Reporting from Camp Hero, Afghanistan — After the Koranic verses had been chanted, after the mullahs and military commanders had talked of the need to put past mistakes behind, each detainee bent over a document written in his native Pashto, carefully affixing his thumbprint.
With that gesture -- a promise to renounce violence and shun the insurgency -- the four Afghans, all of whom had spent months in U.S. military detention, were free to return to homes and families in troubled Kandahar province.
Over the last two months, similar ceremonies in Afghanistan have marked the release of more than a dozen detainees back into their communities, where village elders, local officials and family members vouched for their promise to lead peaceful lives.
The community-release program is part of a larger U.S.-led effort to redress what has for years been a festering Afghan grievance against foreign forces here: suspected insurgents being held for months or years in military custody with little or no opportunity for the innocent among them to make their case.
When it comes to American treatment of wartime captives, any Afghan schoolchild can rattle off a roll call of notorious names: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, the latter a military prison at an American air base north of Kabul.
The Bagram jail, scene of well-documented detainee abuses in years past, including two prisoner deaths in 2002, was closed late last year and replaced with a new facility six miles away.
Among Afghans, "there's a toxic perception of detention practices," said Michael Gottlieb, a Harvard Law School graduate. He serves as civilian deputy of a new U.S.-led task force set up to institute reforms and pave the way for handing authority over military detainees to the Afghan government.
That drive has taken on added impetus amid Western and Afghan efforts to woo Taliban foot soldiers away from the insurgency and back to civilian life. Tales of injustice against detainees makes such "reintegration" a tougher sell.
U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of Western forces in Afghanistan, moved quickly after assuming the post to address the issue of detainee treatment. It is a key element of his counterinsurgency doctrine, which holds that winning over the Afghan public is the only durable bulwark against the Taliban.
