This Week in Afghanistan Watch:

• U.S. to Transfer Detainees from Guantanamo to Afghanistan
• CIA field commander: U.S. knew bin Laden was in Tora Bora
• Another suicide bombing attempt, Pakistan to close several Afghan refugee camps, Debate over responsibility for prison abuses
• Afghan women risk their lives to run for office; Times opines on Pakistan's "ambivalence"
• Feature Article: "Death to America" Online—Jihadists turn to the internet

August 11, 2005

"I'm not going to quit, because I want to show people that a woman should be able to do these things. But definitely I fear for my life."

-Noorzia Charkhi, a female journalist campaigning for a seat in Afghanistan's parliament.

U.S. to Transfer Detainees from Guantanamo to Afghanistan

August 5 (Washington Post), by Josh White and Robin Wright—The Bush administration is negotiating the transfer of nearly 70 percent of the detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to three countries as part of a plan, officials said, to share the burden of keeping suspected terrorists behind bars.

U.S. officials announced yesterday that they have reached an agreement with the government of Afghanistan to transfer most of its nationals to Kabul's "exclusive" control and custody. There are 110 Afghan detainees at Guantanamo and 350 more at the Bagram airfield near Kabul. Their transfers could begin in the next six months….

The decision to move more than 20 percent of the detainees at Guantanamo to Afghanistan and to largely clear out the detention center at Bagram is part of a broader plan to significantly reduce the population of "enemy combatants" in U.S. custody. Senior U.S. officials said yesterday's agreement is the first major step toward whittling down the Guantanamo population to a core group of people the United States expects to hold indefinitely.

"This is not an effort to shut down Guantanamo. Rather, the arrangement we have reached with the government of Afghanistan is the latest step in what has long been our policy -- that we need to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield," Matthew Waxman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said shortly after leaving Kabul with Prosper. "We, the U.S., don't want to be the world's jailer. We think a more prudent course is to shift that burden onto our coalition partners."

The negotiations come amid intense international and domestic pressure on U.S. detention operations, with allegations of mistreatment and abuse as well as concern that detainees have been held for years without being prosecuted for their alleged crimes. Legal problems have also plagued the prosecutorial process at Guantanamo, which has been blocked for months as detainees' attorneys present challenges in U.S. federal courts.

"The Guantanamo issue is clearly a liability for the Bush administration, and emptying it has become a priority," said John Sifton, a specialist on Afghanistan and detainee issues at Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring group. "It's not a victory for human rights if a whole set of people deprived of their liberty are then moved to another place and continued to be deprived of their liberty unlawfully."…

Over the past year, U.S. military authorities have released several dozen Afghans that have been determined as not posing a threat. But President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called on the United States to hand over all Afghan citizens. He raised the issue during a meeting with President Bush in May…

In a military fact sheet about "the future" of Guantanamo, developed in early July, defense officials indicated that the operational priority of the facility is to shift from intelligence gathering to long-term detention.

Editorial: Emptying Guantanamo

August 6 (Washington Post)—The agreement announced this week to repatriate 110 Afghan detainees from Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is a breakthrough of sorts in the thorny problem of managing captives in the war on terrorism....But turning these people over raises potentially significant human rights concerns that the administration must confront. Repatriating detainees en masse offers an opportunity for the administration to relieve pressure on its own detention facilities. But it must take care to avoid a situation in which abuse of large numbers of inmates by foreign surrogates could appear to have taken place on America's behalf.

Newsweek Exclusive: CIA Commander: U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away

August 15 (Newsweek)—During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan…Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border…But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora-intelligence operatives had tracked him-and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."

Another Attempted Suicide Bomb

Further evidence of the trend first noted here?

WASHINGTON, August 7 (American Forces Press Service)—In other news from Afghanistan, a suicide bomber was detained as he attempted to detonate a series of explosives attached to his body at a U.S. base south of Salerno, near the Pakistani border, Aug. 6, officials said.
The potential bomber attempted to enter a U.S. facility in the region under the guise of needing medical attention. At the gate he produced a grenade, which he attempted to detonate, officials said. But the grenade failed to detonate, and security forces apprehended the man. The suicide bomber also had two anti-personnel mines and a second grenade attached to his body. He is now in the custody of Afghan forces, officials said.

Pakistan to close Afghan refugee camps near border

ISLAMABAD (Reuters)—Pakistan has told 105,000 refugees sheltering in its lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan that it will close down their camps, the U.N. said on Saturday, adding that the region had become too insecure. Hundreds of people have been killed in fierce clashes between security forces and al Qaeda-linked militants in the Waziristan tribal region in the last two years…Pakistan has already closed down camps in North and South Waziristan, where most of the fighting has taken place. Earlier this week, the government said Afghans living in Islamabad and adjoining city of Rawalpindi would be relocated. The UNHCR said that would affect more than 60,000 refugees. "The refugees will be offered a choice of voluntary repatriation to Afghanistan or relocation within Pakistan," the UNHCR statement said.

