Mohammed Fazl has been held at Guantánamo Bay since early 2002
The Obama administration is considering transferring to Afghan custody a senior Taliban official suspected of major human rights abuses as part of a remote bid to improve the prospects of a peace deal in Afghanistan, Reuters has learned.
The potential handover of Mohammed Fazl, a "high-risk detainee" held at the Guantánamo Bay military prison since early 2002, has set off alarms on Capitol Hill and among some US intelligence officials.
As a senior commander of the Taliban army, Fazl is alleged to be responsible for the killing of thousands of Afghanistan's minority Shi'ite Muslims between 1998 and 2001.
According to US military documents made public by WikiLeaks, he was also on the scene of a November 2001 prison riot that killed CIA operative Johnny Micheal Spann, the first American who died in combat in the Afghan war. There is no evidence, however, that Fazl played any direct role in Spann's death.
Senior officials have said their 10-month-long effort to set up substantive negotiations between the weak government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban has reached a make-or-break stage involving "confidence-building measures" such as the transfer of five detainees from Guantánamo – of whom Fazl could be one – and the establishment of a Taliban office outside Afghanistan.
Officials said the detainees would not be set free, but remain in some sort of custody. One intelligence official said there had been intense bipartisan opposition in Congress to the proposed transfer.
"I can tell you that the hair on the back of my neck went up when they walked in with this a month ago, and there's been very, very strong letters fired off to the administration," the official said on condition of anonymity. "What is clear is the president's order to us to continue to discuss these important matters with Congress."
Even supporters of a controversial deal with the Taliban say the odds of striking an accord are slim.
Critics of Obama's peace initiative remain deeply sceptical of the Taliban's willingness to negotiate.
Obama is expected to soon sign into law a defence authorisation bill to broaden the military's power over terrorist detainees and require the Pentagon to certify in most cases that certain security conditions are met before Guantánamo prisoners can be sent home.
Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the senate intelligence committee, said such detainees would "likely continue to pose a threat to the United States" even once they were transferred.
In February, the Afghan High Peace Council named six men it wanted released as a goodwill gesture. The list included Fazl; senior Taliban military commander Noorullah Noori; former deputy intelligence minister Abdul Haq Wasiq; and Khairullah Khairkhwa, a former interior minister.
Michael Semple, a former UN official with more than two decades of experience in Afghanistan, said Fazl commanded thousands of Taliban soldiers at a time when its army carried out massacres of Shi'ites. "If you're head of an army that carries out a massacre, even if you're not actually there, you are implicated by virtue of command and control responsibility," he said.