Afghan Prison Blues

Abdul Bari is looking forward to springtime, when fighting will resume in eastern Afghanistan's Ghazni province. The Taliban field officer is in line for a possible promotion to succeed his commander, Mullah Momin Ahmed, who was killed in action late last year. Until the snows melt, though, Bari is quietly enjoying his freedom. "Thank God and my cousin," Bari told NEWSWEEK last week at his winter quarters on the Pakistani border. "Without them I'd be dead or spending many years in prison."

Bari was arrested on terrorism charges a little more than a year ago, when police caught him visiting relatives in Kabul. He ditched his mobile phone—filled with Taliban contacts—by passing it to his cousin, a woman in her 20s, but the cops seized a notebook containing his scribbled will. That evening the city's deputy police chief paraded Bari in handcuffs on television and called him the leader of a squad of suicide bombers that had infiltrated the capital. "Not true!" Bari shouted. But the officer had "proof" that Bari was on a suicide mission: the will in the notebook. The next day Bari was handed over to the government's draconian National Directorate of Security.

Bari was facing a decade or more in prison—if he survived. The NDS, controlled by a powerful and nearly untouchable political clique from the Panjshir Valley, runs its own secret court system. Canadian forces in Afghanistan stopped transferring captured Taliban to the directorate three months ago, because of allegations of NDS torture and corruption. But Bari's cousin acted quickly. By the third day, Bari says, she got in to visit him at the NDS lockup, bringing him food and paying off officers to stop beating and interrogating him. Instead of being hauled before a clandestine NDS court and sentenced, 52 days after his arrest Bari was back in the field with Taliban forces. The price, he says, was $1,100 in bribes to NDS officers. He also says the main topic of conversation among Taliban inmates was how payoffs were being arranged for their release.

Corrupt Afghan cops, judges and jailers are sabotaging the war effort in Afghanistan. While no official statistics are publicly available, hundreds of captured militants every year appear to be buying their way out of official custody. NDS spokesman Saeed Ansari denies that the directorate has ever taken payment for releasing prisoners. Nevertheless, sources in the U.S. and Afghan governments and inside the Taliban itself have told NEWSWEEK that in Afghanistan's detention system, freedom is always up for sale. "It's very true," says a U.S. counterterrorism official, declining to be named on such a sensitive issue. "It happens a lot, on a regular basis." The official rattles off the noms de guerre of fighters whose backdoor releases have caught the attention of U.S. authorities: " 'Red Eye' … 'Uncle' … 'Mullah Crazy' ... It's a continuing thing."

And it's everywhere. In southern Afghanistan, Western residents have remarked for years on the relative scarcity of Taliban detainees in local police holding cells, despite the hundreds of insurgents who are arrested there every year. In Ghazni province, Bari boasts that 60 to 70 percent of Taliban fighters detained by the local police are turned loose as soon as payoffs can take place. A senior government official in an- other eastern Afghan province, speaking anonymously because the topic is so sensitive, says Kabul's jails don't seem much better at keeping dangerous men locked up. His forces have captured "a significant number" of Taliban and sent them with "strong evidence" to Kabul. He expected them to be in jail a long time, he says, but thanks to crooked cops and the corrupt judicial apparatus, many detainees have already returned to the insurgents' ranks in his province. "It's a serious issue," he says, adding that the whole system urgently needs a cleanup.

Bari and other Taliban sources say their group has a network of agents across eastern and southern Afghanistan whose job it is to buy freedom for captured insurgents. The size of the bribe—from a few hundred dollars to more than $10,000—depends on various factors: how important the detainee is, what his mission was and what type of weapons he was carrying. The price and the complications rise exponentially with every transfer of a detainee up the official chain of command. If struck by a twinge of conscience, notoriously underpaid local members of the Afghan National Police can tell themselves that if they don't accept a payoff, someone higher on the ladder will. Too often, they're right.