precisely because of that high profile, Hosseini's U.N. hosts and handlers felt he was so vulnerable to attack here that his visit had to be virtually incognito. Each of his stops was unannounced, and he was never introduced by name. All trips outside the capital were nixed, and the Afghan news media was not notified of his visit. There were no literary gatherings, no receptions, no public events. It was not only the Taliban the U.N. group feared, it was public opinion.

If the goodwill envoy chafed at being kept under wraps, if the homecoming novelist winced at the sad irony of his position, Hosseini did not admit it. Instead, he played his anonymous assigned role with obliging graciousness, perhaps even a little relieved to be away from the international whirlwind.

"I have not come here as a writer from the West. I have come here to listen to the stories of voiceless people and to make sure they are not forgotten in the greater narrative of Afghanistan today, the narrative of drugs and elections and insurgency," Hosseini, 44, said during a break in the high-walled compound of the U.N. refugee agency here.

He was not especially eager to talk about "The Kite Runner" or the storm of controversy it aroused among Afghans here and abroad, with its dark theme of ethnic prejudice and its searing, pivotal scene of a boy from the subservient ethnic Hazara minority being raped in a Kabul alley by a group of ethnically Pashtun youths. "My book came out six years ago, and I have been talking about it ad nauseam ever since," Hosseini said a bit wearily. "I have moved beyond that, and I am wearing a different hat now that I hope can be meaningful. I am here to parlay a message to people outside, who read my work and who may want to help. I am not here to preach to the Afghans, and if they think I am an anonymous U.N. worker, that's fine with me."

And yet it seems clear that Hosseini has still not fully come to terms with his Afghan identity. He has lived abroad since he was 11, and he readily acknowledges that he leads a "charmed life" in a very different universe. He keeps coming back, keeps wanting to connect. But he has few friends here, and he compares himself to a character in "The Kite Runner" who says, "I feel like a tourist in my own country."

During his weekend tour, Hosseini grew increasingly depressed by the anguished stories he heard, the squalid conditions he encountered and the knowledge that the people pouring out their woes hoped that somehow, this stranger who had appeared with the Land Cruisers and the video crew could save them.

In one mud hut, a jobless returnee said he wished he could take his family back to Pakistan, but that it too was now overrun with insurgent violence. "We are trapped between two fires," he said helplessly. In a dusty ally, an elderly man told Hosseini that if the NATO forces left, he would have no choice but to pick up his gun and go back to war. In a tent colony, a nomad leader said the displaced families there would not survive the winter.

"He told me, 'If you do not help us and we die, our blood will be on your hands,' " Hosseini said grimly.

He was also taken aback by the marked deterioration in security since his last visit for the U.N. in 2007. At the time, he was able to travel by road to several other cities and stroll in refurbished shrines and parks. Today, with suicide bombers lurking, Kabul has become a maze of roadblocks and blast walls, and sightseeing would be an unthinkable risk for a foreign VIP -- even an émigré who speaks like a native.

The hardest part, though, is that Hosseini -- whose novels have humanized Afghanistan's problems to millions of readers abroad, and have tried to address the historical ethnic hatreds now bubbling up during a tense and fraud-plagued presidential election -- may not be safe among his own countrymen.

Even though DVDs of "The Kite Runner" film sell briskly at a few upscale city markets, the anger that swept through the global Afghan grapevine after its release in 2007 was so fierce that its child actors had to leave the country. If enough Afghans knew the author were in the capital, he could easily be torn apart by a mob.

"The purpose of a novel is precisely to talk about things that people don't want to talk about, to create a debate rather than to sweep unpleasant truths under a rug," Hosseini said. "I wish the Afghanistan of today were an open society where I could walk the streets and talk unhampered. I hope that day will come, but unfortunately it is not yet a reality."

Instead, the organizers of his visit manufactured a secure, controlled substitute for a public event: an invitation-only kite-flying contest on a hill overlooking the capital. U.N. workers handed out blue kites decorated with peace doves, and young boys whooped with glee as they ran them aloft. None knew the identity of the slim man in a U.N.-logo shirt who stood there, talking to a few foreign journalists with their video cameras aimed at the iconic blue objects swooping behind him.

"Khaled, could we have one more shot of you looking up at the kites?" a cameraman asked. Hosseini smiled, let a paper kite fly upward from his hands, and looked up dutifully as it trailed away into space.

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Op-Ed Columnist - The Afghanistan Abyss - NYTimes.com

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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.

The group’s concern — dead right, in my view — is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.

“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,” the group said in a statement to me. “The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.

“The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome,” the statement said.

The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

“We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just don’t understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there — possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.

