WASHINGTON: A human rights group is calling on the United States to develop a new detention policy with Kabul for a US military prison in Afghanistan dubbed the “Afghan Guantanamo”. In a report published this week, Human Rights First urged Washington to establish a “transparent legal framework for the detention of those captured by the US military in Afghanistan”. The detention centre located at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul holds some 600 detainees captured by US forces in Afghanistan.

Human Rights First said it was strategically important to develop a new detention policy at time when US the United States finds itself battling an increasingly violent and powerful insurgency. US President Barack Obama is weighing a request to deploy thousands more troops and other resources to the war-torn country in a move that would ramp up the US effort in the eight-year conflict.

“Successful counterinsurgency depends on US actions being seen as fair, humane and beneficial to the security of the Afghan people, whose cooperation is needed to ensure a stable Afghanistan,” said the report’s author, Sahr MuhammedAlly. “To achieve this goal, the US government should take further steps now to support US goals of bolstering Afghan sovereignty (and) increase the capacity of the Afghans to handle detentions on their own.” Washington, she said, should reduce “the risks of arbitrary detentions, mistaken captures and ... ensure detainees a more meaningful way to challenge their detention”. The rights group, which said any new detention framework should be codified in a bilateral agreement or Afghan legislation, called for the US government to “increase capacity for fair criminal trials in Afghan courts” and for detainees to be granted access to lawyers.

The report also repeated a long-standing appeal for the United States to allow human rights groups to access the Bagram facility. The Pentagon announced in mid-September that it would for the first time allow Bagram detainees to challenge their detention before a military tribunal. The announcement came months after hundreds of prisoners began protesting what they called “indefinite” detention in July. The detainees still do not have access to all the evidence against them and instead receive assistance from a US military representative who can view their case file and gather witness testimony on their behalf.