our situation, including our military escort’s invitation to sleep over. Wahid offered to leave, insisting we really didn’t want to cause any trouble.
“That’s not necessary,” countered the commander. They returned our luggage, but we temporarily had to surrender all electrical devices—computers, recorders, cameras, and a satellite phone—to prevent transmitting signals. Wahid carefully retained all of our notes about the detainee abuse we had just researched, and then together we checked in our personal effects. The soldiers at the office were helpful and courteous, and handed me a receipt for our equipment after they filed it away.
“See? No problem,” I said to Wahid, patting his back as we exited the office.
He lit a cigarette, and quietly sighed.
“We were kidnapped,” he said, half-joking. And then he repeatedly offered to return to Kabul by road, even though it was a dangerous journey.
My countrymen shuffled through the base. They spoke a language I could understand, ate familiar food at shared meals. Troops played basketball on paved courts, and raucously cheered during evening volleyball matches. But Wahid felt no such familiarity and comfort. He might even have felt less comfortable there—at the very base where Dilawar was first captured—after having spent several days translating accounts of how US forces treated his fellow countrymen.
There was a war on, and we were in a violent Taliban region. Soldiers had to prepare themselves for regular attacks. And yet the barricades and distant checkpoints, along with the availability of familiar American comforts peppering the base, seemed to insulate Salerno, to disconnect it from its locality.
Apart from brushing up against Afghan laborers and their military counterparts who worked at the base, I wondered how much contact American troops had with the local population, and whether this shaped their perception of local Afghans. How many Americans at Salerno had even heard about Dilawar?
Two days after our original departure date, a turbo-prop plane finally picked us up and returned us to Kabul. Days later I met with Nader Nadery, deputy director of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. I asked Nadery about the extent to which American troops were still involved in detainee abuse.
“Since last April, complaints have been decreasing,” he said. It was heartening to hear that there were fewer incidents. But, Nadery added, since 2006, “Americans were forcing Afghans to sign documents saying they should not describe what happened to them.”
I had heard that US forces compelled detainees to sign papers before their release—especially if they had been held in Guantanamo. Nadery feared that released detainees were unsure of exactly what the documents contained, but felt intimidated by having to sign them, which may have kept them from reporting abuse. He and other human rights workers also felt that the limited redress offered in cases of US torture and abuse discouraged detainees from reporting their experiences. It reminded me of a discussion I had about the Dilawar case with a staffer of the Senate Armed Services Committee before my trip to Afghanistan.
“When we were briefed on the Bagram cases we were told ‘this is a success story,’ ” he had said. “Of course we were briefed sometime in 2004, nearly two years after the incident occurred. But CID [the Army’s Criminal Investigative Command, commonly referred to as the CID] said, ‘We got this initial report in and we were told nothing really happened. But we didn’t believe that and went back and looked into it some more until finally we realized they were serious homicides, and we needed to make recommendations.’
“They were touting that as a success story over at CID, really. But you wondered why it took so long in the first place. I mean these guys were beaten to a pulp. Literally.” Even some CID officers were distressed by the outcome of the Bagram case.
Dilawar and Habibullah weren’t the only detainees to suffer such a fate. To date, Human Rights First found more than 200 detainees have died while in custody of US forces since the launch of the “war on terror”; some were obviously tortured to death.51 For former detainees, the sluggish pace of the investigation into the Dilawar case (and other similar cases) seemed to signal more than a slow bureaucratic response. For these torture victims, it indicated that the US wasn’t genuinely trying to stamp out torture; to some, it even seemed to suggest a kind of sanction.
When Wahid and I interviewed former Bagram detainee Qader Khandan in Khost, he told us that military investigators visited him while he was incarcerated in Guantanamo from 2003 to 2006 and asked him about what happened to Dilawar at Bagram. He sketched out pictures of the holding cells, and the ways in which military personnel suspended prisoners with chains. His drawings looked strikingly similar to the ones that US troops submitted to investigators from the US Army’s CID. Khandan was certain the investigation would help bring justice to those responsible for the torture and demise of Bagram’s detainees. It didn’t.
After we finished our interview with Khandan, we broke to eat lunch together and I told Wahid what ultimately transpired with the investigations and courts-martial. Few soldiers, and even fewer officers, involved in the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah saw the inside of a courtroom. Military investigators recommended that twenty-seven Army personnel be criminally charged for the Afghans’ deaths and related abuses that occurred in Bagram around the same time. In the end, only four troops were sentenced to jail time. None of the sentences exceeded five months.52
“I will not translate this to him,” said Wahid, referring to Khandan.
I nodded in agreement. We both knew such news would only worsen his grief.
The stories of Dilawar and Habibullah represent only two examples of US detainee abuse in Afghanistan in 2002. Yet they were also two of about 128 cases that year in which Afghans were seriously abused in Bagram and at US bases in Afghanistan—often with the very same techniques that were applied to Dilawar and Habibullah.53
I later asked Wahid if I could quote him when writing about our experiences in Khost for Americans back home.
Yes, he said. “Tell them that after this I will not support them…I will not trust them.”
It was a halting remark. And it was then that I finally understood the enduring legacy of Dilawar’s experience.
There has been plenty of torture in Afghanistan in modern memory—from the recent Soviet invasion and the civil wars that followed to this most recent conflict. Dilawar’s experience is another tragic story in that continuum. It is also key to understanding early US detainee abuse.
The stories of Dilawar and Habibullah reveal that violent assaults and desperation cannot always explain why troops resort to torture. True, the American military was embroiled in a war with the Taliban. But US forces at Bagram can’t explain away their acts of torture because they were under attack (as some soldiers have alleged).54 Bagram didn’t face an increase in combat deaths and casualties during the time that Dilawar and Habibullah were tortured. In fact, American casualties in Afghanistan during the winter of 2002 were comparatively quite low.
Dilawar and Habibullah’s experience also showed that soldiers didn’t need manuals or memos to lead them to torture. US troops in Bagram tortured their prisoners in banal and crude ways, informed by myths and memory. The sleep deprivation dreamed up by Mackey’s military intelligence colleague, as well as his observation that “hard-core prisoners were unlikely to start cracking until about fourteen hours into an interrogation,” were a product of folklore that spread through casual hearsay. The soldiers that enhanced sleep deprivation through “monstering” used techniques they remembered from their MP training (e.g., the “peroneal strikes”). Some learned compliance blows from three weeks of detainee training
