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Chapter 2:

The Story Begins in Afghanistan

COMBINE THE WORDS “US” or “American” with “detainee abuse” or “torture,” and the response will likely contain “Abu Ghraib” or “Guantanamo.”

But the American use of torture during the war on terror did not begin with Abu Ghraib, nor did it begin in Guantanamo. It’s easy to lose track of that fact, given the powerful images associated with both of those facilities: the Abu Ghraib pictures of sexual sadism, and photos of hunched Guantanamo detainees clad in orange jumpsuits and darkened goggles, surrounded by coils of concertina wire.

“The White House always put forward that Abu Ghraib was an exception, just some rotten apples,” said John Sifton, a former senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism at Human Rights Watch. “But US personnel in Afghanistan were involved in killings and torture of prisoners well before the Iraq war even started. The story begins in Afghanistan.”¹

No flashy photos show these abuses, at least none that has emerged into the news media with the same force as the images from Abu Ghraib. It takes an attentive reader to identify these cases and track their chronology. And it takes a dispassionate approach to parse out when and where government officials willfully contributed to coercive interrogation, when officers and soldiers acted with relative autonomy (or without explicit instructions), and how commanders and officials were complicit in overlooking abuse.

Human rights organizations recorded cases of detainee abuse shortly after US boots hit the ground in Afghanistan in 2001. Some instances occurred in the heat of battle or when troops were “roughing up” detainees upon capture. To be fair, some roughing-up is a by-product of detainee arrests that is fairly typical of combat situations, and is by no means exclusive to the US military. But consistently roughing up suspects when they are captive in a detention facility is a different matter. During the early phase of US combat operations in Afghanistan, some of these abuses were relatively mild. Others were quite severe. Some even turned lethal.

Perhaps the most famous early cases of US prisoner abuse involved two detainees known as Habibullah and Dilawar. The events surrounding their deaths occurred in Afghanistan in December 2002. Three years later, the New York Times first detailed their experiences and the early abuses at the Bagram Air Base.² Over time, Habibullah and Dilawar’s stories have gradually gained more public exposure in print and in film (e.g., in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side). But these events deserve to be revisited because of their timing and what they reveal about the early development of US abuses.

Journalists had already interviewed many of the guards who abused detainees in Bagram. Yet I never heard them provide an explanation that seemed adequate; most of their reasoning seemed incomplete at best and self-serving at worst. And so, in 2007 I traveled to Afghanistan to interview former Bagram and Guantanamo detainees who could describe events from an Afghan perspective.

Years after the US-led coalition toppled the Taliban in 2001, violence engulfed southern and eastern Afghanistan, making travel to provinces like Khost increasingly difficult. Car travel, conceivable in the years just following the US invasion, was now strongly discouraged. By mid-2007, the road connecting Kabul to Khost was rife with banditry and talibs, making it especially perilous. Non-Afghan travelers typically sought out limited air transport to Khost, which meant flying into Forward Operating Base Salerno—the very base where Dilawar and his companions from Khost first arrived.

Wahid Amani, my translator, fixer, and friend, accompanied me there to retrace some of the steps of those who were released from US captivity. Wahid was a twenty-seven-year-old journalist from Wardak province who worked as a freelance journalist for several years, and then as a reporter and trainer with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). We worked together for IWPR, and he occasionally assisted foreign journalists with their projects. But he grew uneasy about taking assignments in provinces like Khost, where violence had become prevalent.

Wahid didn’t mention our journey to his family or fiancée. It was risky, and he didn’t want to worry them. Just a few weeks before we set out, the Taliban kidnapped an Italian journalist from La Repubblica, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, in Helmand province, where Wahid and I worked for the IWPR. The Afghan government feared it would lose Italian support if Mastrogiacomo was killed, and negotiated his release by trading him for five Taliban prisoners (including the kidnapper’s brother and other Taliban commanders).³ But the affair ended badly when the Taliban beheaded Mastrogiacomo’s driver, and then his translator. And their fate resonated among Afghan reporters, fixers, and translators—especially those who helped foreign journalists.⁴

Helmand continued to be a major Taliban stronghold. It was also known as “Little America” because of the US development projects established there during the 1950s–1970s. It seemed like a perfect irony to travel from “Little America” to Khost, also known as “Little Moscow”—provinces whose Cold War monikers recalled the legacy of past policies.⁵

I grew a thick beard during my stay in Afghanistan in order to blend in. From Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s provincial capital, I cloaked myself in a patu (a long blanketlike scarf), wore a sparkly round hat typically donned by Pashtuns (Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group), and long, sweeping clothes whenever I traveled outside our armed compound. My wardrobe and routine were no different in Khost. There, as in Helmand, I was largely confined to an armed compound, and beyond the gates I dressed in local garb, avoided eye contact and speaking in public, and tried to mimic the locals’ gait. Many Afghans still recognized that I was a Westerner, but journalists and aid workers often take such measures to curb conspicuous attention.

Before we arrived in Khost, a local reporter, Kamal Sadat, assured us he would do everything in his power to ensure our safety.

“You will be our guests in Khost,” he said. “Just come whenever you can. I will be waiting for you.”

Clean-shaven, wearing a flowing white kurta shirt, Sadat greeted us at Salerno’s last checkpoint, just before the main road leading to Khost City. Sadat was a medical student practicing journalism to earn some extra money (he was the fifth young doctor-reporter I met in Afghanistan). He had worked for the BBC’s Pashto service, then became a correspondent for Voice of America and Reuters.

“I talk to everyone: the government, the coalition forces, the Taliban. Everyone,” said Sadat, explaining his evenhanded reporting. At one point, he too became a local news story when he was arrested and detained by the Americans. Like other Khost detainees, he was bound and hooded by US forces, shipped to Salerno and then on to Bagram. Soldiers held Sadat’s family at gunpoint and rifled through his reporter’s notebooks.⁶ His arrest provoked a public outcry, and US forces soon released him, explaining they had mistakenly captured the wrong suspect. The US military apologized to Sadat, and he maintains that he wasn’t mistreated (except for the property damaged in his home during the arrest) and said he holds no resentment toward his captors.

During our ride from Salerno to Khost City, he asked me many questions about my visit. There were a lot of Taliban in the province, and the area was often gripped by violence. Weeks before we arrived, Khost suffered a string of suicide bomber attacks that claimed fourteen lives.⁷ Sadat was especially curious why an American journalist would visit such a hostile region in order to report on detainee abuse.

“I have very good relations with the American base,” he said. “The American soldiers will be unhappy when your book comes out, no?”

Sadat seemed worried that even the slightest involvement with my reporting would sour his relations with the local US military forces in Khost. I had a feeling that Wahid was also unsure about the value of our research. Afghanistan has seen many long and bloody wars that have wrought untold misery. Why focus on one tragedy in Afghanistan, no matter how appalling?

Sadat weaved his car through Khost’s bustling, dusty streets, seeking shelter for his new guests and a meeting place for our local contacts. The Governor’s Guesthouse, where meetings and official functions took place, offered the best accommodations in town, though it lacked certain amenities—no regular running water, the electrical power switched on only after sunset, and one unsanitary bathroom shared by two floors of guests. Tall concrete barriers lay on alternating sides of the entrance road to prevent oncoming cars from gaining enough momentum to crash a suicide car bomb into the building. Guards languidly settled themselves in the sort of plastic chairs commonly seen on suburban American lawns, and shifted positions only when a new visitor arrived, checking bags, frisking, prodding them with questions, and so forth.

