Afghanistan
From American Gulag
According to both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan is home to twenty secret U.S. detention facilities. Bases include Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Bagram, which is the main one. The rest of this article will focus specifically on Bagram.
[edit] Background
Bagram is a military airbase that is currently controlled by the US. It was built in the 50s and used by the Russians in the 70s and 80s during its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. It then changed hands between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance until the 2001 US invasion.
Various newspapers (Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Independent in the UK) have published similar accounts about detainee abuse: prisoners have been subjected to inhumane treatment that military officials call “torture-lite” or “stress and duress” techniques. They were allegedly stripped naked and anally raped, deprived of sleep, and forced to kneel in the same position for hours while wearing black, spray-painted goggles. The “common peroneal strike,” a direct hit to the side of the leg just above the knee, was used frequently; if a prisoner were hit enough times, the injury was comparable to one’s leg being run over by a bus.
[edit] Detainees
Bagram first appeared in the newspapers when New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall wrote about the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah.
Dilwar, who was only 22, was found dead in his cell on December 10, 2002. He died from a heart attack stemming from coronary heart disease, but military pathologists called it a homicide. On the morning on his arrest, an American base, Camp Salerno, was attacked by a rocket. While driving his taxi, Dilawar was stopped at a checkpoint; officials found a broken walkie-talkie and a stabilizer, which regulates electric currents. He was suspected of that morning’s attack and brought to Bagram. While imprisoned, he was struck over 100 times just so the prison guards could hear him cry out “Allah.” After his last interrogation, Dilawar was chained to the ceiling and found dead several hours later.
Habibullah, 30, was another Afghan who died under US custody. He died a week earlier than Dilawar, on December 3. He supposedly died from a pulmonary embolism, or a blood clot in the lung, but his death was also considered a homicide. He was captured in Uruzgan on the basis of being a Taliban sympathizer and the brother of a Taliban commander.
Neither Dilawar nor Habibullah were allowed to be seen by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which usually has access to prisoners.
British Muslim Moazzam Begg, unlike Dilawar and Habibullah, was lucky to survive. He recently released his book, Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar. In February 2002, Begg was arrested in Pakistan, taken to Kandahar, then moved to Bagram and finally to Guantanamo Bay. Bagram was apparently the worst of the three facilities. He was sometimes left hanging in his cell, forced to stand on his tiptoes, and at one point, he was led to believe that the woman screaming in an adjacent cell was his wife. His interrogators threatened to send him to Egypt to be tortured if he did not cooperate. After his three-year ordeal, he was released on January 25, 2005.
[edit] Legal Proceedings
Criminal investigations were launched after news about the two homicides. But the prosecution proved to be a difficult process. Who were the witnesses? Do you hold one person accountable, and if so, who is that person? How far up the chain does accountability go?
When asked why the investigation took two years, Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Pamela Hart said that the military strove “to ensure that they followed every viable lead to ensure they knew exactly what happened.” The injuries supposedly “appeared very subtle,” and “it was difficult to assign a particular bruise to a particular timeframe to a certain individual.” The closest the prosecution got was with Specialist Willie V. Brand, who admitted to hitting both Dilawar and Habibullah before they died. According to a New York Times article written by Tim Golden, a jury convicted Brand of “maiming, assault, maltreatment and making a false statement and could have sentenced him to 16 years in a military prison.” But after hearing about his sick wife and poor family of four, the charge of involuntary manslaughter was dropped. Even Brand’s lawyer, John P. Galligan, was surprised at how easily his client was let off the hook. He was not jailed or fined, and he was allowed to leave the Army with an honorable discharge. Out of the 27 people who were reviewed for criminal charges, only five of them pleaded guilty, and the most severe punishment administered was a five-month prison sentence.
[edit] Update
Bagram is still a military airbase, and it holds 650 detainees. It is no longer a detention facility, as the Pentagon has officially changed the name from “Bagram Collection Point” to “Bagram Theater Internment Facility.” Since December 2002, though, torture seems to have stopped. Moreover, the average detainment of a prisoner has decreased from 2-3 years to 14.5 months. Now, the major complaints are about the lack of judicial process and the lack of family visits.
