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In Afghanistan, Do the Wrong Thing, They Command
KANDAHAR: ISAF Forces talk to children on the side of the road on May 14, 2010 in Kandahar Province Afghanistan. Nate Derrick / Shutterstock.com
On September 20, the New York Times published a story titled “U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies.” In it, writer Joseph Goldstein details the sickening culture in Afghanistan of child rape by members of the Afghan military:
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.
Goldstein also gives the account of:
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.
For what I think was doing the right thing, Quinn was relieved of his command, and he is no longer in the military. The Times article also says:
Four years later, the Army is also trying to forcibly retire Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, a Special Forces member who joined Captain Quinn in beating up the commander.
“The Army contends that Martland and others should have looked the other way (a contention that I believe is nonsense),” Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who hopes to save Sergeant Martland’s career, wrote last week to the Pentagon’s inspector general.
Michelle Malkin, in a piece today, gives an update on Martland:
[T]he Army this month denied an appeal by decorated Green Beret Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, who was discharged in 2011 after physically confronting an Afghan police commander accused of kidnapping, chaining and raping a local village boy, beating his mother, and laughing about it when questioned.
My outrage meter over this is off the charts. I get more sickened and disgusted with every new story about this horror show. How have we sunk so low as a people that our supposed military “leaders” tell people under their command to look the other way if young boys are being raped, and then punish them when they rightly stop these barbaric acts? I keep thinking to myself how this would have been handled if the Greatest Generation was still running the United States Military. Can you imagine any one of them worried about respecting local cultural norms as abnormal as this subhuman sickness? I can’t.
I was lucky enough last week to watch as an Honor Flight of World War II veterans from South Florida landed at Ronald Reagan National Airport to a rightful heroes welcome. I looked into the eyes of every one of these brave men and women as they walked off the jet bridge. Imagine telling them about this. Imagine how sad and angry they would be to know that their creation of the greatest fighting force the world has ever known, has devolved into social experiments and putting up with animals who repeatedly rape children:
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.
Malkin adds:
Asked whether the president had taken steps to review his military’s treatment of these whistleblowers, White House spokesman apathetically shrugged: “Not that I’m aware of.”
Ho-hum.
A White House that wants to spend billions to stop “climate change” in the name of saving all the children of the planet can’t bother to stop the violent sexual assaults of boys held hostage right under our noses by our warmly embraced “allies” in the Afghan military.
A White House that splashed social media with pleas to “Bring Back Our Girls” after Boko Haram jihadists in Nigeria kidnapped 300 girls and women has nothing to say about the legions of boys forced into prostitution and pedophilia rings witnessed by U.S. troops.
The same White House that, on September 18, hypocritically tweeted this:
Learn about the progress we’ve made on preventing sexual assault after one year of #ItsOnUs → http://t.co/THWlwMusZN http://t.co/xqy2Z38P88
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 18, 2015
So if it’s on us to stop sexual assault, why isn’t it on them to do the same?
==========
Addendum: I also wanted to draw your attention to two must-read articles on all of this by Shane Harris at The Daily Beast:
- Marines Trained That Rape in Afghanistan Is a ‘Cultural’ Issue
- Green Berets Blasted for Attacking Child Rapist
And I ask that you, like I am doing, find and read any articles you can find on this topic. Our military deserves better, and all children, no matter where they live in the world, deserve better.
Published in Foreign Policy, Islamist Terrorism, Military
Ain’t multiculturalism grand?
Is the NYT for or against bacha bazi in Afghanistan?
The weakest argument is that what’s right for us might not be right for everyone. “To each his own.” The argument I’ve seen more often is that Western peoples used to be similarly barbaric, so these peoples should be left to “evolve” naturally.
Set aside the false assumptions that cultures are always progressing forward and that all reach the same conclusions. Let’s suppose that such improvement, that establishment of justice, is indeed inevitable. How many millions of peoples are we supposed to watch be abused and butchered in the meantime?
This is one reason I’m not completely opposed to old-fashioned ideas of conquest.
Or perhaps this is just a sort of cold pragmatism. Our allies in some areas are detestable. How much can we demand of them without breaking the alliance? How much do we need them as allies? I’m reminded of General Patton’s desire to march directly from defeated Germany into the Soviet Union.
We can’t defeat all of the world’s worst evils, but that’s not reason to stop fighting them.
I thought we should invade, depose the Taliban, scatter Al Queda, then leave with a simple instruction” let al queda or the Taliban, back in and we’ll be back. Then we should have turned toward Iraq and negotiated the end of sanctions, the no fly zone in return for extensive inspections. We didn’t. We had credibility then. Now we don’t We’re still in Afghanistan and trying not to return to Iraq even though the vacuum we left is causing the disintegration of everything. We still can’t change these people, we can’t control the outcomes and we don’t want to take over the run the place, any of it. So what do we do? It seems all we’re doing is destroying a whole generation of young men and women, physically, mentally and morally. We can’t even stop doing that.