A lush flower garden in the main courtyard, just past the perimeter, perfumed the air with assorted roses and wild jasmine. A row of small stone stools and faucets lined the entrance for guests to perform ablutions before prayer. Staff and occupants warmly greeted new arrivals by simultaneously slapping one another on opposite shoulders. Such contrasts are ubiquitous in Afghanistan—a severe country, punctuated by harsh landscapes and perennial violence, yet home to welcoming and generous people.

One of the Guesthouse residents was the governor’s security attaché, a stocky Tajik Afghan whom Wahid and I nicknamed “Tank” on account of his build. Tank stood out because he didn’t wear a thick beard and local clothes. Instead, he sported a neatly trimmed mustache, black slacks, and a white short-sleeved shirt. He flashed a glamorous smile, walked forcefully with an open, holstered sidearm, and rapidly dispatched soldiers and security personnel. Tank had personally shielded Khost’s governor against four assassination attempts. The last one occurred at a hospital, when a man dressed like a doctor exploded his suicide bomb just four yards away. You need a keen eye to pick out suicide bombers, said Tank, who explained that he could quickly recognize suspects because they often sweat nervously and dress in bulky clothing or seem to be carrying suspiciously heavy gear. And how do you stop them? Tank said he tried to shoot them in the leg instead of the head (which is difficult to aim at) or the chest (where the bomb is typically strapped).

“It is very difficult, and if you miss you hit people behind him,” he said.

A large sign with “Civilian Military Operations Center” emblazoned in English in large black letters occupied the main wall upstairs. Khost’s Governor’s Guesthouse was once the location for US military offices, and our rooms were plastered with military maps: the “Afghanistan Town and Airfield Plans (AIR),” produced by the DGIA (the UK’s Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency), and a massive gray “unclassified” map of Khost province “produced by the 25th Engineering Detachment, 25th Infantry Division (Light).” Our accommodations seemed to afford the best security in the city, and yet these relics of a foreign military presence hardly made it an ideal place to meet former detainees.

Many of the Afghans connected to the Dilawar case were wary about describing their experiences; some feared meeting with an American, perhaps suspecting I was connected to the US military. Wahid and I first met Shapoor, Dilawar’s older brother, who raised and sold livestock in Khost province. He was initially leery about helping us, but once he understood that we genuinely wanted to learn what had happened to his brother, he changed his mind and helped arrange interviews with the taxi driver who witnessed how the Afghan forces handled Dilawar during his initial arrest. Days later, Shapoor informed us that the taxi driver “had to go to a family funeral.”

“I think he will not come—I am sure he is too afraid.”

We asked if we could meet Dilawar’s closest friend, Bacha Khan.

“He will not meet you. He is too afraid.”

How about meeting the rest of the family? Maybe your parents?

“Every time they hear his name, it is as though he has just died,” explained Shapoor. “As soon as they hear ‘Dilawar,’ they begin crying and don’t stop for twenty days.”

“This upsets us so much because we support the government,” he said, referring to the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.

Shapoor combed his hair with his henna-painted fingernails and tugged his pakol hat around his head. He inhaled deep lungfuls of cigarette smoke and described how he tried to rescue his younger brother and allay his parents’ fears.

We met others who knew Dilawar and were with him at various times during his journey, including former detainees from Bagram. Parkhudin was one of Dilawar’s passengers. He had been with Dilawar from the start, when their journey first began on Khost’s dirt road to Salerno, and he eventually wound up in Guantanamo after being held by US forces in Afghanistan. After he was released from US captivity, he returned home and was soon jailed for robbery. The only way to interview Parkhudin was to meet with him in an Afghan jail.

One afternoon, Sadat drove us to Khost’s local prison, an old fortresslike facility that offered a panoramic view of the city. Parkhudin hobbled into a crumbling prison office wearing a blue-striped pajama-like uniform, his wrists bound by handcuffs. Friendly prison guards dressed in olive green uniforms served us tea and milk candies. They filed in and out of the office past washed-out photos of President Karzai.

Parkhudin had been with Dilawar from the start, when their journey first began on Khost’s dirt road to Salerno.

On December 1, 2002, a family of ten gathered near Yakubi, a small town in eastern Afghanistan. They were preparing to celebrate Eid, the Islamic holiday that marks the end of fasting for Ramadan. Eid is the Muslim version of Thanksgiving or Passover—a dinner to give thanks and celebrate the virtues of peace and forgiveness.

The mother of the family had summoned her son Dilawar, a twenty-two-year-old who, like many Afghans, went by one name—a name that means “brave” in Dari (the predominant language of Afghanistan). Dilawar’s mother asked him to collect his sisters so they could join the rest of the family for dinner. His sisters were married and lived in other villages, so Dilawar needed to fill up the tank of his white Corolla before setting out. One good taxi fare would be enough. He headed for the provincial capital, Khost, about fifteen miles past the American base, Forward Operating Base Salerno, nicknamed “Rocket City”—a favorite target of the Taliban.

It was a long, bumpy ride to Khost, a small bustling city set amidst gray-and-white-flecked mountain valleys. Fighting regularly plagued the region: in the 1980s, during the eight-year Russian siege of Afghanistan, Khost was a robust pocket of resistance; during the Taliban’s tenure, Osama bin Laden used a CIA-built facility to train al Qaeda recruits; in August 1998, President Bill Clinton bombed the Khost camp with cruise missiles. After September 11, 2001, the Taliban battled advancing US forces from these hills and often crossed the nearby Pakistan border to seek cover. The road that connects Yakubi to the provincial capital slices through Khost’s northeastern valleys, so local Afghans had to brave routine violence to travel on it. In Khost City, Dilawar found three customers who were headed to the Yakubi district. It was a perfect arrangement for Dilawar: his customers’ fare would provide plenty of money for fuel and also take him closer to where his sisters lived.

His customers crammed into the Corolla. Like Dilawar, they had recently returned to Khost province after many years of fighting had forced them out of the country. One of them, Parkhudin, had worked in Dubai when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. He scratched out a modest living cleaning fish, fixing nets, and working in factories. After the US invasion, Parkhudin joined the “campaign forces” that aided American troops in the fight against the Taliban.⁸

Parkhudin and his friend Zakim Khan, a local farmer, were looking for a ride to Yakubi, where Khan’s sister lived; she was preparing a meal for them to celebrate Eid. Abdul Rahim, a young baker, was the third passenger in Dilawar’s taxi.

The trip from Khost to Yakubi would take just under an hour. Dilawar and his passengers headed out of town, past the lush green swaths of farms and fields that encircled the city, beyond the edge of Salerno’s perimeter that pierced the horizon, and continued on the dusty road toward the stark valleys.

The road became bumpier as they drew closer to Yakubi, and their car vibrated on the poorly graveled surface. After driving fifteen minutes past Salerno, they dropped into a narrow canyon and went by a remote cemetery festooned with tattered green flags that marked the graves of Arab warriors who helped support the mujahideen or supported the Taliban.⁹ An uninterrupted desert vista stretched before them, dotted only with sparse clumps of grass.

A small patrol of armed Afghans suddenly emerged and spilled onto the road. They shouted orders and stopped Dilawar’s car, then brusquely yanked him and his passengers out. Another taxi appeared. It was on its way to Khost, and the driver slowed down to steer clear of the armed men and avoid inspection. The soldiers searched Dilawar’s car and found an electric stabilizer and some walkie-talkies that Parkhudin had brought with him.

Four Afghans in a white Toyota with electrical gear and communications equipment, heading east (toward Pakistan) to a treacherous district in Khost—it was enough to arouse suspicion. Parkhudin admitted that the walkie-talkies were his and that he used them to communicate with the “campaign forces” when he helped combat the Taliban. But he didn’t have a uniform or proof of his connection to those forces. The soldiers brought Parkhudin to their commander, who searched him and found phone numbers for Dubai and Pakistan in his pocket.

