In December 2002, two Afghan men died in American custody at Bagram airbase, north of Kabul. Their names were Dilawar and Habibullah. Documents and a criminal investigation file showed that they had been hung from the ceiling by their chains and beaten by American guards and interrogators. Military intelligence officers knew of the pattern of abuse and did not stop it. For months, the American military told reporters the men had died of natural causes [1]. Military pathologists ruled both deaths homicides [2]. The autopsy of Dilawar, a 22 year old, recorded "blunt force injuries to lower extremities" [3]. By 2005, Defense Department documents showed that five of six known deaths of detainees in American custody in Afghanistan were clear homicides. No one had been charged with homicide [1].
Bagram was the centre of an archive of such treatment. In March 2004, Human Rights Watch reported that released detainees described being severely beaten, doused with cold water and exposed to freezing temperatures, kept awake for days, and forced to stand or kneel in painful positions. Many of those held were grocers, farmers and labourers, seized on mistaken or faulty intelligence and held without charge or counsel. "There is compelling evidence suggesting that U.S. personnel have committed acts against detainees amounting to torture," the organisation said [2]. Detainees said they were stripped and photographed naked. Two Afghans arrested with Dilawar said they were forced to strip naked in the presence of female soldiers [3]. For men from a society in which the body and the honour of the family are guarded above almost everything, that was not a side effect of interrogation. It was a method.
Afghans released from Bagram told Fikr Institute, in accounts given on condition that they not be named, that if they were ever arrested again they would rather die than return. Fikr Institute treats those words as evidence. A man who would choose death over a second detention is a man the prison has already changed. Many entered Bagram without a commitment to armed resistance. The prison gave them one.
How does a state that calls itself a guardian of human rights do this to the men it held and still call it justice? Part of the answer lies in how the men were counted.
In September 2009, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion by Gunnar Heinsohn of the University of Bremen. He argued that Afghan women had been averaging three to four sons each, so that Afghan families could lose sons in war and still carry on, while Western soldiers were more often only sons. He called the young Afghan men "disposable sons," and concluded: "If demographics are destiny, then Afghanistan is destined to prevail" [4]. The argument was offered as strategy. Its effect was to turn the death of Afghan young men into a statistic their own families could supposedly absorb.
The same logic entered the rules of killing. In May 2012, The New York Times reported that the method the Obama administration used to count deaths in its drone war "in effect counts all military age males in a strike zone as combatants," unless there was explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent [5]. A man of fighting age was presumed to be a fighter until he was dead and someone proved otherwise. In Afghanistan, where the night raids reached 12 to 20 a night by 2011, that presumption was applied house by house [6].
The pattern did not end in Afghanistan. In October 2023, as Israel began its war on Gaza, President Isaac Herzog of Israel said of the people of Gaza: "It is an entire nation out there that is responsible" [7]. The language changes from war to war. The function is the same: if the dead are disposable, guilty by age or guilty by nationality, their deaths need no accounting.
Coordination is not the claim. Convergence is clear: the homicides at Bagram, the disposable sons of a newspaper opinion and the counting rule that made every man of fighting age a combatant all rest on the same premise, that the lives of Muslim men in a war zone weigh less [1][4][5]. Exploitation is visible: the counting rule moved the dead out of the civilian column, and the abuse at Bagram went unpunished while the men who survived it carried it home [5][1]. The precedent is December 2002, when two deaths were first explained as natural causes [1].
The signs to watch are whether the full files on deaths at Bagram are ever released, whether any official is held responsible, and whether the counting rules for civilian deaths in current wars are ever made public.
Fikr Institute judges that Bagram did not only break men. It made the men who walked out into enemies of those who held them, and it did so under a doctrine that had already decided their lives were cheap. A son is disposable only to those who are not his family. Afghan families remember the names of the sons who did not come back.