[edit] Related Links
Begg's Interview with PBS Journalist David Brancaccio interviewed Begg in July 2006 about his experiences in Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar.
Begg's Interview with NPR In September 2006, Begg spoke to NPR about his experiences. The website also shows an excerpt of Begg's book.
The New Republic This was the first article that published pictures of Bagram.
Threats and Responses: Prisoners; U.S. Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody Carlotta Gall's piece that first described the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah.
In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths
A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantanamo
The Bagram File: Revisiting the Case; Years After 2 Afghans Died, Abuse Case Falters
[edit] "GHOST PRISONERS:" Bagram was a foreshadowing of Abu Ghraib
On December 3, 2002, an Afghan named Mullah Habibullah died in American custody. One week later, a man known only as Dilawar was found dead in his cell. Their ages were 30 and 22 respectively, but Habibullah supposedly died from a pulmonary embolism, or a blood clot in the lung, and Dilawar from a heart attack stemming from coronary heart disease. More puzzling is that both deaths were marked as “homicide” by military pathologists who took part in the autopsies. These two deaths took place at an American-controlled air base in Bagram, 25 miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan. These two deaths put Bagram on the map as one of America’s secret torture sites, along with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
Built in the 1950s, the base was used by the Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s to aid their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Since then, control over the compound has flip-flopped between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance until 2001, when the United States assumed command during its invasion of Afghanistan. According to New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall, the U.S. “probably [held] people there from the first days [or] weeks,” but she is sure that prisoners were detained as early as April or May 2002, when she “attended press conferences right nearby.” Despite this knowledge, “its existence is supposed to be classified,” says Scott Higham of The Washington Post. Even the International Committee of the Red Cross is barred from seeing prisoners kept upstairs, where treatment is more severe. Amnesty International is also not allowed into Bagram, even though it has had access to every other prison in Afghanistan. Slowly, though, information about Bagram’s human rights abuses has leaked, and reporters have helped to uncover what has been happening there.
Various sources, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Mother Jones and The Independent in the UK, have published similar accounts: prisoners at Bagram have been subjected to inhumane, degrading treatment that government and military officials dubbed “torture-lite” or “stress and duress” techniques. They were allegedly stripped naked and anally raped, deprived of sleep and forced to kneel in the same position for hours while wearing black, spray-painted goggles. Prisoners, including Dilawar and Habibullah, were sometimes left hanging in their cells with their wrists handcuffed to the ceiling. But the most frightening technique was the “common peroneal strike,” a direct hit to the side of the leg just above the knee. If a prisoner is hit enough times, the injury is comparable to one’s leg being run over by a bus. In the case of Dilawar, the coroner stated that the tissue in his legs had been “pulpified.”
British Muslim Moazzam Begg suffered similar abuses but was lucky enough to survive. Arrested in Pakistan in February 2002, he was first taken to Kandahar, one of the 20 smaller detainee facilities in Afghanistan, then moved to Bagram and finally to Guantanamo Bay. According to Begg, “Bagram…was the worst part of [his] incarceration.” Kept in an 8’ x 6’ “shipping container” for 11 months, he was sometimes left hanging in his cell, forced to stand on his tiptoes, and at one point, he was led to believe that the woman screaming in an adjacent cell was his wife. His interrogators threatened to send him to Egypt to be tortured if he did not cooperate. Begg also believes he was witness to a prisoner’s death. Trying to escape, the prisoner was supposedly caught and beaten, and then dragged to the medical room; after some time, Begg recalls the body being taken out on a stretcher and one of the guards confiding in him about what had happened. It is unclear, however, if this was the death of Dilawar, Habibullah or some other detainee.
CAPTURES JUSTIFIED?
What exactly did these men do to cause the American military to detain, interrogate and torture them? More often than not, they are taken from their homes on little more than suspicion about possible involvement in an attack. It is rare for officials to catch a terrorist in the field, like it did with American-born Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh. On November 25, 2001, he and other captured Taliban members staged an uprising against the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Qala-i Janghi prison in Mazar-e Sharif. CIA agent Mike Spann, who was there to interview Lindh, was shot and killed during the attack. Lindh and the remaining survivors retreated to the basement, where they were found and recaptured on December 1.
