U.S. Super-Sizing Afghan Jail It Promised to Abandon

[n2doc]

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author February 20, 2012


There once was a plan to turn over the main U.S. detention center in Afghanistan to control of the Afghans in 2011. That’s out the window. Instead, the military is offering millions to vastly expand the center’s inmate intake.

Specifically, $35 million will fund expansions necessary to house “approximately 2,000 detainees” at the Detention Facility at Parwan on the outskirts of Bagram Air Field, an hour’s drive from Kabul. The Army Corps of Engineers wants to expand “detainee housing, guard towers, administrative facility and Vehicle/Personnel Access Control Gates, security surveillance and restricted access systems,” according to a recent solicitation. A Turkey-based company received the contract in late January.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. As far back as summer 2010, senior military officials in charge of the detention center boasted to Danger Room outright that by January 2012, they wouldn’t be running the square-mile sized prison. They considered handing the detention center to the Afghans a mark of their own success at fostering a culture of law and order within the Afghan government.

Alas. A year later, the command in charge of the detention center, Joint Task Force-435, admitted that it wouldn’t complete the handoff until the U.S. ended combat in 2014. The reason? “The Afghans don’t have the legal framework or the capacity to deal with violence being inflicted on the country by the insurgency,” an official told the Financial Times.

more
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/02/afghan-prison/

[Comrade Grumpy]

1. Bringing American freedom to the Afghans, one prison expansion at a time.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. "The Afghans don’t have the capacity to deal with violence....."

The Afghans who defeated Russia when it invaded NOW " don't have capacity to deal with violence being inflicted on the country"?????

Horsepucky.

[n2doc]

3. He really means Karzai and his corrupt buddies don't have the capacity

Sort of like the puppet governments we propped up in Viet Nam.