Abuse Cases Open Command Issues at Army Prison

FORT BLISS, TX, August 4 (New York Times) by Tim Golden —In a small courtroom at this vast Army training base, military prosecutors have been moving briskly to dispense with the cases they have filed in the brutal deaths in 2002 of two Afghan prisoners at the American military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan…the cases have so far tended to illustrate how unprepared many soldiers were for their duties at Bagram, how loosely some were supervised and how vaguely the rules under which they operated were often defined.

Along with other information that has emerged, trial testimony has underscored a question long at the core of this case: what is the responsibility of more senior military personnel for the abuses that took place?

Many former Bagram officers have denied knowing about any serious mistreatment of detainees before the two deaths. But others said some of the methods that prosecutors have cited as a basis for criminal charges, including chaining prisoners to the ceilings of isolation cells for long periods, were either standard practice at the prison or well-known to those who oversaw it…

"I just don't understand how, if we were given training to do this, you can say that we were wrong and should have known better," said the soldier, Pvt. Willie V. Brand, 26, of Cincinnati, a father of four who volunteered for tours in Afghanistan and Kosovo.

In interviews and statements to investigators, soldiers who served at Bagram have at times echoed the defenses offered unsuccessfully by the soldiers charged with abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, saying they were acting on instructions from military intelligence personnel or on the authority of superior officers.

But documents from the Bagram investigation and interviews with military officials suggest that at least some soldiers implicated in the two deaths may be able to make such arguments more forcefully than their counterparts from Abu Ghraib, who were unable to prove any authorization for their actions. Witness statements and interviews, for example, indicate that there was a long-running conflict at Bagram between military intelligence and military police units over the interrogators' use of guards to keep awake detainees whom they wanted disoriented for questioning…

In interviews, other former interrogators said she and the staff sergeant who was her deputy had for months been seeking clarification from their superiors about the interrogation methods they could use.

"They asked many, many times," said one former Bagram interrogator who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. "The lack of guidance was a source of frustration for them. My own feeling is that it was never given because nobody wanted to put themselves on the line."

Afghan Women Put Lives on Line To Run for Office

Despite death threats to women candidates—including letters in Helmand offering a $4,000 bounty for the murder of female candidates—support for female candidates remains stronger than expected, according to Rina Amiri, a UN political affairs officer. This support comes in large part from the quota of parliamentary seats guaranteed to women. This quota has resulted in tribal and family leaders putting forward female candidates to increase their influence. As the article suggests, some of the animosity towards female candidates stems precisely from this policy. This intersection of gender norms and power politics has put these women at risk.

CHARKH, Afghanistan, July 29 (Washington Post) by N.C. Aizenman—The note slipped under Mahmoud Shah's front gate was written in a tidy, graceful hand. But the message brimmed with venom: "If you don't stop campaigning for Noorzia Charkhi, your life will be in danger. Also tell Noorzia Charkhi that she should give up her candidacy. Aren't you ashamed to put up posters of your family's women in the bazaar?"…

Two Afghan women discussing the 2004 election. © IRIN

Even though many Afghan families still prohibit wives and daughters from showing their faces in public, 328 women are running for the lower house of parliament, where 68 of 249 seats have been set aside for female representatives. An additional 237 are running for seats on provincial councils that will in turn appoint a third of the upper house.

Despite the traditional restrictions on women, the guaranteed quota of legislative seats for them has given political parties, tribal leaders and powerful families an incentive to promote female candidates whom they might otherwise have ignored—or even banned from running.

"There is quite a bit of support for women running in the parliamentary elections—much more than we expected," noted Rina Amiri, a U.N. political affairs officer who is monitoring the elections. Yet female candidates in provinces across the country have complained of receiving phone calls and letters threatening them with death if they don't withdraw.

Afghanistan's forgotten war

The New York Times identifies the paradox inherent in Musharraf's stance—but doesn't suggest a coherent American policy position.

August 6 (New York Times) Editorial—Afghanistan is out of the headlines, but its war against the Taliban goes on. These days, it is not going well. One of the most important reasons for that is the ambivalence of Pakistan, the nation that originally helped create, nurture and train the Taliban. Even now, Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, seems to invest far more energy in explaining his government's tolerance of Taliban activities than he does in trying to shut them down…

Musharraf says that he has sent tens of thousands of troops to police border areas. Yet well-supplied Taliban fighters keep showing up to battle U.S. troops in Afghanistan. He insists that the training camps are still shut down and that he is committed to thwarting the Taliban, but says he must proceed cautiously so he doesn't inflame militant groups in Pakistan. That would be more persuasive had the general not spent close to six years marginalizing mainstream parties and cutting deals with Islamic extremists to reinforce his rule.

