Even as the Obama administration continues its efforts to — slowly — close the state-of-the-art, multi-million-dollar prison at Guantanamo Bay, it is considering the expanded use of a base in Afghanistan for much the same purpose.

The Los Angels Times reports that senior military leaders, inlcuding ISAF commander Gen. Stanley McCrystal, oppose the plan, arguing that expanding the detention facility at Bagram air base — which already holds some terrorist detainees — could make the job of stabilizing Afghanistan more difficult.

That Bagram is being considered for the task at all reflects the difficulties the administration is facing in finding a suitable site for holding unprosecutable detainees. But rather than double-back on the pledge to close Gitmo, the administration is, remarkably, opting to kill more terrorists in the field to avoid having to capture them.

Without a location outside the United States for sending prisoners, the administration must resort to turning the suspects over to foreign governments, bringing them to the U.S. or even killing them.
In one case last year, U.S. special operations forces killed an Al Qaeda-linked suspect named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a helicopter attack in southern Somalia rather than trying to capture him, a U.S. official said. Officials had debated trying to take him alive but decided against doing so in part because of uncertainty over where to hold him, the official added.
U.S. officials find such options unappealing for handling suspects they want to question but lack the evidence to prosecute. For such suspects, a facility such as Bagram, north of Kabul, remains necessary, officials said, even as they acknowledged that having it in Afghanistan could complicate McCrystal’s mission.
“No one particularly likes any of the choices before us right now, but Bagram may be the least bad among them,” a senior Defense official said.

At present, only about ten of the 800 prisoners at Bagram are foreign fighters not captured in the Af-Pak region. The plan being floated by the administration would see that number expand modestly, to include low-profile al-Qaeda suspects who are both unprosecutable and considered a threat to release.

Bagram is currently slated to be turned over to Afghan control in January of 2011.