11/25/13 – Matthieu Aikins – The Scott Horton Show

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That's councilforthenationalinterest.org Introducing Matthew Akins, reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine, on the phone from Kabul.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Matthew?
Good, thanks.
Good.
Very happy to have you on the show here and a great piece of work that you've done here.
The article is the 18 killings in Rolling Stone, the November 6th issue, about the Rangers and accusations of at least participation in war crimes.
And I want to obviously spend the bulk of the interview talking about that, but I was hoping we could get a couple of things out of the way first.
And in fact, just starting with your take on the meeting with the Jirga and the dispute over the immunity and all of that, I saw a report this morning saying that Karzai may put off signing the paperwork and let the next president take the responsibility.
What do you know about that?
Well, I don't think that Karzai is going to be able to delay it that long.
I think there's just going to be too much pressure on him by the U.S. and NATO to sign an agreement before the end of the year that will give them some ability to plan for what they're going to do with their military deployment over the next year.
So more of a brinksmanship tactic, which Karzai excels at.
He's playing weak hand.
He's kind of stuck between the demands of the United States, which he thinks is an unreasonable ally and the growing resentment of the Afghan people about, you know, a foreign military presence in their country.
So he's trying to play that hand as best he can by sort of flirting with the edge, so to speak, and hoping the U.S. will blink first to jump the balance on his demands.
And now, is it your estimation that the current government could stand without American support into next year and on into 20 whatever?
I think that if you suddenly withdrew international support, we're not just talking military support.
I mean, if the troops go, then a lot of these governments aren't going to be pumping billions of dollars in foreign aid and development assistance into the country.
So if you have a sudden withdrawal of both troops and money, I think that that shock of that would be enough to possibly set off a full scale collapse of the government, or if not that, then certainly a rapid curtailment of its influence in the province.
Hmm.
Do you think there's a safe pace that withdrawal could be done, complete withdrawal could be accomplished on?
You know, it's a difficult question to answer because there's a number of, you know, kind of complex factors in terms of, you know, the date of the insurgency, you know, the varying hypotheses about whether it feeds off the foreign military or whether it would be just as strong if we left, regional issues, relationships with Iran and Pakistan and Central Asia, and then also questions about, you know, whether there'd be enough in terms of the indigenous economy to keep the government going.
But certainly you would have a, it would be a very drastic scenario for the Afghan government.
They would have to find some sort of arrangement with, you know, the various groups that are battling now in order to survive.
But now you talked about, you know, popular opinion.
Are they willing to go ahead and maybe even sacrifice worse chaos to get the internationals out for now and maybe try to put things together themselves?
And then I guess part of that same question would be how representative is the Loya Jirga that is, you know, ratifying this document for the president?
Well, the answer is not particularly representative.
Loya Jirga was handpicked by Karzai, you know, people to give a relatively compliant group in Kabul.
Neither is the Afghan government for that matter.
I mean, we can't really call it a representative institution given how drastically flawed the elections have been.
In fact, I would say that the government in Kabul is much more representative of its own interests, which are that of a classic red-tear state.
And the reds in this case are, you know, the billions that are coming from the international community.
So almost all these people in Kabul who form the government are getting their bread buttered by the international money one way or another.
So their interests don't really lie in a withdrawal.
And you can't really say that they're going to reflect the will of people in that case.
And then, so, and I know this is asking you to, I guess, speculate a lot.
But could you estimate whether you think that a majority of the Afghan population, if they can even be grouped together that way, I mean, that may be kind of foolish.
But do you think a majority of them would just as soon try to work this out without our help, even if it's, you know, rough for the, in the short term as the current power bubble pops, so to speak?
Well, I don't think that, I think it's a very difficult question to ask.
You know, I would say on one hand, probably the average Afghan or certainly, you know, many Afghans, especially in rural areas, don't think that foreign military forces are playing a helpful role in this country.
A lot of them maybe even more, you know, vigorously or violently opposed.
But at the same time, if you take one of the poorest countries on Earth, right, and you ask the people of that country, do you want the international community to stop spending billions of dollars in your country in development aid?
Then they're probably not going to say they want that either.
I mean, they don't want the world to turn their back on them.
They know they need help from the international community.
But the question is whether, you know, the price has been too high or unnecessarily high.
Mm hmm.
All right.
Now, the story that you've reported on here in the 18 killings, I'm certain, well, I can only guess, I should say, has a lot to do with the conversation right now, at least among the population about whether, you know, this continued immunity should be passed on for soldiers staying after 2014.
But before we get right into the story, I was hoping that you could describe for us a little bit about how you did this journalism, because I think it's important that people understand, for example, the photo lineups and stuff that you did and the time that you took in putting this story together before you published it.
Sure.