When questioned about why he has repeatedly violated his promises to restore civilian democracy, Musharraf argues that he must retain power because Pakistan needs his strong and effective hand. Washington needs to ask him why that strong hand seems so helpless against the Taliban.

Zabul's No Kabul: In Afghanistan's Badlands, Things Are Getting Worse, Not Better

GALAT, July 9 (Economist)—The 19th century British fort that dominates the skyline above Qalat offers an easy reference point for low flying Apache helicopters heading for the America base near the town, the capital of Afghanistan's southern province of Zabul. Yet despite being backed by impressive foreign muscle, the government's control in Qalat barely reaches the city limits. On the Pakistani border, deep in the conservative Pushtun belt from which Mullah Omar's movement first emerged to gain control of Afghanistan, Zabul remains Taliban country. Security has deteriorated so badly on the Kabul to Kandahar highway that 17 new emplacements were built along a 60-kilometre (40-mile) stretch north of Qalat in June. The road is beginning to look like the Maginot line.

Featured Article:

The article dissects why the internet is, ideologically, an ideal medium for jihad (its "shapeless disregard for national boundaries and ethnic markers fits exactly with bin Laden's original vision for al Qaeda"). It also illuminates some fascinating details about how the net is used in practice, such as the mechanics behind a "dead drop," a method of securely concealing communications within chatter. The piece is well worth a read in its entirety.

August 7 (Washington Post) by Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser—The snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched "every second al Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov" as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile. On the screens were photographs of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Nearly four years later, al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace...

Among other things, al Qaeda and its offshoots are building a massive and dynamic online library of training materials—some supported by experts who answer questions on message boards or in chat rooms—covering such varied subjects as how to mix ricin poison, how to make a bomb from commercial chemicals, how to pose as a fisherman and sneak through Syria into Iraq, how to shoot at a U.S. soldier, and how to navigate by the stars while running through a night-shrouded desert. These materials are cascading across the Web in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and other first languages of jihadist volunteers.

The Saudi Arabian branch of al Qaeda launched an online magazine in 2004 that exhorted potential recruits to use the Internet: "Oh Mujahid brother, in order to join the great training camps you don't have to travel to other lands," declared the inaugural issue of Muaskar al-Battar, or Camp of the Sword. "Alone, in your home or with a group of your brothers, you too can begin to execute the training program."

"Biological Weapons" was the stark title of a 15-page Arabic language document posted two months ago on the Web site of al Qaeda fugitive leader Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, one of the jihadist movement's most important propagandists, often referred to by the nom de guerre Abu Musab Suri. His document described "how the pneumonic plague could be made into a biological weapon," if a small supply of the virus could be acquired…

Al Qaeda's innovation on the Web "erodes the ability of our security services to hit them when they're most vulnerable, when they're moving," said Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA unit that tracked bin Laden. "It used to be they had to go to Sudan, they had to go to Yemen, they had to go to Afghanistan to train," he added. Now, even when such travel is necessary, an al Qaeda operative "no longer has to carry anything that's incriminating. He doesn't need his schematics, he doesn't need his blueprints, he doesn't need formulas." Everything is posted on the Web or "can be sent ahead by encrypted Internet, and it gets lost in the billions of messages that are out there."

The number of active jihadist-related Web sites has metastasized since Sept. 11, 2001. When Gabriel Weimann, a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, began tracking terrorist-related Web sites eight years ago, he found 12; today, he tracks more than 4,500. Hundreds of them celebrate al Qaeda or its ideas, he said.

"They are all linked indirectly through association of belief, belonging to some community. The Internet is the network that connects them all," Weimann said. "You can see the virtual community come alive."…

But al Qaeda's move into cyberspace is far from total. Physical sanctuaries or unmolested spaces in Sunni Muslim-dominated areas of Iraq, in ungoverned tribal territories of Pakistan, in the southern Philippines, Africa and Europe still play important roles. Most violent al Qaeda-related attacks -- even in the most recent period of heavy jihadist Web use—appear to involve leaders or volunteers with some traditional training camp or radical mosque backgrounds…

One of al Qaeda's current Internet organizations, the Global Islamic Media Front, is now posting "a lot of training materials that we've been able to verify were used in Afghanistan," said Givner-Forbes, of the Terrorism Research Center. One recent online manual instructed how to extract explosive materials from missiles and land mines. Another offered a country-by-country list of "explosive materials available in Western markets," including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the former Soviet Union and Britain."…

The transit attacks in London may also have an Internet connection, according to several analysts. They appear to be successful examples of "al Qaeda's assiduous effort to cultivate and train professional insurgents and urban warfare specialists via the Internet," wrote Scheuer, the former CIA analyst.

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Afghanistan Watch is prepared by Carl Robichaud, a program officer at The Century Foundation.

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