Could he be al Qaeda? Why else would he have foreign numbers? And why was the driver transporting an electrical device? What was it for? Was he using it to fire rockets? Those questions were all it took.

The soldiers loaded the four Afghans into their vehicle and sped away. No one explained to them where they were being taken and what lay ahead. Their trip lasted only a few minutes, as they were first taken into American custody in Salerno. Burly American soldiers hauled them out of the vehicle and instructed them to lie down beside a chain link fence.

Dilawar trembled, and his eyes fell downcast. Strangers now surrounded him—young American soldiers with M16s slung across their shoulders, their eyes concealed by opaque plastic glasses—and he was in an unfamiliar place, wedged between his former passengers.

One hour had passed since the time of their capture.

The soldiers approached and ordered the Afghan prisoners to stand upright. They fastened the detainees’ wrists behind their backs with stiff white plastic flex-cuffs and pulled heavy dark hoods over their heads. The Afghans were then ordered to lie flat on the ground, and their ankles were cinched together with the same plastic ties.

Hours went by. Parkhudin remembered that they were left in this position on the ground outside; they couldn’t extend their limbs in a relaxed position because their wrists and ankles remained bound. Vehicles rolled past, jets screeched, and helicopters thundered above them day and night, making sleep difficult. Bored soldiers would occasionally throw small rocks at them and laugh.

Eventually, they were told they were being shipped elsewhere. Soldiers helped raise them off the ground, and their joints ached from hours of atrophy. The four prisoners were tethered together and walked forward on a gravel road, unsure where they were being shepherded. Blinded by their hoods, they could rely only on their muffled senses to grasp what would happen next. They could feel heavy rotor wash beat down on them from a transport helicopter. They were loaded into an enclosed space, then felt vibrations and the sensation of being airborne. They were being ferried from Salerno to the Bagram Air Base.

Since the day they were apprehended, time had blurred from one sleepless day to the next. But after their flight, it quickly sped up. They arrived in Bagram in what felt like less than an hour, and were loaded onto a bus and escorted to a building where they were finally unhooded. It was now December 5, four days since their arrest. None of the new detainees knew it at the time, but it was one day after a Bagram detainee known as Habibullah had died.

Their eyes burned, and they squinted against the light in their new surroundings. Once their vision cleared they saw a brightly lit hall where soldiers shuffled among prisoners, organizing them into a single-file line. Then they were ordered to strip.

“We were very ashamed, but we could not do anything,” said Parkhudin.

After a brisk medical check by Army medics, the prisoners were ordered to put on orange uniforms and herded into a cell made of chain link fence. “They were giving us water to drink and bringing us food, and there was a big drumlike pot we used as bathroom,” said Parkhudin. “But we were not allowed to talk to each other.”

They were jammed in with ten or fifteen others. Qader Khandan and Said Abaceen, two detainees from Khost whom I met during my trip there, went through the same sequence months earlier. At first, Khandan was forced to engage in acts designed more to humiliate than cause discomfort. Khandan said he was given a toothbrush and water and ordered to wash the floor while his hands were bound. Then soldiers dirtied the floor and made him start over.

Like Dilawar and his passengers, Khandan was neither permitted to look at soldiers nor allowed to speak. Infractions were met with a routine response.

“Punishment,” Khandan said in English, invoking a term that was commonly used by US soldiers throughout his detention. And “punishment” for Khandan meant “forced standing”—a stress position that involved prolonged, painful standing—for two hours, he said.¹⁰

The first time prisoners deviated from the rules, they were forced to stare into a bright light for two or three hours. First it stung. Then it became blinding. And finally, their heads pounded from the pain.

“It was not only me,” said Said Abaceen, who was in Bagram in early 2003. “I think all the prisoners there were speaking to each other and [forced] to look into the light, one night or for ten hours.” Abaceen later learned that his eyes had sustained permanent damage and he has to wear sunglasses on sunny days to lessen the pain.

One by one, detainees were led from the holding cell to small individual cells. According to prisoners’ descriptions, these cells were not high enough for standing upright nor long enough for lying down.

“It was a place designed so that you cannot sleep and cannot relax,” said Khandan.

The ordeal had already rattled Dilawar. Parkhudin had known the taxi driver only since he hired him in Khost, but to him, Dilawar seemed terribly afraid: “He was not like a brave guy—he was not used to this kind of problem.”

Fellow inmates often heard Dilawar crying to his captors, “I’m not with these people. I’m a driver and I don’t know who they are…I just don’t know. I didn’t know these people.”

Soon a regimen of interrogations would begin.

Dilawar came from a family of seven brothers and three sisters, and was always considered quiet and shy. When he was seventeen years old, his family married him off to a local girl from Khost, and soon afterward they had a daughter, Rashida.

His parents were native Afghans, but like his other siblings, Dilawar was born in Pakistan. They fled their homeland during the mujahideen wars that erupted after the Soviets invaded in 1979. Like many Afghan refugees in Pakistan, they lived day to day, laboring for migrant wages.

No one in Dilawar’s family was sympathetic to the Taliban. But after the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan in 1996, the violence declined for a while. That respite offered Dilawar’s family an opportunity to return to Khost and claim a plot of land where they could grow corn and grain.

Shapoor, the oldest sibling, used the wages he saved from working in Dubai to start up a business buying and selling goats and cows. Dilawar was responsible for shepherding the goats, taking them out to the mountains for grazing and returning with them at night. Eventually the family built a simple seven-room house with stone walls in Khost’s Yakubi district.

Yet the family regularly encountered problems with the Taliban. In Khost, talibs routinely harassed locals who were caught in the streets instead of attending the mosque during prayer time. One day, a small group of talibs stopped Shapoor’s car, yanked him out, and beat him up for disobeying a law under the Taliban regime: listening to music.

Dilawar was Shapoor’s favorite sibling, and Shapoor worried whether his little brother could survive the tough environment of Afghanistan under the Taliban, where religious laws were enforced with violent severity. As a teenager, Dilawar could grow only wisps of facial hair, and his family urged him to stay home since he couldn’t fulfill the beardlength requirements imposed under the Taliban.

Dilawar didn’t have the frame or stamina for hard labor. After his shepherding work, he would move stones from the mountains with the family tractor, selling them to locals for house construction. But Shapoor noticed how Dilawar struggled with his job, and how it wore out his slight body.

The money Shapoor had saved from working at hotels and driving taxis in Dubai was enough to buy Dilawar a Toyota Corolla. Shapoor hadn’t provided his brother with a wedding gift, but knew that this present would be more meaningful, since he would no longer have to haul heavy rocks with a clumsy tractor. Dilawar was overcome by his brother’s generosity. He finally had the means to pursue work that was less physically taxing.

On the day Dilawar was abducted, Shapoor was about thirty minutes outside of Khost, where he had gone to sell sheep and goats, when a taxi driver edged alongside him and rolled down his window. It was the taxi driver who had been traveling on the same road where Dilawar and his passengers had been pulled over. He told Shapoor that they had all been arrested and that the Toyota’s windows had been smashed. Shapoor feared what had happened to his young brother.

Back in Bagram, the detainees were roused late at night for questioning. Soldiers poured ice-cold water on them and ventilated the prison to allow the freezing night air to gust over their wet bodies.

Then the guards came with chains.

By now the prisoners were accustomed to having their wrists bound. But the soldiers were lifting them by their arms, hoisting them upward by chains attached to the ceiling. The weight of their bodies, pulling downward as their arms were stretched upward, made breathing difficult. The soldiers still wouldn’t permit them to relax, and often made noise to frighten them or keep them awake. Detainees remained hooded, causing further disorientation.

“We did not know if it was day or night,” said Parkhudin. “The lights were always on.”

There were bathroom breaks twice a day for a few short minutes. During interrogations, the men were lowered, unchained, and ushered to small rooms for questioning. Their limbs creaked as their bodies returned to a normal position.

“We could not walk because our feet and hands were hurt,” said Parkhudin.

Then the questions began.

Why did you have the numbers from Dubai? What about the walkietalkies? What were you doing with the electrical stabilizer? Did you use it to launch rockets?

Interrogators occasionally presented photographs and questioned prisoners about the subjects contained in them, such as Osama bin Laden and Taliban leaders. Troops applied various kinds of pressure if prisoners said they couldn’t identify people in the photos, if they didn’t have answers, or if they seemed evasive in any way. Qader Khandan said he was forced to do push-ups while a soldier stood on his back. Other detainees said they were beaten. Some were ordered to hold their bodies in stress positions for hours, their arms and legs trembling from exhaustion, their ankles swelling, pain shooting through their extremities. Then interrogation sessions ended, and they were once again hung from chains.

It became a routine. Some prisoners claimed they were chained ten days and ten nights, their toes just scraping the floor, lowered just for interrogation sessions and short bathroom breaks. Again, no talking was permitted. More infractions meant more beatings on their arms, legs, and feet. While suspended, prisoners were vulnerable and could not shield themselves from the blows.

Parkhudin couldn’t see Dilawar, but could hear him being beaten. He seemed especially distressed, more so perhaps than the others.

“I could hear what he was yelling and that he was crying, asking for his mother, asking, ‘Where are you my God?’ ” Parkhudin recalled.

Soldiers laughed when they heard Dilawar’s anguished cries. Fellow detainees thought soldiers were taunting Dilawar “just to make fun,” said Parkhudin.

When Shapoor relayed news of Dilawar’s capture to his family in Yakubi, they were desperate to help, but uncertain about what to do.

“We were running around trying find ways to release him,” said Dilawar’s younger brother, Mohammad Rafik. “We went to the government officials, the village elders. Everyone.”

As the oldest child, Shapoor was charged with trying to determine where Dilawar was being held. He was granted permission to use all family resources to secure his release.

He went first to the governor’s office and learned that Dilawar had been taken to Forward Operating Base Salerno. The Taliban had recently attacked the base with rockets; local officials may have speculated that Dilawar and his passengers were arrested as suspects. Khost’s detainees were first sent to Salerno, then forwarded to the Bagram Air Base, where they were processed and questioned. Shapoor didn’t understand the process; he just wanted to secure his brother’s release.

He traveled to the outskirts of Khost City and implored the guards at Salerno’s checkpoint to help him locate his brother.

“They said they knew some people in the base that could help me,” said Shapoor. “They were always asking me for money.”

Shapoor remembered that he had seen one of the guards in the governor’s office when he was first searching for a contact for the Americans. But he needed more than anguished pleas to help Dilawar.

“I did not want to lose him,” said Shapoor. “He was the one I loved most in my family.”

Desperate, Shapoor used the family’s savings, adding it to his own money, to dole out bribes: first to local government officials, then to Afghan military guards at Salerno. Each of them promised they’d help locate Dilawar; some assured him they would even go to Kabul to try to gain his release. But they rarely relayed news about him.

Each morning Shapoor set out at seven o’clock to make rounds, bribing guards and officials and pursuing any leads, and then returned home by nightfall. When he arrived back home the family pelted him with questions.

“How many people did you see? How much did you pay them?” they asked. “Is there any hope?”

He tried to assure them that Dilawar would be released the next day, maybe the day after. “Just telling them lies so that they would not be very sad, giving them a hope that he would be released,” said Shapoor.

But it went on for weeks, and the family’s savings eventually dwindled to nothing. All told, Shapoor estimates he spent 800,000 Pakistani rupees (about $13,323) in bribes for Dilawar’s release. In a rash move, Shapoor even offered his daughters to one of the main Afghan guards who promised he would help Dilawar.

“When I was out of money, I told the guard that if you will help me release my brother I will give you my two daughters,” he said, explaining that they could be married off to his sons or grandsons.

The guard recoiled. “You just have to wait—he will be released,” he said. “You have to be patient.”

It was the same refrain Shapoor heard from everyone. Once again the guard assured him that he would personally travel to the American base to locate Dilawar.

“But no one helped me.”

Khandan was hung by his wrists for days and lowered for two or three hours a day for interrogation. Soldiers lowered him so he could relieve himself and then, he said, they would strike him and roll him down a flight of stairs. Khandan soon feared the bathroom and reasoned it would be safer to consume less food and water. After three days he stopped eating and drinking. Eventually a soldier pleaded with him to stop fasting and assured him that he would be able to use the bathroom safely.

Many of his fellow detainees could no longer control their bowels, and the prison began to smell of human waste. Khandan saw flecks of dried blood on the floor whenever guards removed his hood to give him water. It seemed that some prisoners had sustained grave injuries from their detention in Bagram. One of them was Habibullah—sometimes referred to as Mullah Habibullah—the brother of a Taliban commander from Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province.¹¹

During his detention, Khandan heard guards tussling with Habibullah. Other prisoners heard Habibullah exchanging shouts with the guards, and then they heard soft thuds—what seemed like body blows. Next they heard what seemed like sputtering sounds coming from Habibullah. And then silence.

Habibullah died from his injuries on December 4, 2002.

The interrogations did not stop, and the soldiers resumed their routines. Prisoners once again heard the standard battery of questions in the interrogation room: How long have you known Osama bin Laden? How many times did you meet him? Where are the Taliban commanders? Who did you work for? How long have you supported al Qaeda?

Over time, prisoners grew increasingly weary and less articulate.

There were also misunderstandings during interrogations because Bagram’s Afghan translators had difficulty understanding the prisoners from Khost.

“All the translators had problems with us because of our accent,” said Parkhudin.¹²

Some troops believed detainees were purposely confusing interrogators and evading questions by feigning miscommunication.¹³

Once again Dilawar pleaded with his captors.

“I’m just a taxi driver,” he said. “The only reason that they arrested me was because of the stabilizer they found in my car. That is why they brought me here.”

“He was crying,” recalled Khandan. “It was all because of the pain, and he was saying ‘Oh, my mother. Oh my God. Oh, I’m about to die.’ ”

But no one heeded his words.

And soon Dilawar, too, succumbed to his injuries.

Word about Dilawar’s death gradually percolated into Afghan governmental channels. Afghan officials puzzled over how to convey the news to his family and how to return his body to Khost. Eventually a government worker who knew about Dilawar contacted his uncles.

“My family, my uncles, they didn’t let me know,” said Shapoor. “They just went to Kabul by themselves and brought the body.”

Dilawar’s body traveled from Bagram, between family houses, until it reached Yakubi. At last, his uncles broke the news to his father, and the family crumpled in sorrow.

Dilawar’s prized Toyota sat in front of the family house, and his mother wept whenever she saw it. Bits of shattered glass still encrusted the edges of the windows. Shapoor eventually sold it for $1,000 and used the money for Dilawar’s funeral ceremony.

Since then, said Shapoor, whenever Dilawar’s parents heard his name “they would get very weak, and I had to take them to see a doctor.”

His mother even developed a respiratory condition from the grief, said Shapoor. Dilawar’s five-year-old daughter, Rashida, understood her father had been captured and killed, but no one could make sense of it. No one understood what anyone would want with Dilawar, the most unassuming member of the family. All they had were documents that established he had been in US custody.

Nearly a year after their arrest, US authorities cleared Parkhudin and Zakim Khan of all charges, allowing them to return home. Shortly after they arrived in Khost, they traveled to visit Dilawar’s parents.

