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TechnoratiTorture a Kabul Speciality
Ottawa's deal to inspect prisoners shows it hasn't learned from war history in Afghanistan
How did Canada, one of the world's most respected, law-abiding nations, become a party to the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and a violator of the Geneva Conventions?The story begins in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
The Soviet KGB created a mirror-image secret police for its Afghan puppet government, KhAD.
Having been pursued by KhAD agents, I can speak with personal knowledge of this subject.
CRUELTIES
KhAD sought to eradicate all opposition to the Communists. It also ran the education system and religious establishment. KhAD quickly became notorious, even in a famously brutal society, for its cruelties.
All political prisoners -- that is, anyone who opposed the Communists -- were subjected to systematic tortures. These ranged from garden variety beatings, pulling of fingernails, near-drowning and electric shocks to more refined cruelties.
Prisoners were flayed alive, thrown into vats of sulphuric acid, blinded, buried alive, burned with gasoline, or slowly frozen in refrigerated rooms.
Psychological tortures -- sleep deprivation, long isolation in darkness, sound assault, mock executions and psychotropic drugs -- were also used by KhAD under KGB supervision. The same tortures, known as "enhanced interrogation," are routinely used today by the CIA.
The Communists killed two million Afghans. Canada turned its back and refused to aid the mujahedeen battling Soviet occupation. After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the newborn Taliban movement drove the remaining Afghan Communists -- rebranded the Northern Alliance -- into the far northeast.
U.S. INVASION
In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, allied itself to the Northern Alliance, and overthrew the Taliban. A figurehead, Hamid Karzai, was put in power. Real power, however, was held by the Communist-dominated Northern Alliance.
Once the Northern Alliance took Kabul, the KhAD, rechristened NDS, was quickly re-established. The old Communist torturers and war criminals went back into business.
Today, an estimated 60% of NDS personnel are former KhAD agents. Canadian and U.S. forces fighting to pacify southern Afghanistan have been routinely handing captives and suspects over to the NDS secret police -- in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.
This dirty secret was finally exposed to Canadians by a major Globe and Mail investigation.
It exposed Ottawa's childish claims of having assurances from the Afghan Communist secret police -- which had murdered or maimed tens of thousands of victims -- to treat prisoners humanely.
How did Canada get into this mess? Conservative politicians in Ottawa saw a chance to win new voters by whipping up jingoism in a jolly little war against "evil" Muslims that was supposed to be a slam dunk.
Chest-thumping generals leapt before they looked. The men in Ottawa responsible for getting Canadians stuck ever deeper in this ugly conflict had no knowledge whatsoever about Afghanistan, its tribal politics, or history.
Senior officers and politicians who claim not to have known they were handing over prisoners to the Afghan secret police for torture are either stunningly ignorant or lying.
I guess they never read Rudyard Kipling's famous admonition to British soldiers fallen wounded in Afghanistan, "save your last bullet for yourself."
This writer, who has covered many guerrilla wars in Asia, Africa and Central America, repeatedly warned in recent years that the longer Canadian troops stayed in Afghanistan, the more they would become brutalized and involved in war crimes. Such is the nature of all guerrilla wars. Has no one in Ottawa ever studied Algeria, Lebanon or Vietnam?
FAIRY TALE
Canadians who still believe the fairy tale that their forces in Afghanistan are "nation building" or doing social work should reflect on the grim fate of prisoners their soldiers handed over to the mercies of the Afghan secret police.
Ottawa's deal this week with Kabul for inspection of NDS prisoners is a sham. The KhAD had the same empty "agreement" with human rights groups in the 1980s.
It's bad enough Canada's troops are defending Afghanistan's warlords who run its booming heroin industry. Now Ottawa is hand in glove with the Communist Party's veteran torturers. Well done, Ottawa.
9 Comments so far
Show All"Prisoners were flayed alive, thrown into vats of sulphuric acid, ..."
The first I belive. Not the second. A person thrown into a "vat of sulphuric acid" would explode, spattering acid all over the place. And why use a vat? A 44 gallon drum (one of them chemical resistant ones) would make much more sense. Who keeps open "vats" of H2SO4 lying around the place, anyway?