Though many Americans felt that Lindh deserved his 20-year sentence, there was controversy about his treatment. Pictures of him – naked, blindfolded and strapped down to a stretcher with duct tape – circulated the media. According to his lawyers, he was “’wounded, starved, frozen and exhausted,’” and had been subjected to tortuous conditions.
Dilawar’s case was different. The morning of his arrest, he drove his taxi past an American base, Camp Salerno, which had been attacked by a rocket earlier that day. He was stopped at a checkpoint, and officials found and confiscated a broken walkie-talkie and an electric stabilizer that regulates current from a generator. He and his three passengers were suspected of involvement in the morning’s attack and brought to Bagram. Dilawar’s relatives, who were later interviewed by New York Times reporter Tim Golden, claim that the stabilizer did not belong to him. The interrogations that ensued were brutal.
Dilawar suffered many common peroneal strikes because, as Golden states in his article, the prison guards simply wanted to hear him cry out “Allah” for their amusement. Specialist Corey E. Jones believes that Dilawar was struck over 100 times. When Dilawar denied that he was responsible for firing the rocket, his interrogators slammed him into the wall and kicked him in the groin. Once it was over, Dilawar was dragged back to his cell and chained to the ceiling to await his next interrogation session. After several sessions, Sergeant Yonushonis and some others believed that Dilawar was innocent, but by then it was too late; Dilawar was already dead.
Moazzam Begg was suspected to be a financial supporter of the Taliban. According to Time magazine, his name popped up on a money-transfer document from an al Qaeda camp. But Begg argues that he was not an al Qaeda sympathizer and that the U.S. government was wrong in failing to formally charge him during his three-year detainment. “They’ve never accused me of a crime,” says Begg in an NPR interview. “What they’ve said was that I was a supporter of, a sympathizer, or financier of…terrorism in general, which they assumed from me having visited a Kashmiri trading camp in 1993, which had nothing to do with the Taliban or al Qaeda.” But, as interviewer Steve Inskeep states and as Begg admits, the Kashmiri trading camp was “full of gunmen who were training to commit acts of violence.” Moreover, British authorities had suspected Begg as early as 1999 of helping create an electronic terrorism manual, dubbed the “Encyclopedia of Jihad.”
Unlike Dilawar and Begg, not much is known about Habibullah. He was captured in Uruzgan for being the brother of a Taliban commander and for supposedly aiding the Taliban – information that Jan Muhammad, the former governor of the province, told The New York Times. The Times also spoke to Habibullah’s father via satellite phone, but was unable to meet him in person.
It seems clear that the military had enough reason to justify the questioning of Dilawar, Begg and Habibullah. One had a stabilizer in his trunk, one was linked to an al Qaeda camp, and one was the brother of a Taliban commander. The issue, however, is the lengthy detainment and torture that they endured.
LEGAL PROCEEDINGS
When news finally got out about the homicides, U.S. officials responded by launching criminal investigations. New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall first wrote about the two deaths in December 2002. Later, with the help of Tim Golden and The Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, more and more information emerged. But prosecution proved to be a difficult process. Who were the witnesses? Do you hold one person accountable, and if so, who? How far up the chain does accountability go?
When asked by NPR why the investigation took two years, Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Pamela Hart said that the military strove “to ensure that they followed every viable lead to ensure they knew exactly what happened.” The injuries “appeared very subtle,” and “it was difficult to assign a particular bruise to a particular timeframe to a certain individual.” The closest the prosecution got was Specialist Willie V. Brand, who admitted to hitting both Dilawar and Habibullah before they died. A jury convicted Brand of “maiming, assault, maltreatment and making a false statement and could have sentenced him to 16 years in a military prison.” But after hearing about his sick wife and poor family of four, the charge of involuntary manslaughter was dropped. Even Brand’s lawyer, John P. Galligan, was surprised at how easily his client was let off the hook. He was not jailed or fined, and he was allowed to leave the Army with an honorable discharge. Out of the 27 people who were reviewed for criminal charges, only five of them pleaded guilty, and the most severe punishment administered was a five-month prison sentence.
