Is The US Maintaining Death Squads And Torture Militias In Afghanistan? -- Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian
Afghan President Hamid Karzai and local residents insist that the answer is yes.
In 2010, as WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified documents relating to the conduct of the US government, government defenders dismissively claimed that they revealed nothing new. Among the many documents disproving that claim were ones relating to a US policy in Iraq set forth in "Frago 242", which ordered coalition troops not to stop or even investigate torture and other war crimes by the Iraqi forces they were training, but simply to "note" them.
And note them they did: the logs record thousands of cases of Iraqi forces severely beating, brutalizing and torturing Iraqi civilians while US forces, with rare exception, did nothing to stop it (when the documents were released, the Guardian detailed just some of the illustrative cases).
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My Comment: There is no American policy to support death squads in Afghanistan .... if there was that news would have been leaked to the press a long time ago. What we have is an internal struggle among Afghans that has been ongoing for years. Lets face it .... Afghan culture and justice can be brutal .... so it would not surprise me if there are Afghan security units operating in a manner that would be labelled as a war crime by us. It would also not surprise me if U.S. forces are turning a blind eye to such practices .... leaving Afghans to fight Afghans in a manner that they are accustomed to .... and we in turn preferring to not get involved in their war. Is this the right approach .... probably not .... but this war is going to continue long after we are gone, and to change the mindset of the Afghan security forces on how to fight this conflict is going to take generations and years to accomplish .... a position that we are simply not able to do with the resources and time constraints that we now have.
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