“If there’s a problem, why aren’t they saying it when they visit? This raises the question, why are they raising their voices now?”

In response, a spokesman for the international military command referred to a letter written by Gen. John R. Allen, the ISAF commander, that was in an appendix to the United Nations report. In it, General Allen said that he and his deputy had written to Afghan government ministers about 80 cases of abuse. In some cases, he wrote that he made pleas to remove individuals who were involved in the abuse, but that only one detainee had been removed. Mr. Faizi said he was not aware of the letters.

Even before the report was made public, General Allen halted transfers of detainees to all of the facilities named in the United Nations report because under international human rights law it is prohibited to transfer any detainee to a government where there are “substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

The report was based on interviews with 635 detainees in facilities around the country, and it found that half of them had experienced torture or abuse. Most of the ill treatment happened in facilities run by the police or the intelligence agency. At a few detention sites, the torture was so frequent that the United Nations report described it as “systematic.”

The Afghan government took particular exception to that terminology, Mr. Faizi said. “It is not the policy of the Afghan government to torture and it’s not systematic. It’s not to the extent that it says in the Unama report,” he said, referring to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.