Archive for the 'Prisons in Counterinsurgency' Category

The pitiful Hamid Karzai had a peace jirga in June.  Astonishingly, it appears that it wasn’t very successful.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s peace jirga earlier this month was pretty close to a bust. Powerful northern rivals were conspicuously absent, as were the Taliban, who instead dispatched a pair of suicide bombers to disturb the proceedings, detonating not far from where the conference took place. The violence, however, overshadowed a rare moment of unity among influential lawmakers and elders: a full-throated call to release of hundreds of prisoners, possibly even including Taliban, languishing in Afghan and U.S. military jails.

In yet another affirmation of his will to end the Taliban-led insurgency through compromise rather than the end of a gun, the President said the jirga’s demand compelled him to act quickly to free those prisoners who might oppose his government but have not been convicted of alleged crimes. The goal, he went on, was to build goodwill with “disenchanted people” in league with the Taliban.

Shortly after the jirga, Amrullah Saleh, the head of Afghan intelligence agency NDS, resigned. It was widely believed that he had been browbeaten by Karzai for the security lapse that allowed the suicide bombers to be so close to the jirga. But Saleh had long bristled at what he viewed as Karzai’s tendency to appease the Taliban for political gain; in fact, he had called the prisoner-release idea a “disgrace” that amounts to “negotiating with suicide bombers.”

Later in June, fourteen Taliban prisoners were released as part of this agreement, and another twenty eight have been released just in the last several days.  In fact, this is only the beginning.  The flood gates could soon open, culminating in the release of as many as a thousand Taliban.

The head of Afghanistan’s most notorious prison says nearly 1,000 Taliban inmates could be freed from Pul-e-Charki prison as part of an amnesty deal offered by Hamid Karzai’s government.

The figure, revealed by General Abdulbakhi Behsudi, the warden of Afghanistan’s largest prison, in an interview with The Globe And Mail, suggests the potential breath of the prisoner release ordered under the terms of a controversial resolution issued by Afghanistan’s peace jirga, an assembly of tribal elders convened last week to pave the path for negotiations with the Taliban.

On Sunday, President Hamid Karzai ordered the creation of a special delegation to review the cases of Taliban inmates “imprisoned without sufficient evidence,” the first move toward a widespread prisoner release that could involve amnesty for thousands of jailed insurgents across Afghanistan …

Mr. Behsudi keeps a collection of evidence confiscated from these inmates in a locked glass cabinet, proof, he said, of their intractable criminal minds.

There are dozens of battered cellphones used to issue orders for suicide bombings; $1-million worth of heroin and hash buried inside the soles of shoes, stuffed inside a hairbrush, and lining a false-bottomed cooking pot. There is a braided rubber whip seized from cellblock D, used by the insurgents to punish any inmate who crossed them.

“These people will never be loyal to the government because they are dark thinkers, they think dark things,” said Mr. Behsudi, a heavy-set man dressed in crisp army fatigues, brandishing a sword confiscated from a prisoner’s bed.

Pul-e-Charki has about 4,620 inmates, he said, with the Taliban forming the most cohesive category of prisoners. Only a small fraction of those – the ones caught with “a smoking gun” – would be exempt from Mr. Karzai’s proposed amnesty.

While we are attempting to separate the insurgents from the population, go to great (and deadly) lengths to avoid collateral damage when fighting the insurgents, and have many thousands of American warriors deployed in theater to protect the population and kill the insurgents, Karzai is releasing them back into the population to start all over again.

With “friends” like this, who needs enemies?

From Reuters:

A U.S. military report on detainees in Afghanistan calls for changes in both U.S. and Afghan prison systems to prevent Islamist radicalization behind bars, U.S. military officials said on Monday.

As authorities in Afghanistan brace for a new wave of detainees from stepped-up U.S. and NATO military operations, officials said the report recommends that detention facilities separate militant religious extremists from each other and the general prison population.

The report by Marine Major General Douglas Stone also calls for vocational training for other detainees, as well as religious instruction from moderate Muslim clerics who reject the harsh theology of the Taliban.

Officials said the policy changes could help reconcile many Taliban fighters with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a step viewed as vital for stabilizing the war-torn country.

We’ve seen it before in Iraq.  Radicalization behind prison bars.  But in Afghanistan we have noted our doubt that the hard core Taliban fighters will “reconcile” with Afghanistan.  Control it, sure.  Reconcile to being merely a part of it – no.  These bad boys are in prison, some of them, and the question now is what to do with them?

It’s gets worse.

Reports today that the U.S. military is calling for an overhaul of the Bagram prison in Afghanistan follow weeks of little-reported protests by prisoners there, who since July 1 have refused to leave their cells or participate in video-phone calls with family members, all to protest their indefinite detention, says the International Committee of the Red Cross, which informed families of the protests. Prisoners are reportedly refusing even to meet with the ICRC.

Do tell?  Protests of indefinite detention, you say?  Our position?  Same as Old Trooper who comments at Blackfive.  “Taking prisoners is not productive.”  The problem started when we took prisoners.