These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to go public with their concerns. And their views are widely shared among others who also know Afghanistan well.

“We’ve bitten off more than we can chew; we’re setting ourselves up for failure,” said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as “nonsense.”

I’m writing about these concerns because I share them. I’m also troubled because officials in Washington seem to make decisions based on a simplistic caricature of the Taliban that doesn’t match what I’ve found in my reporting trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into “Taliban” or “non-Taliban.” Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and fears.

Many Pashtuns I’ve interviewed are appalled by the Taliban’s periodic brutality and think they are too extreme; they think they’re a little nuts. But these Pashtuns also admire the Taliban’s personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President Hamid Karzai.

Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it’s a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land — particularly because the foreigners haven’t brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated.

Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.

In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and some commanders in the field have been superb in building trust with Afghans. That works. But all commanders can’t be superb, and over all, our increased presence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers.

That may be why the troop increase this year hasn’t calmed things. Instead, 2009 is already the bloodiest year for American troops in Afghanistan — with four months left to go.

The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban.

This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.

•

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

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Baloch Separatists Attack Traders

One person has been killed in an attack in Pakistan's Balochistan province, the latest in a spate of attacks against non-Balochi people in the region.

Police said three others were also injured when a group of rice traders from Punjab province were attacked.

An armed separatist group, the Balochistan Liberation United Front (BLUF), has claimed responsibility.

Officials say nearly 40 people have been killed by Baloch separatists in the province since the start of 2009.

The killings are part of a campaign by armed groups to drive non-Balochi people out of the province, according to officials.

The traders had come from Punjab province to sell rice at a weekly market in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, police said.

They were shot near the market on Sunday by assailants on two motorbikes.

Six people have been killed since Friday in similar targeted killings, police said.

After Sunday's attack, police arrested dozens of suspects in overnight raids.

'Political autonomy'

Balochistan accounts for nearly 40% of the country's area but it has less than 10% of its population.

The province is rich in natural resources but has almost no representation in the central bureaucracy or the army, the two groups that have for the most part ruled Pakistan, says the BBC's Ilyas Khan in Islamabad.

As a result, Balochistan remains a province steeped in poverty and with an undeveloped infrastructure, our correspondent says.

Since 2001, armed groups have been conducting a violent campaign to prevent the army from setting up garrisons in the province and to discourage major development projects that they believe would benefit businesses and workers in other provinces.

They have been demanding political autonomy and greater provincial control over their natural resources.

Hundreds of Baloch political activists have been detained in "undeclared custody" and activists claim that a number have been tortured and killed.

Officials say the targeted killings are part of a strategy on the part of these groups to drive non-Balochi settlers out of the province and to discourage people of other provinces from taking up jobs or setting up businesses in Balochistan.

Initially, it was mainly Punjabi's - Pakistan's biggest ethnic group - who were targeted.

But in recent months armed separatists have also targeted ethnic Sindhis and Pashtuns from the North West Frontier Province, police say.

Long-Oppressed Hazara Minority May Play Key Role in Afghan Elections

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 26, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 25 -- For generations, Afghanistan's Hazara minority has occupied the humblest niche in the country's complex ethnic mosaic. The political power structure has been dominated by the large southern Pashtun tribes, followed by the slightly less numerous northern Tajiks.

During various periods in history, the Shiite Hazaras have been forced from their lands and slaughtered in bouts of ethnic or religious "cleansing." In more recent times, they have often been relegated to lowly jobs as cart-pullers or domestic servants. The abused boy in the novel and movie "The Kite Runner," which generated much controversy here, came from a family of Hazara servants.

But the group now stands poised to play a decisive role in the Aug. 20 presidential and provincial council elections. It has produced a popular presidential candidate, independent Ramazan Bashardost, who is an extremely long shot but has been traveling the country nonstop, preaching a message of government reform and social justice.

Meanwhile, President Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun who is seeking reelection, and his major challengers are aggressively courting the Hazara vote. The group makes up as much as 20 percent of the country's electorate and had high voter-registration and turnout rates in the last presidential election, in 2004.

"We have become kingmakers," said Mohammed Mohaqeq, a leader of the main Hazara political party, Wahdat-e-Islami, who agreed to support Karzai in return for pledges that Hazaras would be given control of several ministries and possibly a newly created province. "I cannot get elected, because my Pashtun brothers might not support me, but our people can make a big difference in deciding who wins," he said.

Mohaqeq has been campaigning in various provinces for Karzai, who has remained largely invisible during the run-up to the elections. Mohaqeq's party has organized an army of campaign workers and has fielded a slate of 14 candidates for the upper house of parliament and provincial councils, including one young man whose posters depict an old Hazara cart-puller bent under a load of goods.

