Pledges of Human Rights Reform

Well, isn't that amazing. Who might have anticipated such an outcome. To hope that Western sources taking the time and trouble to finance the upgrading of Afghanistan's prisons and sending out their incarceration and rehabilitation experts for the purpose of training Afghans on prisoner-treatment best-practices would turn them away from traditional torture methods to extract incriminating intelligence must seem in retrospect faith in naivete.

The United Nations has issued once again a condemnatory statement. They are aghast; Afghan authorities appear to remain convinced that torture has proven to be an asset in their manipulation of Taliban-affiliated prisoners. They may be right, since they know their society better than the high-minded human-rights-violations-averse West whose military had routinely turned over to Afghan authorities those Taliban that were taken in combat. To hear later from shrill-voiced liberals how dreadful it was to be complicit in the torture of jihadis.

Afghanistan is not a destination for the faint-of-heart. Like Pakistan and Iraq, fierce tribal loyalties and even fiercer hatred for fellow Muslims who have committed the cardinal sin of backing the wrong version of Islam impels them through custom and heritage to mount bloody attacks with a view of exterminating the heretics. Death comes often in these societies, sometimes unexpected, more often with resignation toward the inevitable.

And it it inevitable that people mired in the byzantine and sinister byways of fanaticism cling to what is dear and familiar. So prison reform has been a slow and tedious process; NATO allies clinging themselves to the notional belief that if they are earnest enough in imparting to their Afghan colleagues the precepts of human rights, they will ultimately be sufficiently convincing to ensure that Afghans will unhesitatingly accept the premise that doing great physical and mental harm to another human being is not nice.

The UN report documents little progress in the curbing of prisoner abuse. In multiple detention centres, detainees are hung from the ceiling by their wrists, beaten with cables and wooden sticks, administered electric shocks, have their genitals twisted, and entertain threats that bottles will be shoved up their anuses; threats that may perhaps make death look inviting by comparison. And the report has convinced NATO to once again figure out how they can themselves detain  prisoners.

How ludicrous is this situation? This is a war fought in a country that remains mired in the stone age in many respects; certainly where civil society is concerned, weighted down with quaintly restrictive and brutal customs sacrificing the equality and humanity of much of the population, through misbegotten traditions. A kind of social savagery prevails once away from urban centres. And the country's authorities must deal with terrorists who think nothing of mass slaughter and generally terrorizing the country.

The Afghan government claims its internal monitoring committee has discovered "the allegations of torture of detainees were untrue and thus disproved". Well, so there. Qualifying their certainty by admitting that perhaps there was a slight possibility that torture might still be useful at some detention facilities, but come on now, nowhere near the horrendous levels described in the UN report. But the government will (sigh) check it out once more.