Dilawar’s mother pleaded to hear what happened to her son. The released detainees could tell that Dilawar’s death had already exacted a devastating toll on his family, and they didn’t want to add to their grief. They simply couldn’t bring themselves to convey the truth about Dilawar’s suffering to his parents. Parkhudin insisted “there was no punishment at all … the Americans did not beat him and they did not beat us.” Maybe Dilawar was sick, said Parkhudin to his parents, and perhaps he had a health problem that led to his death.

“I told them that Bagram was a comfortable place, and the Americans were very nice people.”

At the Khost prison, where Wahid and I interviewed Parkhudin, two bearded Afghan guards with narrow faces and chiseled cheeks sat on opposite sides of the room and listened to Parkhudin unpack his experiences. It took him several hours to describe the ways in which American guards and interrogators ratcheted up pressure with pain and humiliation, and what he told Dilawar’s family about how the US military treated them. After he finished his story, the guards grimaced and looked puzzled; their eyes turned sullen. They seemed bewildered by the events that their American counterparts were involved in.

For days, Wahid and I listened to the events that befell the young taxi driver and heard other former detainees catalog their own experiences in US custody.

During the evenings we sat underneath a sheltered veranda at the Governor’s Guesthouse, lounging on long burgundy velvet cushions and sipping tea as the sun set. Wahid worked for hours, translating the events from Bagram and Guantanamo. He was groggy from sleeplessness; his nights were filled with vivid nightmares of lunging dogs and menacing figures.

“I just keep thinking …” he mused. “If they can do this to a taxi driver—a nobody just carrying an electrical stabilizer—and they can capture, and then kill him … then they can do this to anyone.”

Dilawar’s story, like others I encountered in Afghanistan and the Middle East, was an exception, I explained to Wahid. True, there were several documented cases of US torture in recent years, but that didn’t represent how most US forces behaved. I couldn’t gauge whether Wahid genuinely accepted this. And it was hard to explain why US forces turned to abuse, and how it became so aggressive that they would take the lives of Dilawar and Habibullah.

I told Wahid about one common explanation: Bush officials drafted memos that sanctioned coercive interrogation techniques for the military, and those practices spread first to Guantanamo, then to Abu Ghraib, and from there leached into other parts of Iraq. But this account could not be used to explain the torture of Dilawar and Habibullah. Like other prisoners who had been abused by the US military in 2002, their experience preceded the memos.

Due to legal decisions drafted by the Bush administration during early 2002 prisoners were regarded as “enemy combatants,” and many US troops understood that al Qaeda and Taliban detainees weren’t entitled to the minimum standard for humane treatment afforded in the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article Three.¹⁴ But the other memos pertaining to coercive interrogation probably had far less influence on troops—especially early on.

In August 2002, Jay Bybee, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel, signed off on a memo to provide the CIA with the legal framework for harsh interrogation. That memo, often called “the Bybee memo” (or the “torture memo”), defined physical torture as “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Later that year, in December, the Department of Defense’s general counsel, William J. Haynes II, sanctioned coercive interrogation, known as Counter-Resistance Techniques, exclusively for Guantanamo’s interrogators. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later approved the techniques contained in the Haynes memo. Additional memos and directives authorizing US forces to use coercive interrogation emerged after 2002.¹⁵

It is possible that there were other memos that haven’t been made public, authorizing troops in Afghanistan to apply torture or abuse during 2002. Perhaps there is proof—through memos, verbal orders, or military directives—that senior officers directed soldiers to rough up detainees and even outlined the techniques that troops could employ. That such evidence exists has been a common belief among those who have researched and read about US torture.

“There seemed to be a regimen or a system in place where prisoners were routinely roughed up as a matter of policy,” observed a human rights researcher I knew who had interviewed dozens of former detainees from Bagram and Kandahar. “Someone had to issue an order or directive. American soldiers just don’t do that sort of thing on their own.”

To date, no evidence has been found that senior military commanders issued explicit directives to soldiers in Afghanistan to abuse and torture detainees during the time Habibullah and Dilawar were in US custody. According to Reed College professor and noted torture expert Darius Rejali, high-ranking officers and government officials typically have not ordered torture policies in most documented cases of torture. Instead, in most historical cases, “torture began with the lower downs, and was simply ignored by the higher ups.”¹⁶

If the cases of Habibullah and Dilawar mirror the same pattern of guidance and leadership (or lack thereof), they force us to ask: How do we account for cases in which troops lacked directives and still committed abuse? It is too easy, and sometimes inaccurate, to claim that heated combat operations lead to torture. So what happened?

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when US torture and abuse first emerged during the war on terror or to determine who first planted the seed—either with respect to the conditions in Afghanistan or the origins of the techniques themselves.

Chris Mackey, an Army interrogator who served in Afghanistan during the early years of the war and chronicled his experiences in his book The Interrogators, offers one of the few glimpses into this period.¹⁷ Mackey and his interrogation unit started out in Kandahar during early 2002. It was the first time most of them had actually performed realworld interrogation work. Like other forces, they had to hastily learn about their adversary in order to conduct intelligence operations. It demanded hard work and long hours of study. Understanding the war and their enemies was confusing, and they grew even more frustrated through repeatedly questioning detainees who misled them.

“The interrogators were swimming in deceit, all day every day,” wrote Mackey.¹⁸ But once his unit transferred to Bagram in the spring of 2002, it encountered a far more hostile prison population. “And the interrogators’ hostility toward them increased in turn.”

Mackey wondered how this hostility would affect his work as an interrogator, and how the antagonistic environment would generally alter his troops’ outlook and behavior toward their detainees. “It made me wonder sometimes whether we were becoming like the troops in Vietnam who had become so prejudiced against the ‘gooks’ and ‘slopes’ and ‘Charlie,’ ” he mused.¹⁹

Mackey said that he and his fellow interrogators didn’t apply any kind of coercive techniques for most of his tour in Afghanistan. “But during the coming months in Bagram, a combination of forces would lead us—lead me—to make allowances that I wouldn’t have even considered in the early days at Kandahar,” he admitted.²⁰

They tinkered with their methods, making “tiny encroachments on the rules.” The first technique they used was sleep deprivation, though Mackey referred to it as the “adjusted sleep routine.” While in Bagram, Mackey worked with a seasoned military intelligence officer and interrogator named Steve (a pseudonym, as is Mackey’s name), who seemed to have special insight into how sleep deprivation affected human behavior.

“[Steve] talked in almost academic terms about patterns of prisoner behavior,” wrote Mackey. “He told us at one point that hard-core prisoners were unlikely to start cracking until about fourteen hours into an interrogation, and it was clear that he wasn’t just pulling this number out of his head.”²¹

Mackey further reasoned that Steve’s informed understanding about the successes of this technique gave it further legitimacy. But the interrogators also wanted to impress the special operations forces they worked with and sought to match their toughness to prove to them that they were equally capable of producing successful interrogations.²²

Steve didn’t order harsh interrogation techniques, but implied that they should be used. “He made it clear to me,” wrote Mackey, “that we would be letting him down, letting down [the task force], if we were to take our foot off the gas pedal. There was clearly more pressure.”²³

According to Mackey, in the summer of 2002, he and his unit met another intelligence officer at Bagram, a sergeant, who encouraged them to use the “adjusted sleep routine” more often.

“He was a very enthusiastic guy, always pushing us to be more aggressive in the booth,” remembered Mackey, referring to the interrogation booth. Once, while he was giving interrogators pointers in the ICE (Interrogation Control Element) the sergeant suggested they combine their regimen with other techniques—and try to frighten detainees in the process.

