Hukumran: a cabdriver who made a powerful enemy

GARDEZ, Afghanistan — Hukumran was easy to like. He leaned back on a cushion, made himself at home, winked and lit a cigarette.

He's a Kochi, a member of a nomadic tribe, with no last name. He gave the Americans a first and a last name, "Hukumran Khan," because they really seemed to want him to have both, he said, giggling.

Other men who made the drive to a tribal-affairs office in Gardez to meet with an American reporter were a little nervous that they might be seen with a foreigner, something that can mean a death sentence if Taliban commanders find out.

Hukumran, a cabdriver, had come over from Khost, a dangerous province, but he was relaxed as he sipped his tea and spoke in a low, polite voice. He said he had nothing to hide. He was innocent.

After holding 572 tribunals at Guantánamo from July 2004 to July 2007, the U.S. military declared only 38 detainees to be no longer enemy combatants. Hukumran was one of them.

He said he'd been arrested in the summer of 2002 — he said it was about eight months after the Taliban regime fell, which would have been about June — when a local Afghan military commander stole his satellite phone and refused to return it without a hefty payment. Hukumran refused and demanded to speak with U.S. Army officers.

Soon afterward, the Afghan commander took a contingent of Afghan soldiers to raid Hukumran's village. They dragged him off not because he was a militant, Hukumran said, but because he was threatening to expose corruption.

The problem with that story, a high-ranking Afghan intelligence official said, is that Hukumran isn't what he seems. His satellite phone was confiscated, the official said, because of whom he had been calling: men linked to the Taliban.

Those phone numbers and their significance, however, apparently never made it up the chain to interrogators at Guantánamo, said the intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he isn't allowed to talk to reporters.

While U.S. military officials at times detained the wrong men at Guantánamo, the intelligence official said, they also sometimes let the right ones go.

The official said he had received reports from an informant in Waziristan — a Pakistani tribal area near the Afghan border that's a Taliban and al-Qaida refuge — that Hukumran had wasted little time reconnecting with hard-core Islamist groups after he was released from Guantánamo in 2005.

The official said that Hukumran "has very close ties with Sirajuddin Haqqani," a Taliban commander who operates out of Pakistan, along with his father, Jalaluddin Haqqani, considered among the fiercest insurgent leaders in Afghanistan and who acts as a go-between for al-Qaida and the Taliban.

"He [Hukumran] is not a good person; he's been involved with anti-government activities," the official said.

In his interview, Hukumran didn't mention the Haqqani family. He said only that he was a simple man who, as he told the military tribunal at Guantánamo, never had anything to do with the Taliban or al-Qaida.

After he was arrested, he said, he was sent to a U.S. Army base in Gardez and then to the detention camp at Bagram Air Base.

At Bagram, he said, interrogators tried to shake him into recanting his story, into saying that his travels as a laborer to Saudi Arabia — where he said he dug water wells — the three AK-47s found near his home, the two passports he carried and the expensive satellite phone were evidence that he was more than a clueless nomad swept up in the war on terrorism.

"There were two interrogators, American men, who wanted to frighten me. They had beards. They would beat on the chairs and yell that I was lying," Hukumran said. "I told them that these things did not frighten me. I told them I was telling them the truth, and if they wanted to kill me, fine."

The Americans threatened that he'd be sent to Guantánamo, that he could spend his life in prison. Fine, Hukumran said, go ahead and do it.

He spent about a year and a half at Guantánamo.

The interrogation sessions there were far less harsh, he said. They focused more on his life than they did on al-Qaida or the Taliban. How did he get to Saudi Arabia? How much was he paid? Did his employers treat him well?

"The interrogators at Guantánamo were very nice with me," he said. "They gave me cigarettes all the time and let me watch movies. ... I was innocent; there was no proof."

He quickly learned that if he kept to himself in the cellblocks, his life would be relatively easy.

"The Arabs were always making problems. They would throw water at the soldiers; they would spit at them," Hukumran said. "When something happened that the inmates didn't like, they would begin shaking their cell walls and screaming. I never took part in this because I didn't want the guards to take me away."

So he remained quiet and waited.

When the time came for his tribunal, he told his story of standing up to the corrupt Afghan army officer.

He then made his plea: "I'm not Taliban, and I'm not al-Qaida. ... I'm asking from you guys to be kind to me. Don't be mean to me; please release me from here."

The U.S. officers sitting on the tribunal listened to him. Hukumran got his wish, and he was sent back to Afghanistan, where he's free to travel and do business with whomever he pleases.