US accused of inaction after Taliban POWs killed in ’01

US officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation - sought by officials from the FBI, the State Department, the Red Cross, and human rights groups - because the warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the CIA and his militia worked closely with US Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the US-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which Dostum had served as a defense official.

“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,’’ said Pierre Prosper, the former US ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ’’

It is not clear how - or if - the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths - which may have been the most significant mass killing in Afghanistan after the 2001 US-led invasion - has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.

“If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government,’’ Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, “There is always a time and place for justice.’’

While President Obama has deepened the US commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Karzai, whose government is widely viewed as corrupt.

A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had told Karzai of their objections to reinstating Dostum. The US officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Karzai over the general’s role, said an official briefed on the matter. Asked about looking into the prisoner deaths, the official said, “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.’’

While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the US-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to Dostum’s forces, which were part of the US-backed Northern Alliance, in the city of Kunduz. They were then taken to a prison run by the general’s forces near the town of Shibarghan.

Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.

A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source, whose identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died. Estimates from other witnesses or human rights groups range from several hundred to several thousand.

In Afghanistan, rival warlords have had a history of eliminating enemy troops by suffocating them in sealed containers. Dostum, however, has said previously that any such deaths of the Taliban prisoners were unintentional.

While a dozen or so bodies were examined and several were autopsied, a full exhumation was never performed, and human rights groups are concerned that evidence has been destroyed.