Cda hoped Afghan Army would take over prisoner watch in 2006: documents

Afghans wait to be released from a prison in Jalalabad, Nangarhar province, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday, March 9, 2010. Over 70 people, jailed for criminal activities, were released as part of an amnesty decreed by the Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Rahmat Gul)

OTTAWA - NATO allies lobbied Afghan's president for a separate legal framework to handle prisoners captured around Kandahar in late 2006 but those efforts "went nowhere," say internal memos.

The records outline an early strategy of the Canadian government as it faced pressure from the International Red Cross and others to take more responsibility for captured Taliban fighters.

Opposition parties have accused the Conservative government of turning a blind eye to potential torture in Afghan jails, despite warnings from its own officials and international human-rights groups.

But uncensored documents shown to The Canadian Press by two confidential sources suggest Ottawa was in fact pressing for an arrangement to remove responsibility for prisoners from Afghanistan's notorious intelligence service and give it to the country's Ministry of Defence.

The idea was to let the fledgling Afghan army operate a detention facility built by the U.S. rather than rely on either the National Directorate of Security or the country's shaky correctional system.

The proposal included a demand that Afghanistan create a separate legal framework for terror suspects, similar to the U.S. system of military tribunals.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai was pressed to carve out "a new detainee policy that would have made the Afghan army responsible for prisoners and created a new class of detainees, but efforts have gone nowhere," says a Dec. 4, 2006, memo.

The Afghan army is among the few institutions that enjoys a measure of respect among corruption-weary Afghans.

Canadian officials earlier rejected overtures from the Dutch and British to open their own detention facility.

At the time, Canada lacked the ability to monitor the condition of prisoners it captured, despite being responsible under international law, and was reluctant to institute a monitoring regime.

In 2005, Paul Martin's Liberal government decided to transfer prisoners to the Afghans to avoid handing them to the Americans, a politically explosive proposition.

The proposal to put Afghan soldiers in charge was resisted by the country's defence minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who wanted to concentrate on building the army into a fighting force.

And the proposal was apparently rejected because of the insistence facilities be subject to a "U.S.-style system for trying those considered a threat to national security."

A Nov. 24, 2006, Foreign Affairs cable shows that the International Red Cross had serious concerns that Karzai would issue such a decree.

The humanitarian agency asked Canada to "engage further" and insisted that any such designation for prisoners come in the form of "legislation, not decrees."

The collapse of the proposal left Ottawa with no alternative for monitoring detainees until officials cobbled together a plan for the underfunded Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission to become the watchdog.

But that plan immediately went awry when Afghan intelligence prevented the commission's inspectors from visiting prisons. It was only with the publication of torture claims that the Conservative government relented and oversaw prisoners itself.

The U.S., which has maintained a vast detention facility at the Bagram air base near Kabul, has revived the idea of Afghan troops overseeing prisoners.

Last September, Defence Secretary Robert Gates instituted a task force that would transfer prisoners to the Afghan ministry of defence within a year.