It's woth noting that pretty much everyone is lying, either one way or the other.
We should not be in Afghanistan at all. If it was necessary to be in Afghanistan, it should have been to send in as many aid groups and money as possible to maintain the health and well-being of the Afghani civilians while America beat its "exceptional" militaristic small brains out as it usually does. Since when does Canada do might over talk? Are we too, to believe that we are the world's gift to human kind?
I despise what we are doing in Afghanistan and the rest of the "Global South." I am appalled with what we are doing to our own country with the diminishment of our social services, education and jobs. Just another dumbed down Euro-Western country for sale to the highest bidder.
The worst part about this story (which Margolis doesn't mention) is that the Canadian government actually thinks torturing detainees in Afghanistan is OK.
Their main reaction once their "dirty secret" came to light was to accuse opposition politicians and other critics of being Taliban supporters, and to complain about how these revelations of torture were hurting the morale of the Canadian troops!
Internal government documents made it clear that they knew all along that detainees were likely to be tortured, but they did nothing to stop it, or even to protest it. Canada has become a torture state.
Margolis: "Real power, however, was held by the Communist-dominated Northern Alliance."
Margolis' anti-communism and historical distortion shines through.
From the Guardian, Dec 3, 2001 .. "Who's who in Afghanistan":
General Abdul Rashid Dostum lead the Northern Alliance, and the article states ...
"His defection to the mojahedin was one of the main factors in the downfall of the last communist government in 1992."
Full article here: http://tinyurl.com/35rk5x
Actually, Mr. Margolis described the answer nicely later down. Politicians who are looking for an easy issue to campaign on. Attacks, whether rhetorical or physical against "foreigners" seem to qualify for that in our mass societies. They get everyone whipped up against some over-exaggerated "evil" or "threat" that's out there, then since the targets of the violence aren't voters, everyone seems to agree. In fact the various politicians then try to out-do each other in who can be the most extreme in attacking this exaggerated enemy.
Then you've got the generals, looking for an easy campaign with an easy victory. Not only does it help their careers, but they also use it to go back to the government and ask for bigger budgets and more personnel. The latter is always a victory in a bureaucracy.
And last you've got the people who are supposed to be the foreign service professionals who are supposed to know what they are getting into. But being an Afghanistan expert never has driven anyone to the top of that bureaucracy, so it turns out that among the decision makers there's no one who knows any more than the original over-exaggerated claims of threat and crisis and the generals over-exaggerated claims of easy victory.
What Mr. Margolis leaves out is the people. They are a part of this too. They are a part when they accept the over-exaggerated claims of threats and victories without question. They are definitely a part of it when they vote for the politicians who act this way. And the people are a part of it when they accept that a proud and honorable country's standards must be abandoned because of all the BS going around.
The last part should be a lesson learned for all citizens in democracies. There is a reason why nations have always held to high standards in terms of stuff like torture and human rights. In the short term, it seems like an inconvenience. This silly red tape that ties the hands of those brave fighting men out there fighting evil for us. But in the long run, it becomes apparent why nations hold to such high standards. Now we see what happens when nations can no longer stand by a reputation for decency and human rights. And we see the slippery slope that emerges when we begin to tolerate such behaviour. Wasn't it just this weekend that I was reading that around 1/3 of US troops in Iraq support torture?
The people of both Canada and America need to try to return their nations to being decent honorable nations that uphold and defend human rights.
No need to repeat the quote a fourth time.
The answer from where I sit in the classroom is that the greatest enemy of democracy is bald-faced hypocrisy.
"How did Canada, one of the world's most respected, law-abiding nations, become a party to the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and a violator of the Geneva Conventions?"
I'd say when people stopped being lawmakers and gave that job to bribeable representatives. For more, see: http://www.swissworld.org/dvd_rom/eng/direct_democracy_2004/index.html
"How did Canada, one of the world's most respected, law-abiding nations, become a party to the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and a violator of the Geneva Conventions?"
They mistakenly believed Bush.
How did Canada, one of the world's most respected, law-abiding nations, become a party to the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and a violator of the Geneva Conventions?
***answer: when it became populated by human beings. Have enough humans in any one place and they will do something bad.