COULD ABU GHRAIB HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?
In a short, online survey that I designed and administered to Stanford students, I asked eight questions about whether students had heard of Bagram or Abu Ghraib, what they knew about the two places, and how they had first heard about the prison sites (see attached copy of survey). Of the 100 respondents, seven people said that they had heard of Bagram, but only one person knew that it was a prison facility where detainees were tortured. The others said that it was a city in Afghanistan or an air force base. In comparison, 79 people had heard of Abu Ghraib, and the majority knew that it was an Iraqi prison where U.S. officials abused detainees. One student’s response: “US Army officers tortured and violated the basic human rights of prisoners being held at Abu Ghraib. Graphic photos were released of such torture.” When asked where they had received most of their information about Abu Ghraib, responses ranged from “Time magazine” to “TV/internet” to “Newspaper (NY Times).” As for where they first heard about Bagram, many said “TV;” one said that her boyfriend was on duty at Bagram.
One likely reason for the lack of knowledge about Bagram is the lack of information provided by the media. Prisons in Afghanistan were barred from the outside world, and even the Red Cross did not have access. “Bagram and Kandahar are/were secretive facilities to which the media has no access,” said Begg in an Amnesty online discussion session. “Hence, it is of little surprise that the abuses there –including murder – are not reported as much.”
However, the few stories that were written about Bagram were largely ignored. Carlotta Gall’s piece about the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar was filed on February 5, 2003 but buried on page 14 a month later, on March 4. Doug Frantz, the investigative editor at the time, said that had Gall’s story run on the front page, “it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.” Despite her superb reporting, the story was apparently pushed aside because it was too improbable to be true; the editors had a hard time “get[ting] their mind around” it. Gall personally thinks that the reason was a pro-American, post-9/11 sentiment: “there was a sense of patriotism, and you felt it in every question from every editor.”
When reading about Bagram, one can’t help but think about Abu Ghraib. According to Scott Higham of The Washington Post, the torture tactics at Abu Ghraib were similar to the ones used in Bagram. Piling prisoners on top of each other, for example, was supposedly a Bagram strategy. Along with some of her soldiers in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, Captain Carolyn Wood, who was in charge of Bagram during summer 2002, was transferred to Abu Ghraib the following summer. Mother Jones states that Wood “rewrote the interrogation policy” at Bagram and brought similar policy changes to Abu Ghraib. The new techniques she approved include the use of dogs, stress positions and sensory deprivation – techniques she apparently came up with after researching interrogation methods “in other places.” But after speaking to Higham more, a different story emerges: “There isn’t a lot known about what she might have done at Abu [Ghraib] and whether she brought these techniques to Iraq. She's never spoken publicly about her involvement,” though she did testify during Lynndie England’s trial. England was one of the U.S. soldiers who abused Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib.
In an NPR interview, Amnesty International Advocacy Director Jumana Musa says that “one really has to question whether or not…we [could] have prevented some of the abuses that happened at Abu Ghraib” if the investigation had gone more quickly or if the unit were “looked at earlier.” It took 22 months to investigate the two deaths, and this delay created a “culture of permissiveness” and showed “that people [could engage] in these types of activities without any kind of immediate reaction or penalty.” Wood, for example, even received a Bronze Star in Bagram for “exceptionally meritorious service.” I asked Carlotta Gall if she believed that Abu Ghraib could have been avoided:
“I feel that if there had been a stricter oversight and enforcement of what is allowed and not allowed in interrogations, these men would not have died. The poor leadership, conflicting rules, pressure for results and poor preparation of soldiers all contributed to their deaths. A strong and public correction of this after the two deaths in Bagram could definitely have prevented further abuse, or certainly applied the brakes to the actions of some of the military police and interrogators.”
In one respect, Abu Ghraib should have been expected. The military protocol for dealing with terrorism suspects was so unclear that a screw-up was bound to happen (though we probably would have never imagined something as shocking as Abu Ghraib). A former senior intelligence officer told Washington Post reporter Dana Priest that a concrete method to deal with detainees was never established: “We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy…everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’” These detainees are appropriately called “ghost prisoners” because they drift from one prison facility to another. They are kept prisoner for several years, away from anything familiar or comfortable, without being able to protest their capture.