Karzai, whose second vice presidential pick is a Hazara, took pains to appease conservative Hazara leaders in March by approving a controversial Shiite family law, even though it outraged human rights groups because it subjected Hazara women to the absolute control of their fathers and husbands.

Yet the political emancipation of Afghanistan's Hazaras, whose children are flocking to universities and office jobs, has created a generational and political split in a community that long fell in lockstep behind ethnic militia or religious leaders such as Mohaqeq as a matter of survival.

Many older or less educated Hazaras still express strong loyalty to such leaders and say they intend to follow their political instructions on voting day. But many others, including students and former refugees who have returned after years in Iran, said they value their political independence.

"I am Hazara, but we have rights now, and no one can tell me how to vote," said Farahmuz, 33, a laborer who joins dozens of men each morning at a traffic circle, hoping to obtain a few hours of work. "I don't want ethnic issues to come up in these elections, because they can destroy the country again," he said.

Many Hazaras said their sentimental favorite for president is Bashardost, 44, a reformist legislator and former planning minister whose office is in a tent across the street from parliament. He has been campaigning in much the same style, accepting government-provided planes to reach distant provinces but then mingling with voters in parks and markets.

"I like Mr. Bashardost because he understands our problems," said Jawad, 25, a Kabul resident who grew up in exile in Iran and now supports his elderly parents as a construction worker. "He doesn't campaign in luxury vehicles like the others. He came to Shar-i-Nau Park on foot and sat there in a tent and listened to the people."

Reached on his cellphone Saturday in a noisy market in Khost province, Bashardost said he had discovered "a big distance between the ordinary people and the politicians in Kabul," adding: "I am sure we are going to see a revolution on August 20." He also said he had received a surprisingly large amount of support from Pashtuns at home and abroad. "This is something very new for Afghanistan," he said.

As a minority group that has long faced economic exploitation and social oppression, Hazaras seem to be taking particular advantage of political freedoms that have opened up since the fall of extremist Sunni Taliban rule in late 2001.

At a new private Shiite college in Kabul, teachers and students said the elections are important for their community, no matter who wins, because they represent a step toward modern, democratic practices that can help overcome Afghan traditions of ethnic and tribal competition.

"We need to develop the values and practices of democracy," said Amin Ahmadi, the college director. "Unfortunately, ethnic issues still play a large role in our country, and people don't trust leaders from other ethnic groups. But if we can have fair, transparent and peaceful elections, that will matter more than if we get a good or a bad president."

In West Kabul, the rundown but bustling heart of the capital's Hazara community, every public surface is papered with campaign posters. Yet many cart-pullers, mechanics and other workers said they are fed up with both national and ethnic politics. They said that their community suffers from widespread unemployment and poverty, but that no one in power has done anything to help.

"We are not happy with our government, and we are not happy with our own leaders," said Imam Ali Rahmat, 61, who sells firewood. "To them, we are just made of grime and dust. To us, they are just made of false promises. We need a change and we need new leaders, because we have lost our way."

Mehsuds in Pakistan Held Responsible for Taliban Leader's Actions

By Joshua Partlow and Haq Nawaz Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 21, 2009

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- The Sina Diagnostic Center and Trust does not appear to be a menacing enterprise. The clinical pathology laboratory's 15 staff members conduct ultrasounds, X-rays and CAT scans and run free hepatitis and HIV tests for poor people and refugees in this teeming northwestern city.

That did not stop about a dozen Pakistani government revenue officers and police from marching up to the lab's second-story office this month to demand that the owner, Noor Zaman Mehsud, shut it down. They ushered patients and staff members outside, pulled down the metal gates and wrapped white cloth around the padlocks. Within 15 minutes, they were gone.

"They just said, 'You are a member of the Mehsud tribe, and we are going to seal up this business,' " Mehsud recalled. "My crime is that I belong to the Mehsuds."

Beyond the frustration of closing a business he ran for nine years and the sting of losing an income averaging $1,400 a week, the most vexing part of Mehsud's situation is that he is on the wrong side of the law. The Pakistani government has declared war on Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud and his network of several thousand fighters in the nearby tribal district of South Waziristan. And under regulations formulated a century ago by British colonial rulers, Pakistan's tribes are still bound by a legal concept known as "collective responsibility," under which any tribal member can be punished for the crimes of another.

The crackdown on the Mehsuds was spelled out in an order from the top political official in South Waziristan, Shahab Ali Shah, on June 14. Because the Mehsud tribesmen had not handed over Taliban fighters, Shah wrote, he was satisfied that they had acted "in an unfriendly and hostile manner toward the state" and that the tribe's "people and their activities are prejudicial to peace and public tranquillity."

