[In recent months, as the American and militants took up intense negotiations to try to end the conflict in Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership made a point of including the former prisoners. Each day during the recent round of talks in Doha, Qatar, the five men sat face to face with American diplomats and generals.]
By
Mujib Mashal
 |
|
Mullah
Khairkhwa, center, during peace talks in Doha, Qatar. “I am really not
thinking
about who is sitting across from me and what they had
done
to me,” he said.Credit Al Jazeera
|
DOHA,
Qatar — When the United
States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and toppled the Taliban government, even
those who surrendered were treated as terrorists: handcuffed, hooded and
shipped to the American detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Now, in a stark demonstration of the twists
and contradictions of the long American involvement in Afghanistan, five of
those men are sitting across a negotiating table from their former captors,
part of the Taliban team discussing the terms of an American troop withdrawal.
[To follow the Afghan war peace negotiations,
sign up for the weekly At War newsletter.]
“During our time in Guantánamo, the feeling
was with us that we had been brought there unjustly and that we would be
freed,” said one of the former detainees, Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa. “But it
never occurred to me that one day there would be negotiations with them, and I
would be sitting there with them on one side and us on the other.”
The five senior Taliban officials were held
at Guantánamo for 13 years before catching a lucky break in 2014. They were
exchanged for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only known American service member to be
held by the insurgents as a prisoner of war.
In recent months, as the American and
militants took up intense negotiations to try to end the conflict in
Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership made a point of including the former
prisoners. Each day during the recent round of talks in Doha, Qatar, the five
men sat face to face with American diplomats and generals.
During days of slow and at times frustrated
discussions at the most recent session, which ended on March 12, it was the
Taliban side that was often more emotional. Some gave impassioned speeches
about how vital it was that the Americans completely leave Afghanistan in as
little as six months.
The usual response from the American side,
led by the senior envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, was to give detailed technical
explanations about why withdrawing was complex and needed to be slower, perhaps
over years.
But other than Mullah Khairkhwa, the former
detainees seemed more reluctant to speak, officials involved in the talks said.
When they did address the group, they seemed
less harsh or strident than some of the other Taliban negotiators, perhaps
mellowed by years of hardship or wary that their freedom could be fragile. Over
the past few years, they have stayed in Doha and have been reunited with their
families, but remain under watch by the Qatari authorities at the request of
the United States.
The five former Guantánamo detainees had
varying roles during the Taliban government. Mullah Khairkhwa served as a
governor and acting minister of interior. Abdul Haq Wasiq was deputy minister
of intelligence.
Perhaps the most infamous figure in the group
is Mullah Fazel Mazloom, a front-line commander who was also chief of the
Taliban army. While accusations of human rights abuses by the others have
generally remained vague, there seems to be considerably more evidence against
Mullah Mazloom, who is accused of mass killings and scorched-earth brutality.
During an initial tribunal hearing at
Guantánamo — The New York Times obtained the transcript via the Freedom of
Information Act — Mullah Mazloom (his last name means “meek”) showed no
remorse.
“There is a 25-year war between person to
person, village by village, city by city, province by province, and tribe
against tribe,” he told the tribunal. “If you think this is a crime, then every
person in Afghanistan should be in prison or bring them here.”
Still, he insisted: “I never fought against
the new government. I never fought against America.”
In their introductions around the table as
negotiations started last month, the five men held up their detention at
Guantánamo as the most important part of their identity.
“In important moments like this, my own
personal troubles don’t come to mind,” Mullah Khairkhwa said in the interview,
after the negotiations had ended. “I am really not thinking about who is
sitting across from me and what they had done to me.”
“What is important is what we are talking
about,” he said, “and what is in it for our interests, for our goal and for our
country.”
The men’s Guantánamo files include several
notations about uncooperative behavior and instigations, including throwing
milk at guards and tearing up their mattresses in protest.
Listed in Mullah Khairkhwa’s record, along
with making disruptive noises or refusing to eat or shower at times, is this:
trying to kill himself and urging others to kill themselves. But in his
tribunal hearing, Mr. Khairkhwa denied having done so.
“There was no spoon in my meal, so I asked
the guard for a spoon,” Mullah Khairkhwa said, according to the transcript.
“Other detainees also shouted that they did not have spoons, either. The
sergeant said he was sorry and from orders of his boss he could not provide me
with a spoon.”
“When I asked the reason,” Mullah Khairkhwa
added, “he said that I was trying to kill myself and encourage others to do the
same.”
[See the Times interactive project “The Guantánamo Docket,” a collection of documents and research about the roughly780 people who have been detained there.]
Most of the men were detained and sent to
Guantánamo after they had surrendered — or even after they had started
cooperating with the leadership of the new government the United States had
installed in Afghanistan.
At the time of his arrest, Mullah Khairkhwa
had retreated to private life in his family’s home village, and had reached out
to President Hamid Karzai, who came to power in the wake of the American
invasion.
Mullah Khairkhwa, according to his Guantánamo
documents, was accused of narcotics trafficking and of closely associating with
Osama bin Laden’s men in Al Qaeda. He denied both accusations in his hearings.
The former Taliban government deputy
intelligence chief, Mr. Wasiq, had come to a meeting with C.I.A. operatives to
discuss cooperation with American and Afghan officials. But he and some of his
associates who had come along were bound and taken away, with at least one of
them rolled up in a carpet.
Mullah Mazloom had surrendered to Gen. Abdul
Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek strongman in northern Afghanistan whose militia allied
with American Special Operations forces. General Dostum sent thousands of
Mullam Mazloom’s men to an overcrowded prison, and his militia killed hundreds
— if not thousands — of those foot soldiers after an insurrection in the
prison.
Mullah Mazloom and some others were
eventually turned over to the Americans.
A timeline for an American withdrawal from
Afghanistan has been a stubborn sticking point during the long days of talks.
But an even more frustrating issue has been how to define who is a terrorist
and who is not. That definition is central as the United States has tried to
seek assurances from the Taliban that Afghan territory will not again be used
as a staging ground for terrorist attacks against the United States and its
allies.
When they were toppled and hunted down, the
Taliban were an oppressive regime, denying citizens basic rights, including
keeping women and girls out of school and behind house walls. In the group’s
18-year insurgency since, they have resorted to acts of terrorism like truck
bombings that have caused mass civilian casualties.
But now that the United States’ priority has
shifted to withdrawal, and out of the pragmatic need to negotiate with the
Taliban, American envoys have turned to parsing words to find some definition
of terrorism they can hold in common with the Taliban.
In some of the sessions sitting across the
table from the former Guantánamo detainees was Gen. Austin S. Miller, the
commander of the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in his four-star
uniform. Last October, General Miller narrowly escaped death in an attack by a
Taliban infiltrator that killed a prominent Afghan security chief, Gen. Abdul
Raziq, who had been walking beside him in a heavily guarded compound in
Kandahar Province.
According to several officials on both sides
who knew details of the talks, General Miller told the Taliban that he
respected them as fighters, but that the war needed to end. He also evoked a
mutual need to fight the terrorism of the Islamic State.
“We could keep fighting, keep killing each
other,” General Miller was quoted as saying. “Or, together, we could kill
ISIS.”
Mullah Khairkhwa said that even though the
two sides had not been able to reach a final agreement this time, the two sides
shared a common interest, at least, in ending the war.
“It’s been a long war, with lots of
casualties and destruction and loss,” he said. “What gives me hope is that both
teams are taking the issue seriously. On every issue, the discussions are
serious, and it gives me hope that we will find a way out — as long as there
are not spoilers to ruin it.”
