ARGHANDAB VALLEY, Afghanistan -- One day this spring, soldiers found a man under a bridge who was surprisingly forthcoming: He said he was there planning to attack them.
“He told us right off the bat, ‘My name is Dangerous, and you should fear me. I’m supposed to be a suicide bomber,’ ” remembers Staff Sgt. Erik Adams, a 24-year-old squad leader.
After the man’s clothes tested positive for aluminum powder, a common ingredient in homemade bombs, U.S. troops turned him over to Afghan police, believing they had an obvious case to detain him after discovering him this spring.
Adams and other soldiers say the Afghans soon let him go.
For U.S. troops operating in tough areas like this valley northwest of Kandahar, it was a familiar pattern. Under rules that restrict them from detaining suspected insurgents in all but the most clear-cut instances, American troops must turn to Afghan forces often reluctant to pursue cases and a court system many liken to a revolving door.
While many U.S. troops describe a frustrating inability to get insurgents off the battlefield and behind bars, saying it undermines efforts to improve security, the Afghan government last week appeared to be reading from an entirely different script.
One of the concrete proposals produced by the peace conference in Kabul earlier this month — an event aimed at jump-starting negotiations with the Taliban and other groups — was a call to release some suspected insurgents as a gesture of goodwill.
On Sunday, the Afghan government said it had launched a review of the roughly 4,500 people in government custody and was working to identify those detained without sufficient evidence.
The Afghan public’s perception is that many people are being rounded up based on little more than rumors, as some delegates at the peace jirga put it. U.S. troops and their advisers in the field tell a different story, in which even carefully built cases often founder.
Mike Callan, a retired New York city detective working as a law enforcement adviser to the U.S. 101st Airborne Division in the Arghandab, said he has seen more than 20 cases in the last six months in which suspects were detained but later released — usually for lack of evidence or after tribal leaders interceded with provincial authorities. Bribes paid to Afghan judicial officials are another suspected cause, he said.
