Comment 35820

By Tammany (anonymous) | Posted November 27, 2009 at 15:34:10

"As long as we remain in THEIR country we have to play by THEIR rules."

But it's their country only in name. Realistically, the Karzai regime is a house of cards being shielded from the wind through US and allied military, political and economic assistance. There may be a facade of independence, but the sovereignty of Afghanistan is severely compromised.

"Having said that, Afghanistan is a sovereign nation and has the right to run it's own justice system. We have no right to detain suspects/prisoners in our own facilities on their soil or to remove said persons to a facility outside Afghanistan, as another nation we all know seems to think it can."

The rights under discussion here are extremely fuzzy in nature. Sure, if Aghanistan were a truly functional sovereign nation state then the clearest norms of international law would apply (and even those norms and their concomitant rights are not in reality as clear and unambiguous as people like to imagine) to the matter at hand and we could say with a good degree of confidence that the Afghans have the "right" to treat prisoners as they wish, etc. and that we don't have the "right" to detain prisoners on our own terms, etc. But for reasons explained above that just isn't the case. How do the norms and conventions which constitute international law apply to the case of a client/puppet regime? They don't really, particularly where the patron states allegedly violating those norms and conventions are the de facto arbiters of what is and is not legal under international law. The rights associated with international law (and sovereignty is at the core of those rights), just like human rights, are what the most powerful nations say they are at any given point in time.

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