A classified war: Afghanistan and the Canberra malaise

What is our Government's knowledge of the extent to which depleted uranium weapons and white phosphorous are used by ISAF forces, as the U.S. did in the Iraq war, with concomitant loss of life and birth defects? If the United Nations Security Council mandate was initially limited to providing security in and around Kabul (UNSC Resolution 1386 of 20 December 2001) why were villages being bombed in Kandahar and elsewhere subsequent to that and before the UNSC extended ISAF's mandate to cover the whole of Afghanistan (UNSC Resolution 1510 of October 2003)?

The Government and Opposition are unable to articulate reasons for our continued presence in Afghanistan. If, as The Australian implies, it is to shore up our alliance with the U.S., what guarantees are there that a weakened, war weary and financially strapped America would and could come to our assistance if required? Important political issues are never ventilated. Equally important moral and ethical questions, unasked, remain unanswered.

This week Human Rights Watch released its report documenting serious abuses, such as killings, rape, arbitrary detention, abductions, forcible land grabs, and illegal raids by irregular armed groups in northern Kunduz province and by the Afghan Local Police (ALP) force in Baghlan, Herat, and Uruzgan provinces. It's not the first time the ALP program has been described as a major threat to civilians and stability. 

A U.N. report, as yet unpublished but scheduled for release this month, alleges widespread torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and already has resulted in NATO deciding to suspend transferring detainees to Afghan forces. The suspension involves facilities including police-run prisons in Kunduz and Tarin Kot, as well as prisons in Herat, Khost, Lagman, Kapisa and Takhar run by the AfghanNational Directorate of Security (NDS) and a counter-terrorism facility known as Department 124.

Others have pointed out that you can't have transition without ensuring that the security forces you leave behind are properly vetted and trained and know they will be held accountable for abuses. So where does this leave us? And perhaps more importantly, what does our Government know and when did it find out?

Most people don't need reminding that there is an absolute legal prohibition on torture, so it's hard to see how the notion of acting in self-defence or in our national interests can possibly extend to any complicity in establishing facilities that will be used for torturing people. Similarly, it's common knowledge that the Afghans whom the invading powers – including us – embraced and helped to gain power after September 11 are the very people who committed atrocities against minorities and against women before the rise of the Taliban, and who were allied to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. We have helped to arm and train and vest power in the wrong people in Afghanistan, and the Afghan people will pay the price for that when we withdraw, even more than they do today. 

Allegations of torture in Afghanistan prisons should not have come as a surprise. They were part and parcel of Afghan operating procedures under the Russian occupation. In November 2007 Amnesty International released a report Afghanistan Detainees Transferred To Torture: ISAF Complicity? Three years later The Nation released its explosive report on America's Secret Afghan Prisons.

The 2010 Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission report confirmed that: 

...Torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment are common in the majority of law enforcement institutions and at least 98.5 per cent of interviewed victims have been tortured. Institutions where torture has occurred include police (security, justice, traffic), prosecution office, national security, detention centres, custody, prison and national army…

Late last year Amnesty International warned our Government that its’ newly announced policy of transferring prisoners detained in Afghanistan to Afghan and U.S. forces could violate international law.

Defence Minister Stephen Smith said the new arrangement was for low-level or low-risk detainees to be handed over to Afghan authorities and for high-risk or high-level detainees to be handed over to the U.S. for detention in the Parwan facility.

Earlier this year, responding to a question put to him by Jim Middleton about his confidence that detainees handed over by Australian forces wouldn't be subjected to torture, Stephen Smith said: