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Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report from Afghanistan in March, arguing that the country has become the new Guantánamo Bay. Outside Kabul, they write, Afghanistan is bleaker and its provinces more lawless than under the Taliban: people travel in convoys, the disappeared are hard to trace, and even Médécins Sans Frontières withdrew after five of its staff were murdered. Only the 17,000 US troops have the run of the country, and the reporters' charge is that the resulting haze of fear has been used to advance a draconian phase of the war on terror — Afghanistan placed at the hub of a global network of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly tortured, with the secrecy around them preventing any independent investigation. They quote Human Rights First's Michael Posner, that the system sits entirely outside international norms and is only part of something larger.
Précis by Red Mole.
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