Although more media coverage would have helped make Bagram more public, credit must be given to the journalists who did uncover information about it. Gall and Golden both did excellent reporting given the fact that they were never allowed into the prison. Also, neither of them had photos as damning evidence. The photos of Abu Ghraib definitely helped, if not caused, the event to be catapulted into international media outlets. Had there been similar pictures of Bagram, the same frenzy might have ensued.
BAGRAM: SINCE 2002
Today, Bagram is still a military airbase. It was in the headlines this past February when a suicide bomber attempted to kill Vice President Dick Cheney while he was visiting the facility. The New Republic, which recently published the first photos of Bagram (Figure 1), and Human Rights Watch have both stated that 650 detainees are still in American custody. Fortunately, according to Gall, “there are no complaints of torture.” She said that a Human Rights Watch researcher, who interviewed about a dozen former inmates, told her that there was nothing serious going on. Since December 2002, the majority of complaints have been about “the lack of judicial process…[and] the lack of family visits.” Another improvement is the prisoners’ shortened detainment, which has decreased from two to three years to 14.5 months.
Bagram is a reminder that the U.S. government committed crimes and got away with them. Although torture seems to have stopped, virtually no one was held accountable for what happened. There are still secret prisons in Afghanistan and in other parts of the world, and preliminary reports and news articles have shown that abuses are happening at these facilities. We shouldn’t allow the government to repeat what happened in Bagram.
[edit] The Taliban’s Fight Against Girls: The Story Continues, but with Fewer Words
By Laura Carwile
June 4, 2008
This is, of course, before October 11, 2007, when Taliban insurgents swept through the Swat Valley of Kabal, Pakistan and planted explosive devices to erupt during the night. After the bombing, the windows still let in the soft white light, but they are shattered, their wooden frames broken and splintered, the glass covering the dirt floor. The desks, neatly stacked in the corner the day before, are toppled over, broken, their miniature square tops in demolished pieces across the room. Even the sturdy blue door separating one classroom from another has been blown completely off its hinges.
No one was hurt in the attack. But the 760 girls no longer have a school to attend.[1]
The Taliban is not always so merciful.
Earlier the same year in the Sadaat village of Logar Province, Afghanistan, students piled out of their school building for a midday break. Two unidentified gunmen drove by on a motorcycle and fatally shot students Shukria and Saadia.
Saadia was 25 and married, but insisted on earning the education she was forbidden during the years under the Taliban.[2]
Five other students and a teacher were critically wounded. Since the attack, fewer than half the girls have returned to school, fearing that they will become the Taliban’s next victims.
“I am afraid,” Maryam, a 12-year-old girl at the school, cried to her parents a week later. “I do not want to go back to school.[3]”
The schoolchildren are not the only ones who are afraid.
“If the government does not improve security, I will also quit my job as a teacher,[4]” Pakiza Mehboob, a teacher at a girls’ school nearby, told the IRIN, which reported on the incident.
And while the Taliban is at fault, many people are angry with the government in Kabul, only 30 km from Logar, for being complacent about the violence.
“The government should change the current option of ‘life or education’ for our daughters,” said Saeed Agha, the father of one of the victims, referring to the extreme danger facing girls who choose to attend school.