“ ‘You’ve got to scare them,’ he said, ‘get right up in their faces and monster them.’ From then on there was only one word that we used for keeping prisoners in the booth until they or their interrogator broke: monstering.”

The name stuck. And so did the continued use of monstering and other coercive techniques even after Mackey’s unit had left Bagram.

“By the time we left Afghanistan, we had come to embrace methods we would not have countenanced at the beginning of the war,” wrote Mackey. “Indeed, as we left, it was clear they did not regard this as a method of last resort but as a primary option in the interrogation playbook.”

Members of the Army’s 519th Military Intelligence Battalion succeeded Mackey’s unit in August 2002 and embraced the techniques that his unit left behind. What started out as “tiny encroachments on the rules” led to monstering. As Mackey further explained, his successors “took to monstering with alacrity … What was an ending point for us was a starting point for them.” He went on to say, “And during their stint in Afghanistan, they undoubtedly added their own plays, many of which were probably exported to Iraq.”

Mackey has tried to distance himself from a system of abuse that he and his interrogators put in motion, explaining that the rise in violence compelled other units to turn to these harsh interrogation techniques. After Mackey’s unit had left and was replaced by a new company, “the stakes got very high,” he said.²⁴ “We went from losing three or four soldiers a month to scores of them. [The interrogators’ command] must have been under a tremendous amount of pressure.”²⁵

Other soldiers have also maintained that the US and its allies sustained heavy attacks during this period in Afghanistan, and that this partly explains what drove troops to use torture during interrogation. But this justification doesn’t square with the facts.

The rate of attacks on US forces in Afghanistan during 2002 in general—and especially during the latter part of that year—remains uncertain. But the military has provided information about the number of combat deaths and casualties for each month of 2002.

Mackey’s unit, the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion, left Bagram in August 2002. In 2002, there were 123 casualties among US soldiers in Afghanistan, including forty-nine deaths.²⁶ Forty of those deaths occurred during the first six months of the year, and the remaining nine died during the latter six months. Just fourteen of those earlier deaths were soldiers killed in action or who died as a result of combat wounds, and only four soldiers were killed in action during the latter six months.²⁷ As for casualties, seventy-four US soldiers were wounded in action during 2002. Fifty-one injuries occurred during the first six months, and twenty-three during the latter six months.²⁸

If there were increased attacks on US forces during the latter part of 2002, they didn’t translate into a spike in casualties and deaths in combat. In fact, the military’s own figures show a drop in casualties during that period. There is no indication that “scores” of soldiers were killed during the time frame that Mackey referenced.²⁹

Dilawar and Habibullah were detained in Bagram during November and December, when eight soldiers were wounded in action and one soldier was killed in action. The “high stakes” argument was at best inaccurate and at worst misleading.

American troops described how they abused detainees as they filtered into Bagram.

“Whether they got in trouble or not, everybody struck a detainee at some point,” said Brian Cammack, a former specialist with the 377th.³⁰

Jeremy Callaway, another Army specialist who served in the 377th from August 2002 to January 2003, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he, too, struck about twelve detainees at Bagram.³¹ When military investigators asked why, Callaway answered: “Retribution for September 11, 2001.”³²

Sometimes MPs greeted detainees with dogs that had been provoked into frenzied barking.

“The K-9 unit from the Military Police would be called to the facility and normally he was there before the detainees arrived,” remembered Sergeant Jennifer N. Higginbotham. “The detainees would be brought into the room and the dog would be barking. The MP K-9 handler would bring the dog into the facility on a leash and the dog was normally muzzled. Once inside the building, the muzzle would be removed to allow the dog to bark. The MP K-9 handler always kept the dog on a leash. If there were only a few detainees brought into the facility, he would stay for about fifteen minutes. If more detainees were present, he may stay longer.”³³

Detainees were also abused during interrogations. Interrogators from the 519th continued to use the same regimen of abuse handed down by their predecessors, and secured additional manpower to buttress their work. The interrogators asked members of the 377th Military Police Company to help them with monstering, and the MPs complied.³⁴

Sometimes they improvised. Soldiers from the 377th admitted they slammed prisoners into walls, ordered them to hold straining positions for hours, twisted their flex-cuffs around their wrists to cause pain, and forced a detainee to consume water “until he could not breathe.”³⁵

Troops also used techniques from their training drills.

“We used to have the detainees do physical training,” said Higginbotham. “Sometimes we would do the training with them—as in jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, ‘Iron Mikes’ (lunges with your hands on your hips), wall sits where the detainee assumed a seated position along a wall without a chair and holding their hands out to their front…We would sometimes use stress positions as an interrogation technique. That would be anything from sitting on the floor with no chair, standing with a chair next to you, but not being able to sit down in it, kneeling on the floor with your hands interlocked behind your head, lying on your back with your hands and feet in the air. Some of us tried these stress positions to see how long you could stand to be in those positions. Once you knew how long you could stay in one of the positions, you never told the detainee to stay in the stress position for a period of time longer than you could stay in it.”³⁶

The MPs also added different methods of monstering to punish detainees and keep them from sleeping.

“If they would not stand up when they were told to, then we would cuff them to the ceiling to keep them standing,” explained an MP from the 377th in a sworn statement. “We would use a leg chain, fixed to the ceiling and then affixed to the short handcuffs.”³⁷

But why force detainees to stand?

It was, as the MP explained, “so they wouldn’t sleep, so they would be willing to talk to MI [Military Intelligence]. MI directed us to keep them from sleeping for specified periods of time. They would write it on the status board, for example, ‘one hour up, two hours down.’ ”³⁸

The MPs also turned to other techniques to discipline and monster their prisoners. These techniques didn’t come from official Washington guidelines. Instead, MPs simply turned to their training. Soldiers from the 377th learned how to subdue and restrain detainees during their MP training at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Some of their instructors were police and corrections officers who had used these techniques in their work. Many of these techniques, such as “pressure-point control tactics” and “compliance blows,” were designed to disable prisoners without causing lasting damage. Some troops became proficient with these techniques and earned nicknames because of these associations. One soldier was dubbed “the Knee of Death.” Damien M. Corsetti, a specialist in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, was actually nicknamed “The King of Torture” or “Monster” and had the Italian word for monster (mostro) tattooed on his stomach.

One of the 377th MPs, Specialist Willie V. Brand, said that he was instructed how to use many of these techniques when he first arrived at Bagram. One of the most frequently used compliance blows that Brand and his peers used was the “common peroneal strike”—hitting a prisoner on the lateral side of the thigh. Striking detainees became “a matter of common practice,” said Brand, and compliance blows were adopted as “standard operating procedure” (SOP) at the base since they were so effective at disabling unruly prisoners.

Brand used the strikes four times against one such defiant prisoner, who was hung by his wrists with chains: Habibullah. “It was morally wrong,” Brand said in an affidavit. “But it was an SOP.”

Even after Habibullah’s death, soldiers weren’t discouraged from using peroneal strikes—they were only instructed to record when they used them.³⁹ The day after Habibullah died, Brand had to contend with another detainee who, according to depositions, was “resistant to interrogation” and “eventually became combative.”

That detainee was Dilawar.

