The prison isn’t big on vocational training but they had some sewing machines before the man who operated them disappeared. Some of the boys are as young as ten and there is no education and too little water. But ‘the political boys’, as the guards call them, are keen to point out the legality of their activities from their point of view. The Afghan government, for reasons nobody understands, aims to move the children to a new site near Sarposa prison, a Taliban-rich area where adult inmates once sewed up their mouths in protest at what they believed was their unlawful detention. Evidence suggests that detained children are physically abused in these prisons. A boy who steals a pomegranate may steal another one and end up next to a kid who knows the quick way to another world.
One boy, Beltoon, came from the province of Paktia. The families in his village competed over whose sons would be sent to the madrassah. ‘You do not love your son, you do not teach him in the ways of Islam,’ the elders would say to parents who kept their sons at home. A counsellor I spoke to, Dr Shah Mohammad Abed, told me there has been a change in the villages: many elders now believe that the world has come to destroy Islam and they must fight back. Beltoon is 15: he was herding goats before his father decided he should go to the regional madrassah, where he spent nine months. The dean then asked for volunteers. Which of them wished to have ‘advanced’ education in Islam in Pakistan? Beltoon’s father and his uncles told him that this meant a better education.
‘Would he understand,’ I asked, ‘that going over the border would mean military training?’
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