Well, what essentially happened was that, you know, last, about a year ago, a team of U.S. Special Forces, Green Berets, called an A-team, moved into a NARC district in Wardak Province, which is a remote area west of Kabul.
And, you know, they were there for only a few months before these allegations of murder, torture, enforced disappearance, started surfacing among the local people.
They took a plane, they made demonstrations.
The Afghan government ordered an inquiry.
The U.S. military denied, you know, that they had any role in these incidents, these allegations.
Ten men went missing.
Probably there was nothing about Karzai forces.
He didn't believe the base.
And after they left, these bodies started turning up, buried close to the perimeter of the U.S. Special Forces base, bodies that the local villagers said belonged to these ten men.
So that's where I found the incident.
Because the U.S. military still categorically denied everything in terms of its own involvement, even after bodies started coming out of the ground and no one really knew who this unit was, the whole incident was kind of shrouded in mystery and never really saw the proper light of day, or got much pickup from the western press.
So I spent about five months this summer, and I live in Kabul, I'm based in Kabul.
I spent about five months this summer in Afghanistan, traveling to that area, which is kind of difficult to do because it's a very heavy Taliban presence.
I interviewed dozens of victims, family members, witnesses, officials, you know, both Afghan and western, and eventually ascertained the identities of these teens.
And basically, you know, came to the conclusion that there was a substantial amount of evidence to show that these men had been taken into custody, often in broad daylight in front of, you know, the whole village.
I asked the American Special Forces team, and their bodies had turned up buried outside the wire.
So clearly, the onus is on the U.S. to explain how these men ended up dead, buried outside their base.
The U.N. and the Red Cross had also done confidential investigations, as I learned, but had found the same conclusions that corroborated the allegations.
And I eventually visited one of the translators for this unit, who'd been arrested and put in prison, sort of being made the fall guy by the Afghan government.
His team, of course, had already left, were from the United States.
And I was able to get photos of these individuals from Facebook.
And as you mentioned, I mixed them up into sort of a grid with random images of other Special Forces soldiers that I saw on the internet, doing a sort of photo-only, like they use in police investigations.
I took photos back to Wardak and, you know, had villagers basically pick people out of the lineup without any prompting.
Well, you know, if you read the article, you'll see we've made out a very comprehensive docket of evidence that suggests that the Special Forces team was supposedly some of the most egregious war crimes committed by U.S. Forces since 2001.
So it is a very well put together article here.
And of course, as is especially necessary with subject matter like this.
And now, I guess before we get too much further into the story, can we talk about, you know, of the evidence, what actually happened there?
But can you give us an update, like you do in your recent blog entry here, about the state of the, I guess it's two separate investigations, one American one and one by the Afghan government as well, right?
Right.
Well, in July, the Army opened up, you know, after a month of denial, the Army opened up criminal investigation into the incident.
And they said, they told me that this was in response to new information that was provided to them by the Red Cross.
So that investigation is ongoing.
During my five months of investigation, none of the dozens of people that I spoke to, you know, who were key and central witnesses in this case, had ever been contacted by U.S. military investigators.
So I suppose the most charitable interpretation of that is that they haven't been given the resources to do their jobs properly.
But it was unclear to me how this investigation could have achieved anything without talking to the central witnesses in the case.
On the Afghan side, they've all also been kind of half-hearted in their approach because, well, for one thing, the Afghan security forces don't really have a very high capacity to undertake rigorous criminal investigations, especially when it involves, you know, members of the U.S. military.
And they haven't received any cooperation from the U.S.
In fact, they said that an internal report that was reported on by Reuters, they had closed their investigation because of lack of cooperation from the United States military.
So it remains to be seen whether there's going to be any accounting for these incidents, whether there's going to be, you know, proper accountability, criminal accountability.
But there is, you know, because of the article, there have been some calls from Human Rights Watch, from the U.N., from other organizations saying that, you know, it's key that the U.S. military ensure that there's a proper accounting for this.
Well, that's good.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, I'm glad to hear that the article has had some effect in that sense.
But also, I thought it was notable the way that you say it in your blog entry here, Will Justice Be Served in the A-Team Killings?
The follow-up blog entry at Rollingstone.com, where you talk about, you know, listen, this must mean that they're not getting the resources, as you just mentioned, that they're not getting the resources to actually do the investigation.
But you're a Rolling Stone reporter, and you went out there and talked with the families, and you were able to get this done.
And so since they're the army and everything, I think they're right out of excuses, right?
You didn't have a bunch of force protection out there on the road.
They got helicopters and A-10s and everything else.
They can go investigate whatever they want, can't they?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the military cannot be as free-willing as a reporter can.
I disguised myself as an Afghan and drove in a civilian car.
It's just a pretty dodgy terrain that way.
But certainly, if they wanted to properly resource the investigation, then they could fly helicopters out to the area.
