Jason Burke

So why was Shahab lying? Possibly because, as the Deputy Chief of Investigations admitted, his loquacity might get him a few years off his sentence. And where did he get the material for his lies from? Televisions were introduced into the cells in August last year.

For a few weeks, between mid-April and early May, I was in Bagram, thirty miles north of Kabul, to cover the war. At about six o’clock on most evenings I went for a run. From our tents in Viper City I would jog past the 10th Mountain Division, through the lines of the 101st Airborne’s Quick Reaction Force, past the long queue for dinner, past the stinking row of portakabins and...

The first execution I saw was in August 1998. All the executions in Kabul take place in the football stadium, and I sat high in the concrete terraces, buying endless small glasses of green tea from a hawker as I waited for the amputations – which precede most Taliban executions – to start. A crowd of around five thousand had filed quietly through the tunnels and onto the stands....