Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
The UDHR further guarantees the rights of liberty, due process and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty.
The United States does not like that Afghans and their parliament insist on these rights. The United States arbitrarily arrests Afghans who it assumes, without evidence, to be “terrorists” or at least “Taliban”. After some struggle it finally agreed to hand over the arrested to the Afghan government. Now an Afghan commission decides if the evidence, if there is any at all, is sufficient enough for to case to go to a trial. In four out of five cases the evidence is insufficiant or lacking at all and the prisoner is set free.
Such laudable due process is disliked by the U.S. military. It therefore pressed on the Afghan government and the parliament to allow for long term detentions without evidence of guilt and without trials. The Afghan parliament, rightfully, rejected such severe violations of universal human rights. That, says the United States, is a “problem”:
A key problem, U.S. officials said, is the Afghan parliament’s unwillingness to pass legislation that would permit the government to detain individuals even if insufficient evidence exists to prosecute them in court. Most of the detainees were apprehended in military operations where the collection of evidence was not a priority; in other cases, information leading to their capture came from sources the U.S. government deems too secret to share with the Afghan government.
“This is very disappointing,” said a U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss detention operations.
The U.S. military knows of course how to avoid such “disappointment”:
“If they can’t prove they’re Taliban, bam”
But that solution is just as dumb as the anonymously quoted disappointment of the U.S. official above.
What is again the U.S. trying to do in Afghanistan?