In other words, the problem would be red tape, not the actual situation on the ground.
Well, like I said, the most charitable interpretation for what seems to be a complete lack of progress on the ground by the investigation is that they haven't been getting proper resources.
You know, there's other explanations.
The army, you know, we've wondered since early on in this investigation how it was possible for at least one level of the chain of command above this unit not to have known to some degree what was going on, not to have been complicit in what amounted to a cover-up of these incidents.
You know, the U.S. Army was informed as early as November, they acknowledged this to me, by Afghans who complained about seeing a translator execute a man named Gul Rahim.
It's an incident, a documented story.
A translator executes a man named Gul Rahim in the field in front of U.S. military forces.
So that was when they first got there, right?
They were there from November 2012 to spring of this year, April of this year, correct?
That's when the incident began.
As I explained in the piece, they arrived probably a couple months earlier.
Oh, I'm sorry, I misunderstood that.
Around that time period, at the end of October, a team sergeant was shot and previously wounded.
And, you know, it's quite possible, but likely, I think, that losing a team sergeant to the fault of the team may have been the trigger for this kind of abuses, and certainly the timing would line up.
But in any case, the U.S. military was notified right at the beginning, you know, when some of the first men were missing.
And yet it took another, you know, 15 deaths for there to be that public outcry, the forces came out.
To me, it stretches the limits of credulity to think that at least someone above these guys didn't understand that something, the crimes that they committed.
And it took the Red Cross, you know, informing them of it in July to open a criminal investigation.
So the question really is, how could there not have been at least some official complicity into what amount to an attempted cover-up?
Yeah, that's a lot of bodies.
Well, and it's not like they did a very good job, I mean, the soldiers themselves, of covering up in the first place, just putting the bodies right outside the wire, basically, right?
It's not clear who was putting the bodies outside the wire.
There's some possibility, speculation, that it could have actually been the translator who was doing the actual, you know, burial, possibly killing as well, of these prisoners.
But, you know, again, as I write in the piece, it seems impossible that he could have done it without their knowledge.
You know, it's a small base, and you can't just start digging outside the wire without these special forces guys noticing, so you're out there digging, right?
And there's also other indications, you know, that they knew that this guy, that Kareem Kandari, was the killed prisoner before in previous deployments.
So in any case, you know, but that being said, I think that these teams that operate with such impunity, and they operate independently, usually in more remote locations, that well, you can't say that sensibility has been buried bodies before, but I think that a lot of these special forces teams certainly have participated in abusive interrogations, certainly have, you know, been so aggressive in their actions that they've killed civilians unnecessarily, and so I think that they don't really worry too much about oversight either.
Yeah.
Well, now, there is footage of this, if people want to see it.
It's at Rolling Stone, and it's pretty disturbing, and it's the, I believe it's the Kandahari, they call him, the translator who's at least taking all the blame, if not the actual responsibility for this, is the one actually doing the whipping in the video, but then there are American special forces revealed standing in the background, correct?
Actually, no, that's a separate video that has nothing to do with this incident, as far as we know.
Oh, really?
It's a bit of a strange coincidence, but it was just something that came across the course of my research.
So it appears to be a mix of Afghan army soldiers and translators definitely whipping an Afghan detainee as what almost certainly are, and certainly appear to be, American special forces soldiers to look on.
I think the video is fairly recent, but we don't have any identities of the individuals in the video.
So it's actually a separate issue, and I think it kind of goes to how this is part of a larger pattern of the abuse of prisoners by Americans and by their Afghan allies.
You know, it's been well documented since 2001, continued for the last 10 years, and we're still seeing happening today, and it's related to the climate of impunity and lack of accountability that exists within the U.S. military for the kinds of abuse that people are.
People are investigated for these sorts of things, and even when they are, they receive little to no punishment.
Well, now, the torture by the Afghan government of prisoners has been bad enough over the last few years, and I guess especially in the Obama years, right, where the American military has officially, and in the media, you know, given orders that, or I forget which it is now, I'm sorry, I'm messing this up, but was it the military, the CIA, or somebody's banned from turning their prisoners over to the Afghans because they'll get tortured.
So just put everybody in American-run jails instead, or for a time, or something, because they themselves are acknowledging that the problem is so out of hand that they don't want to be complicit in it.
Yeah, well, what it is is that, you know, in 2011, late 2011, the U.N. published a report that documented systematic abuse in Afghan detention facilities, the use of torture for interrogation and extracting forced confessions, and in both Afghan police and intelligence custody.
So even though everyone knew this was happening for years, I've written about it, this is a really serious official confirmation, and the U.S., and especially the European allies, who actually have domestic legal obligations not to transfer individuals into torture, unlike the U.S., they were concerned about the halt transfers to Afghan prisoners, detainees, where there were documented cases of serious abuse, which is quite a number of facilities, particularly in the South, since that means the country with the conflicts is strongest.