Agha told the IRIN that while he wanted to educate his second daughter, he was unwilling to send her to school if it meant her life was in danger.[5]
The violence has escalated in the past two years. The Education Ministry of Afghanistan reported that the Taliban and its allies killed 220 students and teachers in 2007.[7] According to the TimesOnline, as of March 23, 2008, 36 schools had been attacked by the Taliban and its local allies.[8] The insurgents set schoolbuildings on fire, and textbooks, which seem to draw particular ire, are tossed into the flames.[9] They frequently send teachers and parents “night letters,” which are signed by Taliban leaders and contain vicious threats if schooling is not stopped. “We have decided to bomb the school building,” One posted to a building in Dara Adamkhel read: “If any of the students shows up and dies as a result, she will be responsible for her own death.[10] ” But the methods range in severity from heckling students walking to and from class to assassinations of teachers and students, sometimes in public. In one example in 2006, six children were killed from a rocket blast while they studied in their schoolyard.[11]
Many of those murdered by the Taliban are male schoolteachers. In 2005, a male teacher was shot and killed outside his school’s gates for refusing to cease teaching girls in his classroom.[12] In 2006, Malim Abdul Habib was stabbed and beheaded in his home by Taliban forces while his wife and eight children, ages 2 to 22, watched in horror.[13] And in April 2008, the AFP reported that gunmen kidnapped a male superintendent from his home in Ghazni and forced him to divulge the addresses of two other male teachers at the schools. The gunmen later abducted those two men as well, and neither local authorities nor government officials have located them.[14]
Unfortunately, the violence seems to be working. Nearly half the schools in Kandahar are closed this year at least some of the time, if not completely. In Helmund, a province wracked by this violence, 40 percent of the schools are non-functional.[15] And in Marouf, all 40 schools are closed.[16] The percentage of girls in Afghan schools hovers around 35 percent - and many of those are risking their lives to attend.
[edit] “They came back”
After the September 11 attacks, the Taliban government in Afghanistan refused to divulge the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden to the U.S. government. The Taliban became synonymous with the kind of anti-American terrorists that we were trying to rid the world of. High-profile celebrities, such as First Lady Laura Bush, Jay Leno’s wife Mavis Leno, and Eve Ensler of “Vagina Monologues” rallied the country around the fight against the Taliban.[17], [18] The group’s horrendous treatment of girls and women was used as one of the reasons to remove them from power.
The Taliban consider educating girls “unIslamic,” and outlawed it during their reign from 1996 to 2001.
U.S. forces, sent to Afghanistan the following month, ousted the Taliban relatively quickly, and were sent on to Iraq for what turned out to be a much longer war. A new, democratic government was set up in the Taliban’s place, led by President Hamid Karzai, and with him came a stream of reforms.
“Schools were opened,” she added. “Girls began to get educated in numbers much greater than those under the Taliban, where female education was virtually non-existent.” Indeed, UNICEF reported in 2003 that 5.1 million children, both boys and girls, were enrolled in public schools.[19]
To many people, it seemed as though the struggle with this anti-American regime was over. The country was beginning to rise from the ruins of years of Taliban rule and war.
And yet, as the Taliban fell from the public’s radar, they came back.
“What they did over the next few years, after 2001, was they simply regrouped to the extent that they could,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a former Afghanistan and Pakistan analyst at the U.S. Department of State who currently works at the Middle East Institute in D.C. “They recruited new people. Now what you have is a new generation of fighters – the leadership carries over, but you have different fighters. But they came back.”
“They were operating under that idea that ‘If only we can stay in the game long enough, we’ll wait out the international community. They’ll get frustrated, and the members of the Alliance will back off and leave the country.”
“That was their strategy,” he continued, “No major confrontations, just hit and run operations. Enough particularly in the South to keep progress from occurring in reconstruction, which wasn’t going on there much anyway, since the government did not have a major presence.” Why target the schools specifically?
As New York Times reporter Barry Bearak put it, “To take aim at education is to make war on the government.[20]”
A 2006 Human Rights Watch report confirmed this: “Groups opposed to the authority of the Afghan central government and its international supporters use tactics such as suicide bombings and attacks on ‘soft targets’ such as schools and teachers to instill terror in ordinary Afghans and thus turn them away from a central government that is unable to protect them.[21]”
The consequences cannot be overstated.
“Insecurity has forced hundreds of schools to shut down and international aid agencies to withdraw from many remote areas,” Constable wrote in her report. “Especially those where such projects are most needed to increase public confidence and reduce the insurgents' appeal.[22]”
The above video shows a clip from CNN's "Lifting the Veil" report, describing the Taliban's affect on girls' schools.
[edit] Why don’t we know?
How did Americans, who used to consider the Taliban an important and dangerous foe, miss their resurgence? How was it possible that such a brutal enemy of the United States regained their foothold? Where were the government reports? And where was the media?
