The Afghan

Just after the New Year, an e-mail was sent from the office of Siebart and Abercrombie to Jakarta. The Countess of Richmond, with a full cargo of crated Jaguar sedans for Singapore, would sail from Liverpool on the first of March. After unloading at Singapore, she would proceed in ballast to North Borneo to take aboard the hold cargo of timber before turning for Surabaya for the deck cargo of crated silks.

THE CONSTRUCTION crew working inside the Pasayten Wilderness was finally and deeply grateful when the job was done by the end of January. To keep up the work rate, the men had chosen to overnight right on the site, and until the central heating came on stream they had been extremely cold. But the bonus was large and tempting. They took the discomfort and completed on schedule. To the naked eye, the cabin looked much the same but larger. In fact, it had been transformed. To cope with a staff of two officers, the bedrooms would suffice; for the extra eight guards to accomplish twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance, an extra bunkhouse had been added, and a dining hall beside it. The spacious sitting room was retained, but a recreation room, with pool table, library, plasma TV and ample DVD selection, had created yet another extension. Both were built of insulated pine logs.

The third extension appeared to be built with the usual uninsulated, rustic logs. Its exterior walls were, in fact, clad only with split tree trunks; inside, the walls were reinforced concrete. The whole penitentiary wing was impregnable from without and escape-proof from within. It was reached from the guards’ quarters through a single steel door, with food service hatch and spy hole. Beyond this door was a single but spacious room. It contained a steel bed frame deeply embedded in the concrete floor; it could never be moved by bare hands. Nor could the wall shelving, also embedded in the concrete.

There were, however, carpets on the floor, and heat came from baseboard-level grilles that could never be opened. The room also had a door opposite the spy hole, and the detainee could open or close it at will. It led only to the exercise yard.

The yard was bare save for a concrete bench in the center away from the walls. The walls were ten feet tall and as smooth as a pool table. No man could get anywhere near the top; nor was there anything that could be propped against the wall or stood on.

For sanitation, there was a recessed area off the sitting room bedroom containing a single hole in the floor for bodily functions and a shower whose controls were in the hands of the guards outside. Because all the new materials had come in by helicopter, the only visible exterior addition was a landing pad under the snow. Otherwise, the Cabin stood in its five-hundred-acre plot, surrounded on all sides by the pine, larch and spruce, even though the trees had been cut back to a hundred yards in every direction.

When they came, the ten guardians of probably the country’s most expensive and exclusive prison were two middle-grade CIA men from Langley and eight junior staffers who had completed all the mental and physical tests at the Farm training school and were hoping for an exciting first assignment. Instead, they got a forest in the snow. But they were all fit and eager to impress.

The military trial at Guantanamo Bay began just before the end of January and was held in one of the larger rooms in the interrogation block, decked out now for its judicial purpose. Anyone hoping for a half-mad Colonel Jessup or any of the histrionics portrayed in A Few Good Men would have been sorely disappointed. The proceedings were low-tone and orderly.

There were eight detainees being considered for release as of “no further danger,” and seven were vociferous in stating their harmlessness. Only one maintained a scornful silence. His case was heard last. “Prisoner Khan, into what language would you like these proceedings to be translated?” asked the colonel, flanked by a male major and a female captain, presiding on the dais at the end of the room under the seal of the United States of America. All three were from the U.S. Marines legal branch. The prisoner was facing them, hauled to his feet by the Marine guards flanking him. Desks set facing each other had been allocated to prosecuting and defending attorneys-the former military, the latter civilian. The prisoner shrugged gently, and stared at the female Marine captain for several seconds; then he let his gaze come to rest on the wall above the judges. “This court is aware that the prisoner understands Arabic, so that is the language the court chooses. Any objection. Counselor?” The question was to the defending attorney, who shook his head. He had been warned about his client when he took the case. From all he had heard, he was convinced he had no chance. It was a civil rights-based appearance, and he knew what the surrounding Marines thought of white knights from the civil rights movement. A helpful client would have been nice. Still, he reasoned, the Afghan’s attitude at least got the attorney off the hook. He shook his head. No objection. Arabic would do.

The Arabic ‘terp advanced and positioned himself close to the Marine guards. It was a wise choice; there was only one Pashtun interpreter, and he had had a rough time with the Americans because he had coaxed nothing out of his fellow Afghan. Now he had nothing to do, and saw the approaching end of a quite comfortable lifestyle.

There had only ever been seven Pashtun at Gitmo, the seven wrongly included among the foreign fighters at Kunduz five years earlier. Four had gone back, simple farm boys who had renounced all Muslim extremism with considerable enthusiasm; and the other two had had mental breakdowns so complete that they were still under psychiatric care. The Taliban commander was the last one. The prosecuting counsel began, and the ‘terp uttered a stream of sibilant Arabic. The gist was that the Yankees are going to send you back to the slammer and throw away the keys, you arrogant Taliban shit. Izmat Khan slowly lowered his gaze and fixed on the terp. The eyes said it all. The Lebanon-born American reverted to literal translation. The man might be dressed in a ludicrous orange jumpsuit, shackled hand and foot, but you never knew with this bastard. The prosecutor did not take long. He stressed five years of virtual silence, a refusal to name collaborators in the war of terror against the USA, and the fact the prisoner had been caught in a jail uprising in which an American had been brutally stomped to death. Then he sat down. He had no doubt of the outcome. The man would have to remain in custody for years to come. The civil rights attorney took a little longer. He was pleased that as an Afghan the prisoner had absolutely nothing to do with the atrocity of 9/11. He had been fighting in an all-Afghan civil war at the time, and had nothing to do with the Arabs behind Al Qaeda. As for Mullah Omar and the Afghan government sheltering bin Laden and his cronies, that was a dictatorship of which Mr. Khan was a serving officer but not a part.

“I really must urge this court to admit the reality,” he wound up. “If this man is a problem, he is an Afghan problem. There is a new and democratically elected government there now. We should ship him back for them to deal with.” The three judges withdrew. They were away for thirty minutes. When they returned, the captain was pink with anger. She still could not believe what she had heard. Only the colonel and the major had had the interview with the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff and knew his orders. “Prisoner Khan, be upstanding. This court has been made aware that the government of President Karzai has agreed that if you are returned to your native land, you will be sentenced to life imprisonment over there. That being so, this court intends to burden the American taxpayer with you no longer. Arrangements will therefore be made to ship you back to Kabul. You will return as you arrived: in shackles. That is all. Court rises.” The captain was not the only one in shock. The prosecuting attorney wondered how this would look on his career prospects. The defending counsel was feeling slightly light-headed. The ‘terp for one panicking moment had thought the mad colonel would order the cuffs taken off, in which case he, the good son of Beirut, was going straight out of the window.