Dilawar was suspended by chains from the ceiling at Bagram, and his handlers couldn’t understand what he was pleading for. Fellow detainees heard him beg for help. Guards remembered Dilawar trying to shake the hood off his head and repeatedly kick one of the prison doors to gain the guards’ attention.⁴⁰ The guards tried to ignore him, but grew annoyed by his conduct. Some of them were irritated with Dilawar after he spit up water when an MP took “a small [1/2 liter] bottle of water and shoved it in [his] mouth and squeezed water into his mouth.”⁴¹ One even remarked that Dilawar was “being an ass.”⁴² Brand had had it.⁴³ He struck Dilawar in the thigh several times to subdue him.⁴⁴

“I told people I had to switch knees because my leg got tired,” said Brand, who admitted he hit Dilawar about thirty-seven times.⁴⁵

Brand may have delivered the final blow, but others contributed to Dilawar’s abuse. Another MP pummeled him six times on both legs with peroneal strikes. A soldier who witnessed Dilawar’s treatment remembered “the look [the MP] gave me when he came out, which seemed … to me as if to mean, ‘This is how you take care of business.’ ”⁴⁶

Troops passed by Dilawar as they went on to deal with other prisoners.

“Dilawar was hanging limp in the chains,” remembered Sergeant Thomas V. Curtis. “I thought he was sleeping. So I kicked the door and I could have sworn I got a response, a slight move of the head.” Then, he said, “we took the hood off and uncuffed him and he was dead weight. He just dropped.”⁴⁷

The MPs tried to resuscitate Dilawar but failed.

His legs were “pulpified,” according to the forensic report.⁴⁸

Curtis summed up the way he felt about Dilawar’s death: “It was more or less that he was the second one to die in our shift,” he said. “I had no personal connection to him, I didn’t [know] him, but it was unfortunate… You can sit back now and see that we should have done things differently. It was like a war thing, us against them. We just did what we were trained to do.”⁴⁹

Even if high-ranking officers did not have a direct role in ordering the abuse at Bagram, they could still have contributed to it in other ways. According to a classified report given to the Washington Post, the 377th’s command oversaw the abuse, knew soldiers “were striking detainees in Afghanistan,” and that a “dereliction of duty contributed to routine prisoner mistreatment.”⁵⁰ Perhaps more than issuing orders, officers simply chose to ignore maltreatment, and that inaction, in turn, helped allow abuse to continue, and to worsen, unabated.

After Wahid and I wrapped up our reporting in Khost, we set out to Forward Operating Base Salerno to catch our flight to Kabul. But we decided to visit one more place before we left. Sadat sped by the verdant fields that edged Khost’s main road, drove past Salerno’s gate, and climbed the same mountain road where Dilawar and his passengers traveled on their way to Yakubi.

There, just beyond a coarse, gravelly cemetery, lay an exposed saddle where the four travelers had been abducted five years earlier, explained Sadat. Wahid, conscious of our surroundings and our proximity to the Pakistan border, felt that we were now exposed. He grew edgy and suggested we move on quickly. We had only a few minutes to take in the surroundings and reflect on the journey that began there nearly a year after the war on terror was declared. Sadat drove us back to Salerno and deposited us at the gate.

“Thank you, brother,” he said. We embraced, then Sadat waved and finally departed.

At Salerno, visitors had to pass three main checkpoints: Afghan forces manned the first two; US troops guarded the third. When we arrived at the first checkpoint, Afghan guards exchanged puzzled questions through rackety walkie-talkies about how best to announce our presence and who would give us clearance. Thirty minutes passed before we were granted permission. We passed the first two checkpoints and hiked several kilometers with heavy luggage along the hot, dusty road to the US checkpoint. I approached the gate first and walked towards a Pashto translator who shouted out to us as we advanced. His cries continued as we neared, and the American soldiers beside him raised their rifles. I suddenly remembered the way Tank, the Governor’s security attaché, described how he identified suspected suicide bombers: they were often dressed in baggy clothes, carried some kind of gear (often strapped to their chest), and were almost always heavily sweating. I fit the profile.

“I’m American—I don’t speak Pashto!” I declared.

The US soldiers were taken aback, then relaxed and lowered their weapons. They asked to see my passport and inquired about our business. The Afghan guards at the first gate had relayed confusing messages to the translator at the US checkpoint, which only heightened their trepidation. Wahid eventually caught up to the checkpoint and doubled over with laughter when he learned that I had been confused for an Afghan—and by my own countrymen. The soldiers were stunned that anyone other than an Afghan would travel “outside the wire” (outside the base, without a military convoy) in local garb.

“Takes a lot of balls,” said one soldier, shaking his head in disbelief.

After clearing this last checkpoint, we went out to the airfield to catch our flight. Just as we were rushing down the base road, a call came from Kabul: our flight was cancelled due to technical problems. The travel company promised to try again the next day, but added there could be a two-day delay, given the foul weather that had formed around Kabul’s mountains. Travel in Afghanistan comes with many hurdles and regularly includes these types of delays and cancellations. Our journey from Khost to Kabul was no different, and Salerno became our home for a spell.

Wahid and I sat beneath locust and poplar trees that hugged the roads, and paused to appraise our situation. Beige office buildings and long olive-green tents were wedged between the alleyways that divided the base. A small stream of Afghans ambled through Salerno, mostly filling their hours with construction work. American soldiers strolled by, often dressed in Army T-shirts and shorts, with M16s casually slung over their shoulders or pistols fastened to their sides. Movement around the base seemed unhurried, even calm.

I tried to convince Wahid that our time on the Salerno base would be tranquil, maybe even enjoyable. It would be safer at Salerno than in Khost, where suicide bombs seemed to strike regularly, I argued. True, we wouldn’t have a jasmine-perfumed veranda, but there was a recreation hall—the Hard Rock—with ping-pong, pool tables, and a small movie theater with many DVDs. We would have access to the KBR mess hall that served a wide array of bland meals and junk food, which would likely ensure one less night of food poisoning back in the Governor’s Guesthouse (I had already had many bouts of sickness there). We could enjoy a night of air-conditioning and avoid more malaria-bearing mosquitoes. And at last, we had access to bathrooms with fully functional plumbing.

Eventually, Wahid agreed to stay—albeit with some reluctance. A contract worker on the base overheard our discussion and offered to help us properly check in so that we could secure accommodation. We agreed, and minutes later she located a military escort who met us at Salerno’s multi-denominational chapel (just across from a mobile Subway kiosk).

A young Army captain and mother of two walked us around the base facilities, first showing us our lodgings: a tent filled with twenty stiff cots that sheltered a handful of Navy reserves from Florida. Then the facilities: restrooms along the roads and the mess hall on the opposite end of the base. Finally, the bomb shelter. She reminded us about Salerno’s pseudonym, “Rocket City,” and instructed us to file into fortified bunkers if the sirens sounded off.

“Just wait for them to announce the all-clear. Then you’ll be fine and can return to your tent,” our escort explained. “There’s usually not a lot of action with so much ‘luminous,’ and we nearly have a full moon now.”

Wahid’s face dropped; her words offered little consolation. It wasn’t just the prospect of occasional incoming fire that was disconcerting. Together, dressed in local attire, we stood out among the throngs of American soldiers, and often caught suspicious stares. Tired, lost in thought, we sat by the road under the shade of the trees, calculating the time we’d have to stay on the base, when a patrol of GIs pulled up in front of us. The soldiers spilled onto the road and questioned us about our presence on the base. Our luggage, which we had just dropped off at the tent, was visible in the back of their SUV.

“You didn’t properly check in, and you guys need to speak with the commander,” said the sergeant.

The soldiers encircled us as we took our seats in the vehicle. Wahid’s face looked strained with worry.

“Nothing will happen to us,” I promised. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

He nodded and turned away.

The SUV pulled up at the American checkpoint, and the soldiers brought us to one of the base officers who managed non-military visitors. I explained our situation, including our military escort’s invitation to sleep over. Wahid offered to leave, insisting we really didn’t want to cause any trouble.

