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| Afghan boys play with a ball next to the ruins of the former Afghan King’s palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009. It should come as no surprise that a country like Afghanistan, with its warrior culture and a history steeped in violence and armed conflict, would be prone to the sort of allegations of torture currently rocking Ottawa’s political class, experts say. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Anja Niedringhaus |
TORONTO - It should come as no surprise that a country like Afghanistan, with its warrior culture and a history steeped in violence and armed conflict, would be prone to the sort of allegations of torture currently rocking Ottawa’s political class, experts say.
For much of its history, the rugged, foreboding, tribally organized territory has seen a succession of invasions that date back to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Since the Soviet invasion in the late 1970s, Afghanistan has been in an almost constant state of war.
The repressive Taliban regime that followed the 1989 retreat of the Soviets, and its subsequent overthrow by the U.S.-led military coalition in 2001, drove the conflict to new heights, said Larry Goodson, an Afghan expert with the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.
Fighting between the Taliban and other Afghan forces introduced a "real ethnic-cleansing dimension to what was historically just a sort of rivalry between groups (but) wasn’t deep-seated hatred," Goodson said.
"Now you really have these deeper senses of animosity."
The result has been a culture of brutalization of large elements of a dislocated Afghan society, worsened by the particularly austere brand of Islam imposed by the Taliban, observers say.
Successive reports from the U.S. State Department itself have made note of the problem.
"Torture and abuse included pulling out fingernails and toenails, burning with hot oil, beatings, sexual humiliation, and sodomy," the department reported earlier this year in its human rights assessment.
The assessment also cited Amnesty International reports of prisoners consistently "subject to torture once transferred to local authorities."
In particular, the country’s intelligence service - the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, forged in the Soviet era and the inevitable custodian of suspected insurgents - is notoriously abusive.
Despite years of warnings, former Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin set off a political firestorm this week when he took direct aim at the Conservative government and military of the handling of prisoners.
Captives taken by Canadian troops and handed over to the Afghans were subjected to beatings and electric shocks in 2006 and early 2007, Colvin told a Commons committee
"According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured," he said.
"For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure."
Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, said Colvin was "only repeating the obvious."
"Nobody should be surprised," Attaran said. "Every human rights agency on Earth warned about it for years."
Joanne Mariner, with Human Rights Watch in New York, said the common knowledge around detainee abuse is one reason why NATO countries and Canada signed memoranda with the Afghan government aiming to ensure human-rights protections.
"They purport to require that people be treated humanely," Mariner said.
"They know that the likelihood of abuse is high."
However, the memoranda amount to little more than a paper "fig-leaf" for coalition forces that offer little protection to detainees, she said.
John McNamer, a decorated Vietnam veteran and peace activist, said some blame for the abuse must fall on both American and Canadian soldiers.
The brutal methods that were employed by U.S. forces in handling prisoners, and which were documented in part in reports and images from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan - were not lost on the Afghans.
"One would have hoped, with any intervention by Western powers, that we would have had the integrity to act legally and show the Afghans an enlightened way of proceeding in these matters," McNamer said from Kamloops, B.C.
"We showed them exactly the opposite."
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