Afghan pullout begins, one container at a time

— The United States began its withdrawal from Afghanistan in earnest, officials said Monday, sending the first of what will be tens of thousands of containers home through a once-blocked land route through Pakistan.

The shipment of 50 containers over the weekend came as a new U.S. commander took control of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan to guide the coalition through the end stages of a war that has so far lasted more than 11 years.

The containers were in the first convoys to cross into Pakistan as part of the Afghan pullout, said Marcus Spade, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, meanwhile, faced his first headache just one day after taking command, after an Afghan government panel acknowledged that detainees taken off the battlefield by coalition and Afghan troops face widespread torture at the hands of local security forces - although it denied systematic torture in government-run prisons.

Issued last month, a U.N. report said Afghan authorities are still torturing prisoners despite promises of changes. The country’s intelligence service earlier had denied any torture in its detention facilities.

The U.N. report said more than half of the 635 detainees it had interviewed were tortured- about the same ratio found in its first report in 2011. It cited brutal tactics including hanging detainees from the ceiling by their wrists, beating them with cables and administering electric shocks.

Dunford’s predecessor, Marine Gen. John Allen, had urged the Afghan government to investigate allegations of detainee abuse.

Allen also had to deal with the delicate task of improving relations with Pakistan, which closed two key land routes from Afghanistan to its southern port of Karachi to all U.S. and NATO cargo for seven months. The Pakistani move came in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani troops at a post along the Afghan border in November 2011. Islamabad reopened the route after Washington apologized for the deaths.

It’s unclear what took the U.S. so long to begin withdrawing equipment through the Pakistan route, which runs south out of Afghanistan to the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

Information for this article was contributed by Kim Gamel, Sebastian Abbo, Riaz Khan and Matiullah Achakzai of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 02/12/2013

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