The NY Times is reporting on instances where US military personnel were told to "look the other way" when our Afghan allies sexually abused children. The perpetrators were Afghan warlords and police commanders being trained or funded by the US. The victims are primarily young boys who are known in Afghanistan as "dancing boys", or "tea boys" and are a status symbol for some proportion of wealthy Afghan men.
Some of this occured on US military bases:
Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.
The "tradition" of pederasty in Afghanistan is
common knowledge in the region. I recall hearing it alluded to in India (as a stereotype of Afghans) when I was a young child in the 80s. The Taliban
clamped down on the practice
during their rule, but it
flourished right after the government was toppled by US forces.
Nor is this the first scandal involving "dancing boys" and the US military. Back in 2009, the Afghan government was very concerned about the PR impact of a journalist's investigations into an incident where the staff of the US contractor Dynacorp, hired an Afghan "dancing boy" for a company farewell party. Of course, the Afghan government is also guilty of looking the other way at widespread sexual abuse by its own forces. Vice did an extensive piece on the Afghan war two year ago that highlighted the widespread abuse of children by our allies. The state department has been highlighting this in their country reports on human rights since 2004.
Back to the NY Times story:
“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”
And that is the question. Why does combatting the Greater Evil require us to be complicit in the sexual abuse and sexual slavery of children?
I wrote an intentionally provocative diary a few days ago about Thomas Jefferson and sexual slavery. I felt that was a useful discussion of our past and how it impacts our present.
This story of our cultivated disinterest in the abuse and enslavement of children by our "allies", in the present, is shameful.
Worse, it is actively undermining the supposed mission in Afghanistan:
“The bigger picture was fighting the Taliban,” a former Marine lance corporal reflected. “It wasn’t to stop molestation.”
Still, the former lance corporal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending fellow Marines, recalled feeling sickened the day he entered a room on a base and saw three or four men lying on the floor with children between them. “I’m not a hundred percent sure what was happening under the sheet, but I have a pretty good idea of what was going on,” he said.
But the American policy of treating child sexual abuse as a cultural issue has often alienated the villages whose children are being preyed upon.