Suppressed UN Document: war criminals—not “freedom fighters”—hold some top posts in Afghanistan

By Ken Silverstein

One of the grim realities involved in establishing a government in post-Taliban Afghanistan was that just about anybody who's anybody in that country had blood on his hands. While the Bush Administration sought to paint its Northern Alliance allies as freedom fighters, many of the leading figures in the Mujahideen coalition that captured Kabul in late 2001 were bona fide war criminals.

For nearly two years, the United Nations has been holding up the release of a major report that chronicles Afghanistan's history of human rights abuses stretching back to 1978. According to a story published three months ago in the Guardian , the report was scheduled for release in January 2005, but “has been delayed repeatedly due to sensitivities over identifying former warlords still in positions of power.”

The Guardian obtained a copy of the report, but to my knowledge no other media outlet has done so, and suppression by the UN has received virtually no attention on this side of the Atlantic. I recently secured a copy of the report (296-page PDF), and it's easy to see why publishing it could lead to embarrassment. It identifies current and former cabinet ministers, members of parliament, and highly-placed members of the Afghan National Army as having played leading roles in past atrocities. (The report details vile atrocities committed by pro-Soviet and Taliban leaders as well.)

The honor roll includes:

General Abdul Rashid Dostum, currently chief of staff to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and de facto governor of Mazar-e-Sharif province, was among the most powerful commanders during the decades of fighting that preceded the overthrow of the Taliban. Dostum's skill as a fighter was matched only by his ruthlessness and cruelty. Soon after 9/11 he made headlines in the United States for an incident in which 200 Taliban prisoners detained by his forces were held in container trucks and suffocated to death. In his seminal work, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, writer Ahmed Rashid described his first meeting with Dostum: “There were bloodstains and pieces of flesh in the muddy courtyard. I innocently asked the guards if a goat had been slaughtered. They told me that an hour earlier Dostum had punished a soldier for stealing. The man had been tied to the tracks of a Russian-made tank, which then drove around the courtyard.”

Karim Khalili, now Afghanistan's vice president, is a former commander of Hezbi Wahdat, the main militia of Afghanistan's ethnic Hazara. Wahdat was involved in some of the most intense violence in Kabul in the early 1990s, and the group was known to use reprisal kidnapping, rape, and indiscriminate bombing of civilians to cow its rivals.

Muhammed Qasim Fahim, the country's defense minister until 2004, was a protégé of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the “Lion of the Panjshir” and the Mujahideen's most iconic leader. Fahim (like Massoud) was instrumental in one of the darkest chapters in Afghan history, the 1993 massacre of Afshar, where a number of Mujahideen factions banded together to drive the Hazara militia from west Kabul. The operation included heavy bombardment of the civilian (predominately Hazara) population, followed by a block-by-block sweep. By the end of the operation virtually the entire population of Afshar had either died or fled. Fahim's unsavory background led to his removal as defense minister due to intense international pressure; President Hamid Karzai recently brought him back into the government as a senior advisor.

Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a powerful member of parliament and ally of Hamid Karzai, was one of the earliest of the men to take up arms against the Soviets. In this period, he also reportedly mentored 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The UN report cites a former military commander who said that prior to the Afshar massacre, Sayyaaf told his men, “Don't leave anyone alive—kill all of them.”

The Guardian quoted Patricia Gossman, a co-author of the UN study, as saying the report was “not a bill of indictment” but a “truth telling” exercise to help Afghans confront their past. She told the newspaper that the delay in publishing “sends the wrong signals. This is something Afghans wanted to see and it's really disappointing we couldn't live up to that.” Meanwhile, the hope that a more genteel side might emerge among Afghanistan's post-Taliban political elite appears to have proved wrong.

This story was written with Sebastian Sosman.

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