It’s never a good sign when you have to tell the men guarding your base not to murder civilians, torture detainees or desecrate corpses. But U.S. special-operations forces in Afghanistan are leaving nothing to chance.
The Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan put 10 contracts for “perimetersecurity“ up for bid on Friday morning. Hired guards, mostly Afghans, will keep watch over anyone who approaches the elite commandos’ remote outposts. The bases on which they’ll work range in size from tiny “village support platforms” staffed by a mere 12-man “A Team” to one near Kabul’s infamous Pol-e-Charkhi prison, but there are uniform expectations for would-be guards. Some of them read more like baseline conditions for membership in civilized humanity.
So-called “Afghan Security Guards” are instructed, “Do not kill or torture detained personnel.” For good measure, if someone’s taken captive, “immediately turn over to U.S., Coalition or [Afghan forces].” Should they kill someone who poses a threat, there is to be “no booby-trapping, burning [or] mutilation” of their corpses.
Afghans guarding U.S. bases don’t exactly have the best track record. A Senate report last fall found them getting into gun battles with one another for cash and doing favors for warlords and even Taliban. But indications that they’ve been murdering civilians, torturing captives and turning dead bodies into gruesome homemade bombs are few and far between. If those cases actually exist, it’s not stopped the task force from hiring Afghan guards to stand watch over their outposts.
While the rules bar Afghan guards from conducting “offensive ops,” they’re still instructed not to “attack protected persons or protected places,” like “mosques, hospitals, cemeteries and schools.” So apparently they’ll spend some time off-base.
Which leads to the most crucial instructions of all. “Fight only combatants,” the contract rules insist. “Destroy no more than the mission requires. Returned fire with aimed fire. Must limit/eliminate collateral damage to innocent civilians.”
Afghan guards might be an enduring feature of U.S. bases. But as the basic instructions indicate, U.S. forces don’t exactly trust them. “Contractor personnel are not permitted to eat in U.S. government dining facilities,” the contract rules read. Only a few of them can work out at the base gyms.
If these are the kinds of instructions that even the most elite U.S. warriors have to provide their would-be local protectors, how wise is it to have men who need to be told not to commit murder watching their backs?
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