Human dignity, Crazy Mike and Indian
country By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - The reason Washington is having
such a difficult time persuading of its good faith and
its good works in its "war on terror" was best
illustrated on Tuesday.
While President George W
Bush told the United Nations General Assembly that the
US belief in "human dignity" - a phrase he used no fewer
than 10 times - was the main US motivation for pursuing
the war, two articles that appeared in two major US
newspapers the same morning offered an altogether
different subtext.
The first piece, titled
"Indian country", was written by one of the Bush
administration's geostrategic gurus, Robert D Kaplan,
and published on the editorial page of the Wall Street
Journal.
Kaplan, who is writing a series of
books about the US military, extolled the wonders of US
Special Forces operating in small units from "forward
operating bases" (FOBs) without direction from any
"Washington bureaucracy" and outside the scrutiny of the
global media.
Just as "in the days of fighting
the Indians", wrote Kaplan, referring to early efforts
to subdue native Americans, "the smaller the tactical
unit, the more forward-deployed it is, and the more
autonomy it enjoys from the chain of command, the more
that can be accomplished".
Unbeknownst to Kaplan
and, presumably, to Bush, the Los Angeles Times that
same morning was publishing a front-page article that
gave one example of precisely what such a unit could do.
Based on reports by a UN team, the
Washington-based Crimes of War Project, and the office
of the Afghan Armed Forces attorney general, the Times
described how US Special Forces at one FOB in
southeastern Afghanistan last year beat and tortured
eight Afghan soldiers over no less than 17 days, until
one of their victims, 18-year-old Jamal Naseer, died.
The eight were taken to the Special Forces FOB
near Gardez on March 1, 2003, after they were seized
while manning a security checkpoint amid suspicions,
apparently planted by local faction leaders competing
for US support, that Afghan army units in the area were
selling arms to the Taliban.
According to the
consistent testimony of the men, they were "pummeled,
kicked, karate-chopped, hung upside down and struck
repeatedly with sticks, rubber hoses and plastic-covered
cables", the Times reported. "Some said they were
immersed in cold water, then made to lie in the snow.
Some said they were kept blindfolded for long periods
and subjected to electric shocks to their toes."
During their ordeal, they were never given
medical help or even provided with a change of clothes.
After Naseer's death, his battered body and the
seven survivors were handed over to local Afghan police
by a Special Forces commander who threatened to kill the
police chief if he released any of the prisoners,
according to an official of the UN Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan (UNAMA), who witnessed the warning.
They were held there with as many as 13 other
inmates in a "secret detention room" built for five
prisoners for the next month and a half - apparently
until their wounds had healed. UNAMA interviewed them
during their stay there and found that their injuries
were consistent with their testimony.
They were
finally transferred to a prison near Kabul and released
after authorities there found no evidence that they had
committed any crimes or had ties to anti-government
groups. The prison also referred the case to the
attorney general.
The Afghan military has
requested an explanation of the incident from the US
military authorities, according to the attorney
general's report, who so far have provided no response.
After the Times began inquiring about the case last
weekend, the Pentagon announced that it has launched a
criminal investigation.
But as of Tuesday,
investigators said they did not know who precisely was
running the Gardez base, other than units from the 20th
Special Forces Group based in Birmingham, Alabama.
Consistent with Kaplan's notion that the Special
Forces should operate as independently as possible from
Washington bureaucrats, however, a US Army detective in
Kabul told the Times, "There are no records ... There
are no SOPs [standard operating procedures] ... and each
unit acts differently."
"Mike", the name used by
the commanding officer of the FOB at the time, is a
common pseudonym for intelligence and Special Forces
officers working in Afghanistan, although this
particular "Mike" apparently stood out for his
aggressiveness, because at least one of his fellow
soldiers referred to him as "Crazy Mike".
At a
March 10, 2003, meeting - that is, 10 days into the
victims' captivity - "Crazy Mike" attended a security
meeting sponsored by UNAMA in Gardez during which he
warned local Afghan commanders that he would kill any of
them if they released prisoners taken by his unit.
It's unclear whether "Crazy Mike" was also the
commander who threatened the local chief police with
death if he released the prisoners.
The
commander of the detained Afghan unit was Naseer's older
brother. He testified that after Naseer's death, there
was an argument between two US officers during which one
grabbed the other by the collar and said that Naseer
should have been shot rather than tortured. One US
officer offered condolences and money, which was
refused, according to the brother's account.
Naseer's death was never officially reported up
the chain of command, so that the Pentagon's recent
report in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal that a
total of 39 detainees have died in US custody in Iraq
and Afghanistan now appears incomplete.
Just how
incomplete that report is, of course, unknown, and the
incident at Gardez may, indeed, be another case of a
"few rotten apples" the administration has tried to
blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
On the other
hand, this latest incident - and particularly the fact
that it was carried out over almost two weeks -
certainly adds to the impression that abuses of
detainees were indeed far more pervasive than the Bush
administration has ever admitted.
Kaplan, whose
2001 best-selling book Warrior Politics: Why
Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos extolled waging war
without mercy, has long argued that maintaining global
order is a rough business and that even "successful"
wars like those against the native Americans or the US
counter-insurgency campaign in the Philippines a century
ago inevitably lead to excesses. The extent that they
can be kept out of the media spotlight - which, of
course, is precisely what the Bush administration has
tried to do - is all to the good, according to Kaplan's
perspective.
"In 'Indian country', as one
general officer told me, 'you want to whack bad guys
quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian-aid
projects'," Kaplan wrote on Tuesday.
"The
red-Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy
nomenklatura may be uncomfortable," he went on,
"but [US] army and marine field officers have embraced
it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of
the early 21st century."
Noting that it was the
great Victorian leader William Gladstone who called on
British troops to protect "the sanctity of life in the
hill villages of Afghanistan", Kaplan stressed that US
leaders must also appeal to the idealism of their
citizens in another article he wrote last year on US
supremacy.
"Americans are truly idealistic by
nature, but even if we weren't, our historical and
geographical circumstances necessitate that US foreign
policy be robed in idealism," Kaplan wrote in the same
article. "And yet security concerns necessarily make our
foreign policy more pagan.
"Speak Victorian,
think pagan," he advised US policymakers. And thus,
while the UN delegates must have heard Bush's rhetoric
about "human dignity", they might have been thinking
about "Crazy Mike" in "Indian country".
