It's a situation that both shows the fading influence of the US government in Afghanistan and provides an example of the type of issues of conduct and policy that may arise as the US transfers its own detention facility to the Afghan government.
The commander of Pol-i-Charki prison outside the capital has had female guards performing the intrusive searches on all women visiting inmates for at least the past month, according to a Western official briefed on the procedures. Men are not submitted to similar searches. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue and so spoke on condition of anonymity.
After trying to work behind the scenes to get the searches at Pol-i-Charki stopped without success, the Obama administration suspended US assistance to the prison earlier this week in hopes that the financial pressure would force a change.
"Until we have determined that this utterly unacceptable practice has ceased, the United States government has suspended all mentoring activity other than that specifically focused on monitoring visitation search procedures," said Gavin Sundwall, a spokesman for the US embassy in Kabul. He said delivery of equipment to the prison had also been halted.
He did not provide a dollar figure for the blocked assistance. The United States has spent millions on improvements to Pol-i-Charki since 2009, expanding its capacity to 7,000 inmates from 4,000 previously.
The US government has a host of mentors who regularly visit the prison to run training sessions and also has been building facilities for vocational programs and business training, along with medical facilities, at Pol-i-Charki.
But body cavity searches were still going yesterday, the Western official said. The searches were first reported by The New York Times.
The policy is against Afghan law and international human rights standards and is not even implemented according to standard hygiene practices, said Heather Barr, an Afghanistan researcher with Human Rights Watch who has done extensive work on the prison system.
Meanwhile, the US soldier who allegedly shot dead 16 civilians in Afghanistan was being held in a US military jail in Kansas yesterday as his name and new details about the veteran's past emerged.The soldier, identified Friday by US media as US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, had served three combat tours in Iraq, and was on his first deployment to Afghanistan.Reports said Bales, 38, was the shooter and a US official speaking on condition of anonymity said they were "correct.”Bales allegedly left his base in the southern province of Kandahar before sunrise Sunday, entered an Afghan village and opened fire, killing men, women and children. The incident has plunged US-Afghan relations into the deepest crisis since the 2001 US-led invasion.The US military has not officially released the soldier's name, nor charged him with a crime yet.Bales was brought to the prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on a flight from Kuwait late Friday, army officials said.Bale's attorney Browne said that his client had gotten angry about a serious injury that a comrade sustained the day before the massacre, but held no animosity toward Muslims.Bales, the father of young children, was also upset because after his extensive Iraq duty he did not believe he would be deployed to Afghanistan, according to US news reports.The suspect appears to have been drinking the night of a shooting, a violation of US combat rules."Investigators have reason to believe that alcohol may have been a factor in this tragic incident," a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.Bales may have "just snapped" due to a combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues, another unnamed official told the New York Times on Thursday.Media reports said Bales was angry about being passed over for a military promotion, and as a civilian had brushes with the law and spent time in anger management.Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday again lashed out at Washington over the massacre, one day after he said international forces should leave villages in his country, potentially jeopardizing NATO operations two years before combat troops are due to leave Afghanistan.US President Barack Obama agreed to resolve Karzai's concerns over night raids in a phone call Friday, and the two agreed to discuss complaints about NATO troops in villages.