So that remains an ongoing issue.
ISAF still hasn't, the international security force, the U.S. and NATO mission in Afghanistan still hasn't resumed transfers to certain facilities where some of the worst practices are continuing to be documented.
And in fact, you know, as I write this story, as I report on this story, you know, last summer the ISAF and the CIA actually had a falling out over this issue, because the CIA, you know, in its paramilitary operations in Afghanistan, continued to work with sites that were associated with torture, and ISAF didn't feel like it could.
So cooperation, joint military cooperation in the field temporarily broke down in summer 2012 over this issue.
Now, can you talk about Bagram prison?
Do you know much about what's going on there and the degree to which Appendix M is used as the floor or the ceiling for how interrogations are carried out by the military there?
Because that's, I guess, that's not special forces guys, off books guys.
These are the rank and file running that thing, right?
What's happened is that the facility in Bagram, which is now being called Parwan Detention Facility, it has been transferred to Afghan control.
So the Afghans actually house the prisoners of Bagram.
Oh, how long ago was that, technically speaking?
That's been ongoing.
It's happened over the past year.
Basically started, I think it's spring, if I'm not mistaken.
But in any case, it's more of a it's in practice, the U.S. retains substantial control over the prison, the U.S. guards inside.
There are still a number of prisoners who are still in, who haven't been transferred through the system into Afghan control.
And then there's additional facilities that aren't really, they're temporary, not really acknowledged as such, that are used by the Joint Special Operations Command, the CIA.
And there's also, of course, the international prisoners, individuals from third countries, usually associated with al-Qaida, who are still being held at Bagram through the other Guantanamo.
It's a pretty complex situation, to be honest.
But actually, you know, you can translate it to say that the detention facility at Bagram is probably the best run and cleanest, most hygienic prison in the country, compared to an Afghan detention facility.
It's not such a bad place to be.
Yeah.
Well, and by the way, and I'm sorry, because I should have really made sure to get this covered in the middle of the interview somewhere instead of, you know, tacking it on at the end here.
But I was hoping that you could tell at least two or three of these stories of who these individuals were.
Because, you know, when they're aliens from some faraway place and just nameless corpses in the ground that, I mean, we don't even see the corpses.
We just read, you know, black text on a white page doesn't quite bring it home.
But you tell the story of who these people were and how innocent we know they were.
These just regular folks who got caught up in, you know, wrong place, wrong time dealing with these army rangers and their translator.
Yeah, we don't know that they're all innocent.
But the point is that even if they were guilty, they can't take a prisoner out and shoot him in the back of the head.
No, I agree with that.
But, you know, I just mean it's kind of easier for the average person to assume that, well, they must have been fighters.
And whatever happened to him, I don't care that much kind of thing.
It's easier that way.
But if you know that it's just some guy and his cousin picking berries or whatever, it's it makes it different.
Well, one thing you have to understand about a place like that is that people there are living between a rock and a hard place.
On one side, they have the Taliban or other insurgent groups that live in their villages that have deep roots in the community who own the night.
And when they come to you and ask you to give them some food and let them stay in your place for the night, they ask them to, you know, let them use your backyard to store their weapons or for your son to come help them carry some ammunition over the mountain.
You know, no is not an answer.
It's tougher.
You can't refuse.
If you do, you'll end up dead.
And then on the other hand, you have the American military pressing down on you where the visits from those Taliban fighters can mean that the next day a drone's going to come and drop a missile on your house or the special forces are going to come and kick down your door and haul you away thinking that you're a member of the Taliban.
So that's the kind of pressure that they're living under.
But a lot of these people were just simple, illiterate villagers, farmers.
Some were civil servants working in the government.
They all had, you know, lots of family members who cared about them in this kind of place.
You live with your extended family and you have to stick together to survive.
It's a really tough place to make ends meet.
So, yeah, I spoke to a lot of the families and sat with them and, you know, sort of reopened their grief and their wounds and listen and talk about their loved ones who had been taken over by the Americans.
And then three, four months down the road, they're digging their dead kid corpses out of the pit.
So these are real human beings with lives and names and kids and parents and they had hopes and dreams and now they're dead.
Yeah, that's what's the bottom line of this whole thing.
It makes it very real and not some academic exercise about how our nation building project is going over there.
But no, that's real suffering, the dead and all the people who love them, too.
And so, anyway, thank you for helping tell this story, Matthew.
Great work.
Thanks for having me on.
That's Matthew Akins writing for Rolling Stone magazine.
He's out of Kabul, Afghanistan.
The piece is the 18 killings.
It's in the November issue, November 2013.
And here's the follow up at the blog is will justice be served in the 18 killings?
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