Afghan detainees and "Casablanca"

As BruceR. points out at Flit we should not be surprised by the connection:

Shocked... shocked

It's possible some people might be confused about the stories saying the Afghan NDS were reported to be cruel jailors, but also tended to take bribes to release insurgents a lot. In our kind of Western justice system that would seem... contradictory.

But not in Afghanistan. One cannot rule out the likelihood here that this is just evidence the system is, in fact, functioning as designed: that is, functioning primarily as a mechanism for generating bribes for local officials through catch-and-release detention policies. The threat of ill treatment itself is itself a primary tool to efficiently extract the levy from the friends and family of the detained. If NDS custody were not seen as hard time, and the NDS themselves as hard men, there would not be the same sense or urgency to spring someone. The prompt releases and the reputation for abuse, deserved or not, go hand in glove in this way...

...the reality could even have been said to have borne some resemblances with the justice of Capt. Renault in the movie Casablanca [more here], with its bribes and "usual suspects": and really, should we be so surprised that that would be the case? If a land where such practices were common was not so foreign as to be incredible to 1940s Western movie audiences, it should not be so surprising to us in dealing with a real-life country that in many ways missed out on the 20th century altogether...

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