Hi Maurice, Now I cry for what the world is reverting to, once again, all is not well:
iht.com
A dirty war in Afghanistan
Robert Fisk The Independent (London)
Thursday, August 15, 2002
In the early weeks of this year, the Americans raided two Afghan villages, killed 10 policemen belonging to the U.S.-supported government of Hamid Karzai and started mistreating the survivors. American reporters - in a rare show of mouse-like courage amid the self-censorship of their usual reporting - quoted the prisoners as saying they had been beaten by U.S. troops. According to Western officials in Kandahar, the U.S. troops "gave the prisoners a thrashing."
Things have since changed. The American forces in Afghanistan, it seems, now leave the beatings to their Afghan allies, especially members of the so-called Afghan Special Forces, a Washington-supported group of thugs who are based in the former Khad secret police torture centre in Kabul. "It's the Afghan Special Forces who beat the Pashtun prisoners for information now - not the Americans," a Western military man told me in Kandahar. "But the CIA are there during the beatings, so the Americans are culpable, they let it happen."
This is just how the Americans began in Vietnam. They went in squeaky clean with advisers, there were some incidents of "termination with extreme prejudice," after which it was the Vietnamese intelligence boys who did the torture. The same with the Russians. When their soldiers poured across the border in 1979, they quickly left it to their Afghan allies in the Parcham and Khad secret police to carry out the "serious" interrogations. And if this is what the Americans are now up to in Afghanistan, what is happening to their prisoners at Guantánamo? Or, for that matter, at Bagram, the air base north of Kabul to which all prisoners in Kandahar are now sent for investigation if local interrogators believe their captives have more to say.
"The British forces were right to leave," a British humanitarian worker announced over dinner in Kabul one night. "They realized that the Americans had no real interest in returning this country to law and order."
- Robert Fisk, in The Independent (London) |
