Almost a decade after US and UK troops invaded Afghanistan, human rights advocates blame both local and international players for the state of impunity still prevailing in the country.

By Bette Dam, Kabul

Mohibullah went for a brief visit last month to his native village in the Southern Afghani province of Uruzgan. He would have liked to stay longer if it weren’t for his fear of Americans as well as prominent Afghans who work with Americans there.

In the first years of the war on terror in Afghanistan, Mohibullah worked for an aid organisation in Tarin Kowt. “We build schools, we build roads.” Late one night in 2003, members of the US Special Forces
pulled him out of his house and put him without any explanation in the notorious Bagram prison, a site known for torture and abuse against detainees.

Mohibullah said he was tipped as a Taliban supporter by Jan Muhammad, a US ally who was governor of Uruzgan at the time. Muhammad apparently saw him as a rival within their tribal grouping.

In Bagram, he was tortured in an attempt to get him to admit his Taliban ties. Prison officials deprived him of sleep, used electric shocks and let dogs loose on him, Mohibullah recalled. After three years he was released for lack of evidence. On his way out, the Americans ordered one last thing: shut up about what happened here.

“I have given up on the human rights situation in Afghanistan,” he says. Mohibullah blames the Americans and the government for picking up people randomly without proper fact checking.

In the streets of Kabul the hope for justice is often debated. A supermarket employee still awaits justice for his father’s torture during the Communist regime three decades ago. A Kabul entrepreneur points out that a country in war cannot expect to have a fair justice system in the short term. “That would be the ideal system. Alas, the situation in Kabul is not ideal.”

Afghans and the international community were full of hope after the inauguration of President Hamid Karzai in 2001. Unfortunately, little has happened since then in the area of justice, says Sari Kouvo, head of the Afghan programme at the International Center for Transitional Justice. “The situation has not really
changed after nine years,” Kouvo notes.

Kouvo further explained how politicians who have to decide on the rule of law and justice are often commanders or warlords suspected of having committed war crimes. They now dominate the
parliament and adopted a law in 2007 which grant amnesty for Afghans accused of war crimes.

“International or national justice cannot take hold because accountability has become political.” Sima Samar, head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, and one of the candidates for this year’s Nobel peace prize, blamed the international community and Kabul for the silence over war crimes.

The Afghan government, Samar says, refuses to prosecute Afghans who live above the law, while the international community is too focused on military missions. “And now nothing will happen to good governance and justice.”

Samar gets annoyed when international officials use the phrase ‘everyone has blood on their hands’ as a
reason for inaction. “I know of millions of Afghans with no blood on their hands, and who would like to serve the country but don’t get a chance.”

Experts also see no change in US policy on Afghanistan since US President Barack Obama came to power in
January 2009. Last year, he launched an investigation into the massacre of November 2001 in Mazar-e-Sharif, where up to thousands of Taliban-prisoners were killed.  Warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum was considered involved, possibly together with US soldiers. But nothing more happened, Kouvo says.

The reason for this, Kouvo explains, is that the US and the international community are in ‘exit mode’ and are seeking stability at any cost. Many people who may be involved in atrocities, dubbed ‘spoilers’ in Afghanistan, are seen as either too dangerous to marginalise or as potentially important to the peace
process. “That’s why no action is taken against them.”

An example of a spoiler is former Uruzgan governor and current Karzai advisor Jan Muhammad. Mohibullah still feels unsafe in Uruzgan, as Muhammad chased him away after his release from Bagram. Mohibullah is forced to settle in the neighbouring province of Helmand.

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