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11 June 2009 WASHINGTON — 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.
A recently declassified 2002 State Department
intelligence report states that one source, whose
identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500
Taliban prisoners died. Estimates from other witnesses
or human rights groups range from several hundred to
several thousand. The report also said that several
Afghan witnesses were later tortured or killed.
In Afghanistan, rival warlords have had a history of
eliminating enemy troops by suffocating them in sealed
containers. General Dostum, however, has said
previously that any such deaths of the Taliban
prisoners were unintentional. He has said that only
200 prisoners died and blamed combat wounds and
disease for most of the fatalities. The general could
not be reached for comment, and a spokesman declined
to comment for this article.
While a dozen or so bodies were examined and several
were autopsied, a full exhumation was never performed,
and human rights groups are concerned that evidence
has been destroyed. In 2008, a medical forensics team
working with the United Nations discovered excavations
that suggested the mass grave had been moved.
Satellite photos obtained by The Times showed that the
site was disturbed even earlier, in 2006.
"Our repeated efforts to protect witnesses, secure
evidence and get a full investigation have been met by
the U.S. and its allies with buck-passing, delays and
obstruction, " said Nathaniel Raymond, a researcher
for Physicians for Human Rights, a group based in
Boston that discovered the mass grave site in 2002.
The first calls for an investigation came from his
group and the International Committee of the Red
Cross. A military commander in the United States-led
coalition rejected a request by a Red Cross official
for an inquiry in late 2001, according to the
official, who, in keeping with his organization' s
policy, would speak only on condition of anonymity and
declined to identify the commander.
A few months later, Dell Spry, the F.B.I.'s senior
representative at the detainee prison at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he
supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners
brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been
"stacked like cordwood" in shipping containers and had
to lick the perspiration off one another to survive,
Mr. Spry recalled. They told similar accounts of
suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified
F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the
detainees provided such accounts.
Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did
not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda
trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment.
Still, the veteran agent said he thought the agency
should investigate the reports "so they could be
debunked."
But a senior official at F.B.I. headquarters, whom Mr.
Spry declined to identify, told him to drop the
matter, saying it was not part of his mission and it
would be up to the American military to investigate.
"I was disappointed because I believed that, true or
untrue, we had to be in front of this story, because
someday, it may turn out to be a problem," Mr. Spry
said.
The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the
matter. In 2002, Physicians for Human Rights asked
Defense Department officials to open an investigation
and provide security for its forensics team to conduct
a more thorough examination of the gravesite. "We met
with blanket denials from the Pentagon," recalls
Jennifer Leaning, a board member with the group. "They
said nothing happened."
Pentagon spokesmen have said that the United States
Central Command conducted an "informal inquiry,"
asking Special Forces personnel members who worked
with General Dostum if they knew of a mass killing by
his forces. When they said they did not, the inquiry
went no further.
"I did get the sense that there was little appetite
for this matter within parts of D.O.D.," said Marshall
Billingslea, former acting assistant defense secretary
for special operations, referring to the Department of
Defense.
Another former defense official, who would speak only
on condition of anonymity, recalled that the prisoner
deaths came up in a conversation with Paul D.
Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense at the
time, in early 2003.
"Somebody mentioned Dostum and the story about the
containers and the possibility that this was a war
crime," the official said. "And Wolfowitz said we are
not going to be going after him for that."
In an interview, Mr. Wolfowitz said he did not recall
the conversation. However, Pentagon documents obtained
by Physicians for Human Rights through a Freedom of
Information Act request confirm that the issue was
debated by Mr. Wolfowitz and other officials.
As evidence mounted about the deaths, Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell assigned Mr. Prosper, the United
States ambassador at large for war crimes, to look
into them in 2002. He met with General Dostum, who
denied the allegations, Mr. Prosper recalled.
Meanwhile, Karzai government officials told him that
they opposed any investigation.
"They made it clear that this was going to cause a
problem," said Mr. Prosper, who left the Bush
administration in 2005 and is now a lawyer in Los
Angeles. "They would say, `We have had decades of war
crimes. Where do you start?' "
In Washington, Mr. Prosper encountered similar
attitudes. In 2002, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, then the
White House coordinator for Afghanistan, made it clear
that he was concerned about efforts to investigate
General Dostum, Mr. Prosper said. "Khalilzad never
opposed an investigation, " Mr. Prosper recalled. "But
he definitely raised the political implications of
it."
Mr. Khalilzad, who later served as the American
ambassador to Afghanistan, did not respond to a
request for comment.
Mr. Prosper said that because of the resistance from
American and Afghan officials, his office dropped its
inquiry. The State Department mentioned the episode in
its annual human rights report for 2002, but took no
further action.
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