Canadian troops arrive at Kandahar airfield on March 8, 2002. Photo by Stephen J. Thorne.

Last month, the Globe and Mail published an article about “enforced disappearances” of Afghan prisoners by Canadian troops in Kandahar. So far, no other Canadian news outlet has reported on the serious allegations in the piece, which offer a rare peek through Ottawa’s wall of censorship at the actual functioning of Canadian military operations abroad.

The source of the allegations is Richard Colvin, a Department of Foreign Affairs (now called Global Affairs Canada) veteran who rose to prominence in 2009 as one of the main whistleblowers regarding Canadian complicity in the torture of Afghan civilians. For testifying to Parliament about the torture scandal, Colvin faced government retaliation. He was “denied promotions that normally would be routinely granted to a diplomat of his rank, and federal lawyers threatened him with prosecution for his decision to testify.”

Since then, Colvin has been compiling additional information about the Canadian military’s treatment of Afghan prisoners. His findings are disturbing. If true, they constitute what Colvin calls “a grave war crime” on a “massive scale.”

Colvin’s report draws from “hundreds of public and private sources,” and details how, during Canada’s occupation of Kandahar Province, Canadian soldiers conspired to secretly detain and transfer hundreds of Afghan prisoners to the central government’s security apparatus. Many of these Afghans were local farmers with no connection to militant anti-occupation forces.

These actions by the Canadian military and diplomatic service constituted an “unauthorized and undeclared” policy on a “massive scale,” and a deliberate evasion of a 2005 treaty signed between Canada and Afghanistan in which Ottawa promised to alert the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) whenever Canadian soldiers handed over detainees to Afghan government forces.

“At the peak of the Kandahar mission in 2006 and 2007, as many as 90 percent of the Afghans detained by Canadian soldiers simply disappeared from any official monitoring.”https://t.co/hWy4Pqk6VE

Rather than notify the ICRC, the Canadian military labelled prisoners as PUCs (Persons Under Control), a term borrowed from the US military, which allowed them to keep the Red Cross in the dark and thereby bypass international monitoring of prisoners. As a result, hundreds of Afghans arrested by Canadian forces “disappeared into the custody of Afghan security forces that had a well-known history of torture, abuse and even murder.”

Colvin asserts that from 2006-2007, the most intense period of Canada’s occupation of Kandahar, “as many as 90 percent of the Afghans detained by Canadian soldiers simply disappeared from any official monitoring,” subject instead to what Colvin calls “enforced disappearances.” During the first year of the Canadian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), “Canada secretly detained and transferred about 1,000 people to the Afghan security forces, and possibly as many as 1,200.” Only 129 Afghan prisoners were officially transferred to the Afghan government.

“The willful transfer of prisoners to a significant risk........

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