Afghan Prison Blues

Quick money is hard to resist in a land where the average person lives on a few hundred dollars a year. Taliban fighters Mullah Obeid and Mullah Hasinullah say they were arrested in different Ghazni districts late last year and taken to the provincial capital's police headquarters at the same time. The cops let them phone their relatives on one condition: that they urge their kin to raise cash and bring it as fast as possible. Hasinullah was out in two days, and Obeid in four. The cost was $3,000 for the pair, along with the weapons they had been carrying and the motorbikes they were riding when they were arrested.

Their families might have been spared the expense if the cops had been a little more patient. According to Mulvi Assad Khan, a Taliban intelligence agent in Ghazni who spent four years in an NDS prison—a governor was determined to keep him in jail—the Taliban's bribery fund for the four southern provinces alone amounts to $500,000. (The sum is uncheckable and may be an exaggeration.) Besides giving cash to police and NDS officers for the release of prisoners, the network also reimburses the detainees' families—in part or sometimes fully—for bribes the relatives have paid. Assad Khan says the Taliban agents know the right people to contact in the police and NDS, and crooked law enforcers also know the routine, often sending a message to the Taliban when they have a valuable militant in custody.

Even the Taliban sometimes marvel at the coziness of their dealings with law enforcers. Mullah Jumah Khan, a red-bearded, black-turbaned insurgent leader in his 30s, says he and five of his men were arrested in the summer of 2006 during a botched ambush in Helmand province. After confiscating their weapons, land mines and remote-control detonators, the cops took them to the district police station, allowing them to inform their families. When tribal elders arrived the next morning, Jumah Khan says an officer agreed to help them if the prisoners promised to quit the insurgency—a routine but meaningless stipulation—and put up a large-enough sum of cash. They said yes.

To seal the deal, the cops, the prisoners and the elders all drove to police headquarters in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. Jumah Khan and his men were held not in a cell but in a separate room, where they were fed and treated well while the price of their freedom was negotiated. After much haggling, the cops and the elders settled on a payment of $10,000 for the six men, Jumah Khan says. The police kept the elders' two pickup trucks as collateral until they got the money, but within days the six were free. "It's funny," says Jumah Khan. "We kill each other on the battlefield, but once a mujahedin is arrested, the police become friendly for a price." He's still leading missions for the Taliban in Helmand.

All the same, the shameless venality of some Afghan cops is too much to stomach even for former detainees like Jumah Khan. Villagers in the south complain that innocent civilians are often detained along with Taliban suspects just for the bribes. Jumah Khan speaks of one notoriously corrupt district police official in Helmand province who openly brags of making at least 20 arrests a day, picking up anyone he wants, Taliban or not. The crooked cop's standard price for freedom is $1,000 a head, according to Jumah Khan, who says the theory is that anyone in the district can afford that much because Helmand is flooded with narcodollars. Nearly half the world's annual opium harvest originates in that one province.

Many Afghan cops stay clean despite the filth among them. That's one reason some unlucky prisoners go all the way to the NDS. When that happens, buying their freedom becomes a longer, more complicated process—but it can be done, according to Taliban fighters. Black-bearded Hazrat Mohammad, 38, a former NDS prisoner, told his story to NEWSWEEK as he crouched over a gas heater, huddled in a heavy jacket at his mud-brick house on the Pakistani frontier. In late 2006, senior Taliban officers sent him to establish a foothold in the far northern Afghan city of Sheberghan. Police in the predominantly Uzbek town soon quickly spotted the Pashtun newcomers and arrested Khan along with his three fighters, transferring them to the NDS provincial office in the main city of Mazar-e Sharif. Mohammad's captors warned him that unless his relatives bought his release in a hurry, he could go to jail for years on terrorism charges.