The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan by Graeme Smith

Author:Graeme Smith [Smith, Graeme]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-36689-4
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Canada
Published: 2013-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

I drifted out of touch with detainee issues in Kandahar after finishing my assignment in the Afghanistan in early 2009, although I heard from human rights investigators that they remained worried that a two-tier system was emerging, as conditions somewhat improved for prisoners transferred from NATO custody but remained vicious for those captured by the Afghan forces. Local soldiers and police frequently worked side by side with foreign troops, so the international forces were also rumoured to be avoiding the hassle of taking prisoners by conducting “field transfers,” or giving Afghan forces the job of collecting detainees. Despite all the flaws, however, it seemed the local authorities had started to understand that torture was a sensitive subject for their international allies. My friends in Kandahar said prisoners were still beaten in the local jails, but the kind of abuses we had discovered were becoming less common. Among all the things that got worse during my years in southern Afghanistan, at least we could assume that the detainee system got better, however minimally. As I was getting ready to leave Kandahar for the last time, throwing away old junk in the media tent, I found the ballpoint pen that the prisoner had given me two years earlier—the copper wire still shiny, and the object retaining its strange beauty. I stowed the pen at the bottom of my suitcase, and when I returned home to Canada the pen got buried in a pile of spare change I kept in an upturned hat.

I had almost forgotten about that souvenir when a friend called me on November 18, 2009. “Turn on your television,” he said. Canadian news channels were going live with coverage of a parliamentary hearing on Afghan detainees. Richard Colvin, the diplomat who had struggled to fix the detainee system during his time in Afghanistan, had been summoned before a committee. By that point he had been promoted to an intelligence liaison job in Washington, but the committee asked him to delve into his archives and talk about what the Canadian embassy in Kabul knew about detainees in the earlier years of the war. Colvin said the torture went even beyond the methods I had reported, and described the transferred detainees being burned, knifed and raped. More importantly, he maintained that senior military and diplomatic officials decided to ignore warnings about the system in 2006 and 2007. “As I learned more about our detainee practices,” Colvin said, “I came to the conclusion that they were contrary to Canada’s values, contrary to Canada’s interests, contrary to Canada’s official policies, and also contrary to international law; that is, they were un-Canadian, counterproductive and probably illegal.”

Colvin’s testimony implied that Canada had knowingly broken international law, and it caused another firestorm of debate in Ottawa about detainee policy. The arguments focused on the big question that I had failed to resolve in my earlier investigation: How much did the foreign troops know? I decided to invite an old friend for dinner. I cooked him a steak, poured drinks, and afterward I brought out the pen.

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