ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Under U.S. pressure, the United Nations eliminated the job of its top investigator on human rights in Afghanistan last week after the official criticized violations by U.S. forces in the country.

U.S. diplomats at a meeting in Geneva of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights pressed the group to end the mandate of Cherif Bassiouni as the United Nations' "independent expert on human rights in Afghanistan."

Bassiouni has repeatedly criticized the U.S. military for detaining prisoners without trial and for barring almost all human-rights monitors from its prisons in the country.

Washington moved to scrap Bassiouni's post partly because the human-rights situation in Afghanistan is no longer troubling enough to require it, said a U.S. official who asked not to be identified.

Bassiouni's ouster came amid other acrimony as the commission's annual meeting closed Friday. U.N. Human-Rights High Commissioner Louise Arbour derided as "not credible" the commission's final report, which named Belarus, Cuba, Myanmar and North Korea as grievous violators of human rights.

Bassiouni, a Chicago-based law professor, repeated the criticisms in a 24-page report presented at the meeting. He noted reports that "estimate that over 1,000 individuals have been detained."

The U.S. official accused Bassiouni of grandstanding "to bolster his résumé," and said his departure would give a greater role to the Afghan government's rights commission.

But the Afghan commission has cited U.S. forces as a frequent obstacle to its work. Afghan officials say they have trouble getting appointments with U.S. officers to discuss human-rights cases. Also, U.S. forces bar the Afghan commission from visiting their prisons.

They admit only the International Committee of the Red Cross, which doesn't publish its findings.

Human-rights advocates say the U.S. policies seem to come primarily from the military rather than the State Department. The Pentagon has withheld the results of its own investigation into human-rights violations at its bases in Afghanistan.

In countries with human-rights problems as deep as Afghanistan's, "the commission normally passes a resolution to condemn the abuses and names a 'special rapporteur' to keep investigating them," said Brad Adams, Asia director of the monitoring group Human Rights Watch. "But in Afghanistan, the U.S. has not wanted these mechanisms to come into play."