Senior government officials have said repeatedly that their target is Baitullah Mehsud and his followers, not his entire tribe, but Shah's wording was broader. He ordered the "seizure, where they may be found, of all members of the Mehsud tribe and confiscation of movable/immovable property belonging to them in the North-West Frontier Province and the arrest and taking into custody of any person of the tribe wherever he is found."

That sweeping order has led to the closure of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of businesses in towns such as Dera Ismail Khan, Tank and Peshawar in North-West Frontier Province, according to lawyers, human rights officials and residents. One South Waziristan political official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said 25 Mehsuds have been arrested in Dera Ismail Khan and Tank.

"This is the law of the jungle, not for civilized people. They are treating people like animals," said Noor Zaman Mehsud, the 39-year-old lab owner, who denied he had any connection to the Taliban. "If I am a criminal, they should arrest me. But they are giving other people's punishments to me."

A few hundred thousand people in Pakistan belong to the Mehsud tribe, a Pashtun network divided into three major clans: the Manzai, the Bahlolzai and the Shaman Khel. Although they are scattered across the country, their home territory is South Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan and is a refuge for fighters operating in both countries. For a civilian, it is not a welcoming place, caught as it is between the repressive rule of the Taliban and the military's preparations for a ground invasion. From the skies, Pakistani fighter jets and U.S. unmanned aircraft regularly bombard Taliban targets.

The violence has pushed tens of thousands of Mehsuds out of South Waziristan. But there is little respite wherever they turn.

"They are asking the people who are besieged, the people who have left their homes, 'Why you are not tackling the terrorists?' " said Said Alam Mehsud, a doctor from the same sub-tribe as Baitullah Mehsud. "Just imagine, what a demand. It's like if America asked me: 'Why are you practicing as a pediatrician? Why have you not captured Osama bin Laden?' "

The move to arrest and seize property of "hostile or unfriendly" tribal people is allowed under Section 21 of the 1901 Frontier Crimes Regulations, a legal framework developed to help the British Raj control rebellious Pashtuns. The regulations, which tribal leaders have tried to repeal or amend for years, give vast powers to the top official in each tribal district, known as the political agent. Aimal Khan, a tribal areas specialist with Sungi, a Pakistani humanitarian organization, said political agents are popularly referred to as "kings without crowns."

In the past, the regulations have been used to block tribal movements, recover hostages and punish those who attack government installations. Latif Afridi, a lawyer and expert on tribal laws, compared Shah's order to economic sanctions against a hostile country. The current pursuit of Mehsuds is not particularly widespread, but it remains an affront to human rights, he said.

"This is an order which is a remnant of the colonial days. Mehsuds should be treated as Pakistanis, their fundamental human rights respected," Afridi said. "It is a very cruel law, but so long as it is a law, I would definitely concede that the political agent has this power."

Habibullah Khan, a senior government official for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, of which South Waziristan is a part, said the collective punishment policy does not mean the government will make "blanket arrests" of Mehsud tribesmen, but rather allows authorities to capture criminals. Another senior FATA official said five close supporters and financiers of Baitullah Mehsud had been arrested.

"We will be very choosy in our activities against the tribesmen in South Waziristan agency, as we know all of them are not terrorists," Khan said.

In June, Abdul Karim Mehsud, a lawyer, filed a petition with the Peshawar High Court asking for Shah's order to be repealed on the grounds that it is discriminatory and that taking such action in North-West Frontier Province is outside the jurisdiction of the tribal area political agent.

The FATA's Khan argued that arrest warrants for Mehsud tribesmen from South Waziristan are applicable outside that region. Lawyers familiar with tribal regulations said the Supreme Court has been divided on the issue. Lawyer Mehsud said last week that his petition had been denied.

"The actions by the government against the Mehsud people are pushing them back toward the Taliban," said Saleh Shah Qureshi, a senator from South Waziristan. "People are going back to Waziristan."

Bilal Mehsud, 24, is not sure where to turn. His father's cement business, Madina Traders in Peshawar, was shuttered last week by a South Waziristan official and tribal police. He lives in Saudi Arabia but is home on vacation. Now police have issued arrest warrants for him and his father, he said, adding, "I'm not sure what crime we have committed."

Noor Khan Mehsud, who along with other tribesmen formed a volunteer committee to help displaced Mehsud families in Dera Ismail Khan, said local authorities have been slow to register the refugees.

"There is no government support," he said. "Officials have closed doors for us, and we are considered militants. Where should we go?"

Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.