The warlord and the Taliban POWs

NY Times:

After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.

“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ”

It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant war crime in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Mr. Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.

“If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government,” Mr. Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, “There is always a time and place for justice.”

While President Obama has deepened the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt.

A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, have told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstalling General Dostum. The American officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Mr. Karzai over the general’s role, said an official briefed on the matter. Asked about looking into the prisoner deaths, the official said, “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.”

While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum’s forces, which were part of the American-backed Northern Alliance, in the city of Kunduz. They were then transported to a prison run by the general’s forces near the town of Shibarghan.

Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that, over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Laili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.

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The story omits facts that led up to the capture of the Taliban at Konduz.

After Dostum and Atta captured Mazir-Sharif from the Taliban, Dostum met with Taliban commander Mullah Faisal to discuss the terms of surrender of about 10,00 of his troops. Dostum was trying to avoid a bloody street fight in Konduz and Faisal was requesting that he and his men be allowed passage to Herat as well as keeping their weapons. Some money was also paid to Dostum and a deal was agreed to.

In Dostum's view this moved these forces from the enemy camp to his. Some of them wound up as POW in a fortress control by Dostum with the help of some CIA offices one of which was Mike Spann. Spann was later killed in a prisoner revolt which almost succeeded in taking over the compound. I suspect that experienced weighed on Dostums treatment of future prisoners. Many of the worst of the Taliban had fled to Konduz, and the Northern Alliance did not have a facility for holding them which probably led to the use of the shipping containers.

Doug Stanton's Horse Soldiers gives the details of the fight that led up to the capture and Dostum's troops as well as the American special forces who fought with them endured some pretty horrific conditions on the way to opening up the north and making the defeat of the Taliban possible. The human rights wackos would probably have found their conditions appalling too.

I think this is probably be brought up as a way to pressure Dostum out of the government. He was an interesting character and he helped to make the defeat of the Taliban possible. That is probably another reason why there was reluctance to stab him in the back with a war crimes trial.