I wrote an article for the National Post that appeared in the Friday edition about Afghan detainees. Due to constraints of space, they obviously could not print the full version. Here is that version now, for those who have wondered how the detainee issue plays in the minds of Afghans. Thanks to Terry Glavin for his assistance in this article.

Afghan patrol through the village of Teymurian. Photo credit: Master Corporal Matthew McGregor

The Canadian media has switched its focus on Afghanistan in recent months from what is happening overseas to what is happening right here at home involving government documents on Canada’s mission in Kandahar. The buzz word has been the alleged “torture” of suspected insurgents captured by Canadian Forces, precipitating the so-called “Afghan detainee abuse scandal.”

An EKOS poll released last week, however, indicates that Canadians haven’t been paying very close attention to the details of the scandal. When asked how closely they have been following how the federal government has handled the Canadian military’s transfer of detainees to Afghan authorities, 43 per cent of those surveyed said “not at all”, while 40 per cent said they have followed it “somewhat closely.”

The reason most widely cited for Stephen Harper’s prorogation of Parliament last December is that he was dodging politically damaging questions from the opposition about the handling of Afghan detainees. The subject has thoroughly dominated agenda of the House of Commons’ Special Committee on Afghanistan in recent months.

But while Canadians have been polled and questioned on how they feel about the mission in Afghanistan, there has been far less reporting on what actual Afghans themselves are saying about the so-called “scandal”, or whether it is resonating with any force over there.

Najia Haneefi is the founder of the Afghan Women Political Participation Committee in Kabul, moving to Canada from Afghanistan in 2007. Canada has already paid too much attention to the detainee issue, she said in a telephone interview from her home in Ottawa.

Ms.Haneefi said she wishes Canadians would pay more attention to the threat of a sellout of human rights as Afghan President Hamid Karzai pursues negotiations with senior Taliban leaders.

When asked about the possible torture of detainees in Afghanistan, she answered by referring to the broader context of Afghans imprisoned across the country. A 2009 survey by the International Red Cross reports that 29% of respondents said they had experienced some form of torture, though that was down from 43% in a 1999 Red Cross survey.

Ms.Haneefi said she doesn’t think that the Canadian government is dodging a scandal on the issue so much as it is avoiding the subject of Afghanistan altogether.

“Harper does not want to deal with the issue because it’s a big headache,” she said. “He went on TV in the United States in 2008 and said that ‘Afghanistan is a grave of empires and we don’t want to be with them forever.’”

In Afghanistan, the issue of insurgent detainees barely registers with the people there.

Zaman Sultani is the Kabul representative for the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. He said that the people he has talked to have not brought up the detainee issue.

“I am not sure if people would care much, because they are still suffering from insecurity, road side bombs, and suicide attacks from the Taliban,” he writes via email from Kabul. “Apart from the others, you may remember the two last explosions in Kabul, in which many civilians and innocent people were killed.”

It is difficult to get an overall sense of what Afghans think, if at all, about the detainee issue, Mr.Sultani said.

“In my experience, people are optimistic for the presence of international forces. And they think if the international forces are
not present, the situation may go back to civil war.”

As for torture, Mr.Sultani noted that it is certainly not confined to captured insurgents in Afghanistan. A recent Afghan Parliamentary delegation to Iran found that 5,630 Afghans – many of whom are poor people caught smuggling opium – are in Iranian prisons, and more than 3,000 of them have been sentenced to death.

But any consideration of torture in Afghanistan should be weighed in light of the widespread use of torture throughout the region, perpetrated by many different countries. It is wrong, Mr.Sultani said, to focus only on the treatment of the captured detainees by western armies.

Ms.Haneefi said that she has relatives who have been tortured in Iran, and that Iranian authorities treat Afghans there “worse than animals.”

When asked about the idea of reconciliation with the Taliban, Ms.Haneefi said she does not believe the Taliban will negotiate with Hamid Karzai’s government, because the Taliban know the Afghan Army is too weak to stand on its own. The Taliban merely have to outlast the resolve of foreign soldiers, she said, and then they will attempt to seize power again.

Mr.Sultani said that Afghans are apprehensive about the future of their country right now.

“I think we are in a vague situation, and there is not a very clear idea where we are headed on the issue of reconciliation with the Taliban. A law has been passed recently by the government known as the Amnesty Bill. This will give a blanket pardon for war criminals, not only for the past but also for the future.”

Afghans acknowledge that the rumours of detainee abuse hurts support for the mission in western countries, but the perception that Afghans don’t want us there is contradicted by numerous polls. Surveys conducted in the past year by the BBC, Red Cross, and the Asia Foundation, consistently revealed that at least 70 per cent of Afghans thought their country was heading in the right direction and would improve in 2010.

Afghans owe that optimism almost entirely to the continued presence of International Forces. Now if only they could get the average person in the west to listen to them, Afghanistan might prevail against the Taliban.