Pamela Constable listed a multitude of reasons for the decrease in story volume in even the most high-profile newspapers.
“There’s been a real down-turn in security over the past two years,” she explained. “There has been a gradual but very real decrease in the security of areas which you can operate in.”
The decrease in security coupled with the increase in violence makes it virtually impossible to travel to many of the areas most affected by the Taliban’s presence. And unfortunately, those are the areas where most of the violence is occurring.
“There are a lot of western troops [in Iraq],” she explained. “In some ways, it’s easier, even though there’s always a danger of being hurt. You get a lot of assistance, and you are protected by the military convoys you travel with.”
Constable told me that after living in Afghanistan for about ten years, she chose to return to Washington for reasons unrelated to security concerns. She said she now travels to Afghanistan three or four times a year, staying anywhere between a few days to a month.
She has written many pieces regarding the violence against girls’ schools, including one in September 2006 that detailed the ever-increasing number of attacks that were forcing girls to start home-schooling because they were unable to travel safely to their schools.
Constable chooses her destinations cautiously.
“I have driven to these villages at times,” she told me. “But if a girls’ school is attacked now, I would be a lot less likely to travel there for the story, because it’s much more dangerous.”
Constable said there were other important reasons that the Taliban’s resurgence was not receiving the press coverage that it deserves.
“First, lots of my colleagues who used to be in Afghanistan essentially left to go to Iraq and never came back,” she said.
Second, she explained, “It is very expensive to cover conflict, and with the general cutbacks across the media along with declining readership, people are being pulled from places like Afghanistan.”
“I would love to be able do more, but it is just not practical for us right now,” Romesh Ratnesar, Time's world editor told the AJR in 2006. “We have to balance the fact that there is significantly more action and more American troops in Iraq, so that's where we have poured a lot of our resources.[23]”
Finally, Constable lays much of the reasoning for the coverage gap at the feet of the television media.
“It has to be said that even if there are newspaper reporters there, the fact of life is that there is no coverage by CNN or any other television networks,” she said. “The cutbacks [in budget] by important television outlets really means that a great number of people in the United States do not have a good idea of what is going on there.”
“I appreciate the excellent coverage being done by the New York Times and other news outlets, as well as the opportunity to be there. But without those images coming in the evening news and that high profile presence, I’m afraid that it does create a big gap in the knowledge of what’s going on.”
For more information on the media's current presence in Afghanistan, see The Forgotten War: AJR
[edit] What do we do now?
Whatever the reason, the decrease in news coverage of Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban occurred almost simultaneously. With no little press coverage, the Taliban is able to get away with more and more. Few questions are being asked as the Taliban pushes back against the democratized progress being made there. And with the Taliban holding more tightly to these provinces, journalists are becoming increasingly unwilling, and at times physically unable, to travel there. And the Taliban is left to its own devices, no longer drawing the outrage of the international community.
Weinbaum believes that strengthening the local communities through means other than local warlords and the Taliban is the only way to break out of this cycle.
“We need local bodies who are given the responsibility of their communities, and local people to defend their own turf,” he said.
“Not by vigilante group, but by getting local people to want to reject the Taliban. They know the Taliban can bring security but they can never bring recovery. They can’t govern, they can’t rebuild – they never did in all the years that they were in charge.”
Still, Weinbaum explains, there is an incentive to accept the Taliban’s rule.
“This has real, local roots – not alien roots,” he said. “It has come about because the people are not provided with basic security and a source of income.”
“You need police aid, you need development aid,” Weinbaum told me. “All the elements sort of go together. You have to make progress in development, in governance, and you can do this by establishing strong police aid.”
Community members agree, especially in terms of preventing violence against girls’ schools.
“They would not have caused this tragedy if police or a guard had been at the school gate,” a local community member told the IRIN of the Logar shooting.[24]
Yet there are never enough resources, and the country’s Ministry of Education has warned that country-wide school security is not possible.
“Given the fact that our government is still working to establish a national police force, it is not feasible to demand school protection units,” Zuhoor Afghan, a Ministry of Education spokesman, said after the attacks.[25]
Weinbaum explains that due to the crumbling situation of Afghanistan under the weak central government, increasing security for schools is a non-starter.
