darkened goggles, surrounded by coils of concertina wire.
“The White House always put forward that Abu Ghraib was an exception, just some rotten apples,” said John Sifton, a former senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism at Human Rights Watch. “But US personnel in Afghanistan were involved in killings and torture of prisoners well before the Iraq war even started. The story begins in Afghanistan.”1
No flashy photos show these abuses, at least none that has emerged into the news media with the same force as the images from Abu Ghraib. It takes an attentive reader to identify these cases and track their chronology. And it takes a dispassionate approach to parse out when and where government officials willfully contributed to coercive interrogation, when officers and soldiers acted with relative autonomy (or without explicit instructions), and how commanders and officials were complicit in overlooking abuse.
Human rights organizations recorded cases of detainee abuse shortly after US boots hit the ground in Afghanistan in 2001. Some instances occurred in the heat of battle or when troops were “roughing up” detainees upon capture. To be fair, some roughing-up is a by-product of detainee arrests that is fairly typical of combat situations, and is by no means exclusive to the US military. But consistently roughing up suspects when they are captive in a detention facility is a different matter. During the early phase of US combat operations in Afghanistan, some of these abuses were relatively mild. Others were quite severe. Some even turned lethal.
Perhaps the most famous early cases of US prisoner abuse involved two detainees known as Habibullah and Dilawar. The events surrounding their deaths occurred in Afghanistan in December 2002. Three years later, the New York Times first detailed their experiences and the early abuses at the Bagram Air Base.2 Over time, Habibullah and Dilawar’s stories have gradually gained more public exposure in print and in film (e.g., in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side). But these events deserve to be revisited because of their timing and what they reveal about the early development of US abuses.
Journalists had already interviewed many of the guards who abused detainees in Bagram. Yet I never heard them provide an explanation that seemed adequate; most of their reasoning seemed incomplete at best and self-serving at worst. And so, in 2007 I traveled to Afghanistan to interview former Bagram and Guantanamo detainees who could describe events from an Afghan perspective.
Years after the US-led coalition toppled the Taliban in 2001, violence engulfed southern and eastern Afghanistan, making travel to provinces like Khost increasingly difficult. Car travel, conceivable in the years just following the US invasion, was now strongly discouraged. By mid-2007, the road connecting Kabul to Khost was rife with banditry and talibs, making it especially perilous. Non-Afghan travelers typically sought out limited air transport to Khost, which meant flying into Forward Operating Base Salerno—the very base where Dilawar and his companions from Khost first arrived.
Wahid Amani, my translator, fixer, and friend, accompanied me there to retrace some of the steps of those who were released from US captivity. Wahid was a twenty-seven-year-old journalist from Wardak province who worked as a freelance journalist for several years, and then as a reporter and trainer with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). We worked together for IWPR, and he occasionally assisted foreign journalists with their projects. But he grew uneasy about taking assignments in provinces like Khost, where violence had become prevalent.
Wahid didn’t mention our journey to his family or fiancée. It was risky, and he didn’t want to worry them. Just a few weeks before we set out, the Taliban kidnapped an Italian journalist from La Repubblica, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, in Helmand province, where Wahid and I worked for the IWPR. The Afghan government feared it would lose Italian support if Mastrogiacomo was killed, and negotiated his release by trading him for five Taliban prisoners (including the kidnapper’s brother and other Taliban commanders).3 But the affair ended badly when the Taliban beheaded Mastrogiacomo’s driver, and then his translator. And their fate resonated among Afghan reporters, fixers, and translators—especially those who helped foreign journalists.4
Helmand continued to be a major Taliban stronghold. It was also known as “Little America” because of the US development projects established there during the 1950s–1970s. It seemed like a perfect irony to travel from “Little America” to Khost, also known as “Little Moscow”—provinces whose Cold War monikers recalled the legacy of past policies.5
I grew a thick beard during my stay in Afghanistan in order to blend in. From Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s provincial capital, I cloaked myself in a patu (a long blanketlike scarf), wore a sparkly round hat typically donned by Pashtuns (Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group), and long, sweeping clothes whenever I traveled outside our armed compound. My wardrobe and routine were no different in Khost. There, as in Helmand, I was largely confined to an armed compound, and beyond the gates I dressed in local garb, avoided eye contact and speaking in public, and tried to mimic the locals’ gait. Many Afghans still recognized that I was a Westerner, but journalists and aid workers often take such measures to curb conspicuous attention.
Before we arrived in Khost, a local reporter, Kamal Sadat, assured us he would do everything in his power to ensure our safety.
“You will be our guests in Khost,” he said. “Just come whenever you can. I will be waiting for you.”
Clean-shaven, wearing a flowing white kurta shirt, Sadat greeted us at Salerno’s last checkpoint, just before the main road leading to Khost City. Sadat was a medical student practicing journalism to earn some extra money (he was the fifth young doctor-reporter I met in Afghanistan). He had worked for the BBC’s Pashto service, then became a correspondent for Voice of America and Reuters.
“I talk to everyone: the government, the coalition forces, the Taliban. Everyone,” said Sadat, explaining his evenhanded reporting. At one point, he too became a local news story when he was arrested and detained by the Americans. Like other Khost detainees, he was bound and hooded by US forces, shipped to Salerno and then on to Bagram. Soldiers held Sadat’s family at gunpoint and rifled through his reporter’s notebooks.6 His arrest provoked a public outcry, and US forces soon released him, explaining they had mistakenly captured the wrong suspect. The US military apologized to Sadat, and he maintains that he wasn’t mistreated (except for the property damaged in his home during the arrest) and said he holds no resentment toward his captors.
During our ride from Salerno to Khost City, he asked me many questions about my visit. There were a lot of Taliban in the province, and the area was often gripped by violence. Weeks before we arrived, Khost suffered a string of suicide bomber attacks that claimed fourteen lives.7 Sadat was especially curious why an American journalist would visit such a hostile region in order to report on detainee abuse.
“I have very good relations with the American base,” he said. “The American soldiers will be unhappy when your book comes out, no?”
Sadat seemed worried that even the slightest involvement with my reporting would sour his relations with the local US military forces in Khost. I had a feeling that Wahid was also unsure about the value of our research. Afghanistan has seen many long and bloody wars that have wrought untold misery. Why focus on one tragedy in Afghanistan, no matter how appalling?
Sadat weaved his car through Khost’s bustling, dusty streets, seeking shelter for his new guests and a meeting place for our local contacts. The Governor’s Guesthouse, where meetings and official functions took place, offered the best accommodations in town, though it lacked certain amenities—no regular running water, the electrical power switched on only after sunset, and one unsanitary bathroom shared by two floors of guests. Tall concrete barriers lay on alternating sides of the entrance road to prevent oncoming cars from gaining enough momentum to crash a suicide car bomb into the building. Guards languidly settled themselves
