Taylor Marsh – TaylorMarsh.com – News, Opinion and Weblog on Progressive Politics

BY TAYLOR MARSH

Flashback in Afghanistan:

Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who’d surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime. When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum’s headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum’s militiamen had fired into the metal containers. [...] The Bush administration, too, has remained silent. U.S. officials claimed that they had no knowledge of the deaths of the prisoners in the convoy until the news media revealed them in 2002, and now the administration has remained silent about Dostum’s reported effort to destroy the evidence of them, which also would be a major violation of international law. American officials say that Dostum’s alleged war crimes are a matter for the Afghan authorities. But the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and depends on American and NATO troops to fight a growing Taliban insurgency that now operates in most of Afghanistan and all but surrounds Kabul, the capital. However, the fact that U.S. special forces and CIA operatives were working closely with Dostum in late 2001, when the killings took place, has fueled suspicions that the warlord got a free pass. … [...]

Gen. Dostum was one of our warlords, the biggest of whom were treated like
heads of state, according to author Ahmed Rashid and other reports. They were favorites of Rumsfeld,
with the use of warlords very much a U.S. policy in Afghanistan, as the CIA
funneled millions of dollars to them to fight the Taliban. It just didn’t always
work out that way. Their own fiefdoms also made their allegiances to their own
agenda greater, their infighting more intense, with anything we wanted them to achieve secondary. The power they wielded
also made for horrific human rights abuses, torture and everything in between
and beyond, which we’ve known about for years. The stories of Dostum’s horrors have been written about many times. It remains to be seen if anyone will answer for the policies Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks sanctioned under warlords like Dostum in Afghanistan. Physicians for Human Rights sent a copy of at least one report outlining Dostum’s mass graves that including axphyxiated prisoners, but received no reply from Rumsfeld or General Franks. When an investigation was finally ordered by CENTCOM, no evidence was found of any atrocities. No one wanted to admit what had been done in our name. The U.S. turned a blind eye.