“Girls’ education will be the first thing to go,” he said.
However, as HRW put it back in 2006, “the situation is not hopeless – yet.[26]”
For one thing, students and teachers alike have not given up their goals of education.
Nooria, a 12 year old from the village of Mandrawar, told Newsweek that despite the obstacle she faces, she wanted to become a schoolteacher when she grew up. Nooria’s school was attacked in 2006, but community members banded together in order to assure that it remained open despite continued threats.
“I'm not afraid of getting my nose and ears cut off," she said. "I want to keep studying.[27]”
“My husband and his family did not want me to teach,” Setareh, a teacher in one of Afghanistan’s rural southern regions, told the LA Times. “They said, ‘You will be killed,’ “But I will never stop this school. [28]”
Enterprising teachers have found ways to keep their schools safe. Some have resorted to holding classes in their homes while others have resorted to lying.
“Once I was walking late in my village,” Mohammad Sulieman, a math teacher, told Constable in 2006, “when three Taliban came along and warned me to stop educating girls. I told them the Koran says girls should be educated as well as boys, and that my school was teaching young girls to memorize the Koran and pray five times a day. They seemed convinced, and went on their way.[29]”
Following the 2007 Logar attack, Karzai mandated the building of two new girls’ schools, each named after one of the victims of that shooting.[31]
Some communities have dispatched own members to defend the buildings. Others rely on the small number of police who patrol their areas, although this option is relatively limited due to the corruption that infests the area. And even NATO has created a well-secured school that it protects 24 hours a day.[32] The recently established Afghan national army has been “reasonably effective,” according to Weinbaum, in connecting with leaders of communities in defeating local Taliban forces.
But still, Weinbaum cautioned, even with all of the hope and all of the seeds of security and prosperity, it is not enough.
“They’re there,” he said of the Taliban, “until things change.”
[edit] Endnotes and Related Links
Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes and information from Marvin Weinbaum and Pamela Constable come from phone interviews (Weinbaum, June 1, 2008; Constable, June 3, 2008).
Getty Image photo of school building in Swat Valley
IRIN Report on Logar shooting - First-hand account of Logar shooting, with testimony from family members of one victim
As War Enters Classrooms, Fear Grips Afghans - New York Times article detailing the Logar attack, with information about chronology of the shooting
A Wake-Up Call in Afghanistan - Pamela Constable's report on Afghanistan from 2007; Journal of Democracy, 18.2 (2007) 84-98
Schools torched, Teachers missing in Afghanistan - ABC News report on the 2008 kidnappings of male teachers
Taliban's Campaign Targets girls' schools - 2007 Telegraph article detailing the recent attacks
“Afghan Schools Torched in War Against Education.” - By Kim Barker, Chicago Tribune, 2006.
Afghan teacher beheaded - USA Today report on 2006 beheading of Afghan schoolteacher
Girls disadvantaged in Afghan education - AFP report from 2008 on the situation of girls' education in Afghanistan
Taleban return to attacking girls' schools in Afghanistan - Great piece from 2008 by the TimesOnline, explaining the most current situation of girls' schools in Afghanistan
Laura Bush and Eve Ensler - Laura Bush and Eve Ensler are among the celebrities who promoted the cause of women during the initial U.S. invasion in 2001.
Mavis Leno - Ms. Leno rallies for Afghan girls
Afghan Girls, Back in the Shadows - Pamela Constable's most recent Washington Post article, dated Sept. 2006, on the attacks
“Lessons in Terror.” - Extensive 2006 report and editorial from Human Rights Watch
A War on Schoolgirls - Newsweek feature from 2006 on the attacks
“The Taliban's War on Education: Schoolgirls are still under fire in Afghanistan.” - from the LA Times, July 31, 2006
A road cuts to heart of NATO's troubled Afghan campaign - International Herald Tribune piece on NATO in Afghanistan, by Carlotta Gall
Plight of the Children with Martin Bell, Parts 1, 2 and 3 - Outlines the current education situation in Afghanistan, with a specific focus on girls' education