“That’s not necessary,” countered the commander. They returned our luggage, but we temporarily had to surrender all electrical devices—computers, recorders, cameras, and a satellite phone—to prevent transmitting signals. Wahid carefully retained all of our notes about the detainee abuse we had just researched, and then together we checked in our personal effects. The soldiers at the office were helpful and courteous, and handed me a receipt for our equipment after they filed it away.

“See? No problem,” I said to Wahid, patting his back as we exited the office.

He lit a cigarette, and quietly sighed.

“We were kidnapped,” he said, half-joking. And then he repeatedly offered to return to Kabul by road, even though it was a dangerous journey.

My countrymen shuffled through the base. They spoke a language I could understand, ate familiar food at shared meals. Troops played basketball on paved courts, and raucously cheered during evening volleyball matches. But Wahid felt no such familiarity and comfort. He might even have felt less comfortable there—at the very base where Dilawar was first captured—after having spent several days translating accounts of how US forces treated his fellow countrymen.

There was a war on, and we were in a violent Taliban region. Soldiers had to prepare themselves for regular attacks. And yet the barricades and distant checkpoints, along with the availability of familiar American comforts peppering the base, seemed to insulate Salerno, to disconnect it from its locality.

Apart from brushing up against Afghan laborers and their military counterparts who worked at the base, I wondered how much contact American troops had with the local population, and whether this shaped their perception of local Afghans. How many Americans at Salerno had even heard about Dilawar?

Two days after our original departure date, a turbo-prop plane finally picked us up and returned us to Kabul. Days later I met with Nader Nadery, deputy director of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. I asked Nadery about the extent to which American troops were still involved in detainee abuse.

“Since last April, complaints have been decreasing,” he said. It was heartening to hear that there were fewer incidents. But, Nadery added, since 2006, “Americans were forcing Afghans to sign documents saying they should not describe what happened to them.”

I had heard that US forces compelled detainees to sign papers before their release—especially if they had been held in Guantanamo. Nadery feared that released detainees were unsure of exactly what the documents contained, but felt intimidated by having to sign them, which may have kept them from reporting abuse. He and other human rights workers also felt that the limited redress offered in cases of US torture and abuse discouraged detainees from reporting their experiences. It reminded me of a discussion I had about the Dilawar case with a staffer of the Senate Armed Services Committee before my trip to Afghanistan.

“When we were briefed on the Bagram cases we were told ‘this is a success story,’ ” he had said. “Of course we were briefed sometime in 2004, nearly two years after the incident occurred. But CID [the Army’s Criminal Investigative Command, commonly referred to as the CID] said, ‘We got this initial report in and we were told nothing really happened. But we didn’t believe that and went back and looked into it some more until finally we realized they were serious homicides, and we needed to make recommendations.’

“They were touting that as a success story over at CID, really. But you wondered why it took so long in the first place. I mean these guys were beaten to a pulp. Literally.” Even some CID officers were distressed by the outcome of the Bagram case.

Dilawar and Habibullah weren’t the only detainees to suffer such a fate. To date, Human Rights First found more than 200 detainees have died while in custody of US forces since the launch of the “war on terror”; some were obviously tortured to death.⁵¹ For former detainees, the sluggish pace of the investigation into the Dilawar case (and other similar cases) seemed to signal more than a slow bureaucratic response. For these torture victims, it indicated that the US wasn’t genuinely trying to stamp out torture; to some, it even seemed to suggest a kind of sanction.

When Wahid and I interviewed former Bagram detainee Qader Khandan in Khost, he told us that military investigators visited him while he was incarcerated in Guantanamo from 2003 to 2006 and asked him about what happened to Dilawar at Bagram. He sketched out pictures of the holding cells, and the ways in which military personnel suspended prisoners with chains. His drawings looked strikingly similar to the ones that US troops submitted to investigators from the US Army’s CID. Khandan was certain the investigation would help bring justice to those responsible for the torture and demise of Bagram’s detainees. It didn’t.

After we finished our interview with Khandan, we broke to eat lunch together and I told Wahid what ultimately transpired with the investigations and courts-martial. Few soldiers, and even fewer officers, involved in the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah saw the inside of a courtroom. Military investigators recommended that twenty-seven Army personnel be criminally charged for the Afghans’ deaths and related abuses that occurred in Bagram around the same time. In the end, only four troops were sentenced to jail time. None of the sentences exceeded five months.⁵²

“I will not translate this to him,” said Wahid, referring to Khandan.

I nodded in agreement. We both knew such news would only worsen his grief.

The stories of Dilawar and Habibullah represent only two examples of US detainee abuse in Afghanistan in 2002. Yet they were also two of about 128 cases that year in which Afghans were seriously abused in Bagram and at US bases in Afghanistan—often with the very same techniques that were applied to Dilawar and Habibullah.⁵³

I later asked Wahid if I could quote him when writing about our experiences in Khost for Americans back home.

Yes, he said. “Tell them that after this I will not support them…I will not trust them.”

It was a halting remark. And it was then that I finally understood the enduring legacy of Dilawar’s experience.

There has been plenty of torture in Afghanistan in modern memory—from the recent Soviet invasion and the civil wars that followed to this most recent conflict. Dilawar’s experience is another tragic story in that continuum. It is also key to understanding early US detainee abuse.

The stories of Dilawar and Habibullah reveal that violent assaults and desperation cannot always explain why troops resort to torture. True, the American military was embroiled in a war with the Taliban. But US forces at Bagram can’t explain away their acts of torture because they were under attack (as some soldiers have alleged).⁵⁴ Bagram didn’t face an increase in combat deaths and casualties during the time that Dilawar and Habibullah were tortured. In fact, American casualties in Afghanistan during the winter of 2002 were comparatively quite low.

Dilawar and Habibullah’s experience also showed that soldiers didn’t need manuals or memos to lead them to torture. US troops in Bagram tortured their prisoners in banal and crude ways, informed by myths and memory. The sleep deprivation dreamed up by Mackey’s military intelligence colleague, as well as his observation that “hard-core prisoners were unlikely to start cracking until about fourteen hours into an interrogation,” were a product of folklore that spread through casual hearsay. The soldiers that enhanced sleep deprivation through “monstering” used techniques they remembered from their MP training (e.g., the “peroneal strikes”). Some learned compliance blows from three weeks of detainee training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, which, in some cases, were taught by police and corrections officers. Some said they learned peroneal strikes on the job at Bagram. One soldier referenced the techniques he learned while working in a juvenile detention center (though he didn’t admit to applying those techniques on Afghan detainees).

The degree to which officers issued explicit orders remains uncertain. It’s possible that mid-level officers ordered some of the abuse. However, at present, there isn’t proof that high-ranking officers sanctioned abuse at Bagram. The soldiers’ lawyers did not introduce such orders as exculpatory evidence during courts-martial. Dilawar’s experience shows that directives, written or otherwise, weren’t needed to enable abuse. Officers merely had to look the other way to facilitate the abuse—and they did, according to military reports.⁵⁵ In that regard, the stories of Dilawar and Habibullah reinforce the impression that overlooking abuse can (and did) help facilitate torture just as much as issuing orders.⁵⁶ Indeed, failing to stem abuse would contribute to more abuse elsewhere during the war on terror.⁵⁷

In the end, some military personnel felt that the intelligence collected from Bagram’s detainees during that period was dubious. According to a report on US detainee abuse in Afghanistan produced by the McClatchy Newspapers, Major Jeff Bovarnick, a legal adviser at Bagram from November 2002 to June 2003, “said in a sworn statement that of some 500 detainees he knew of who’d passed through Bagram, only about 10 were high-value targets, the military’s term for senior terrorist operatives.”⁵⁸

There was another dimension to this story that I hadn’t fully understood until my journey to Khost: the Afghan perspective.