I had been leaning towards leaving the military in order to travel abroad, but this story sealed the deal for me last week. It is abhorrent, but not incredibly surprising.
In the Army, we’re mandated to have quarterly Sexual Assault and Harassment Training, but only mandated to qualify on our rifles once a year. The average soldier spends 4x as much time being told not to rape as he does shooting his weapon. And yet when child rape is occurring within earshot of soldiers on an American FOB in Afghanistan, they’re told “Don’t impose your values!”
From Charles Napier to “Celebrate Diversity!” in nothing flat.
How about a few tactical nuclear weapons over the whole armpit of a country….I kid. Sort of
Oh for the days of a vigorous confident Western Civilization
When Hindu priests complained of the prohibition of Sati by the British authorities:
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
General Sir Charles James Napier, GCB
Our troops were there to protect the Afghan government when the last Christian Churches in the country were destroyed.
A culture that doesn’t defend its own values is not going to last long. Except for the westward expansion wars against the Native Americans and the Mexicans in the SW, America has never gone to war for resources and wealth. We always have gone to war to defend our values. If we aren’t going to defend our values in Afghanistan we should leave.
Id’ve probably shot him.
And yes, to be honest, my hypocrisy-o-meter has broken from overuse during the Obama administration. It is in the shop for repairs.
If another human being is suffering, or in pain, I fail to see how that can ever be allowed to continue on the grounds of cultural appeasement. The excuse is cowardly.
Can we say that the Bush administration is also culpable in turning a blind eye to this?
I don’t know. Can we? And even if we can, is it right to punish an American soldier for defending a child, now or any time?
That reminds me of a quotation:
“The Bible is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live – this lost world – means that we desert the people who need our greatest help. What if you come upon a big, burly man beating a tiny tot to death and plead with him to stop? Suppose he refuses? What does love mean now? Love means that I stop him in any way I can, including hitting him. To me this is not only necessary for humanitarian reasons: it is loyalty to Christ’s commands concerning Christian love in a fallen world. What about the little girl? If I desert her to the bully, I have deserted the true meaning of Christian love – responsibility to my neighbor.” – Francis Schaeffer
>types: deletes, types: deletes< what can I say, what can I say....
Of the many things that make me physically ill about our current culture, this one is near or at the top. All I can say is that our military is reaping the rewards of years of SJW indoctrination and leveling of culture to the utmost evil. God forgive us for being WORSE than them, because we buy into the complete bull pucky of multi-culturalism, diversity and “inclusion”. I cannot believe that our brave men and women serving over there are penalized for protecting the most vulnerable in our midst. Wait, yes, I can believe it, when our POTUS stands there blinking his Bambi eyelashes and shakes the Pope’s hand, while averring after the fact that he will allow the unborn to be slaughtered or left to die because of his profound hatred of life. I am so sad.
Well, I’d call this whole attempt to ignore this perfidy a disgrace, a collusion in depravity. Someone up in the chain of command must have decided on this. Who, and when? Certainly it’s policy by the Obama admin, but was it started under Bush?
@Jonsouth; this is a moral dilemma that is dealt with really well in the Horatio Hornblower series.
In other circles, it is sometimes referred to as “the prime directive.”
Why don’t you work at finding out who the top chain of command is that gave these orders, and the other commanders who follow them. If we had names we might be able to do something about it besides pissing.
Good for Malkin. She discovered something that has been well-known for years. Lest anyone want to place the blame squarely on Obama’s shoulders, here’s a NYT article from 2007 in which the article describes the work an anthropologist did for the military:
I was first informed of the depravity of the Bacha Bazi tradition by Men’s rights blogs. It’s no surprise that it’s taken this long for the story to gain traction and I expect it will fade away soon. Conservatives agree with feminists that women are forever and always, the real victims of everything. Boys are being raped by American allies. Well, women can’t drive in Saudia Arabia!
The burka and voting rights are of much greater concern than the boys forced to be child soldiers or to work dangerous manual labor.
So… just look away then? That feels unsatisfactory.
I have a family member who told me about this over three years ago. He told me there bases were right next to each other with only a fence separating them. They would off course at night be on guard duty and see soldiers bring a little boy into the camp. They would then hear the boy screaming through out the night.
He told me the same men they saw take the boy in and rap the boy they would have to go on patrol the next day. He said it took everything in him not to shoot the animals.
As far as I am concern the officers and politicians who are responsible for this policy should get a bullet through the head. They are no better than the men who are raping the boys because they are giving authority and by silence when they have all the power to stop it they are supporting it. If are troops are their to protect the local population and told not to I can’t think of anything more morally bankrupt.
As Cat points out, this has been known for a long time. I remember this article, in which an Afghani who can’t figure out how to impregnate his wife expresses disgust when informed of the proper method. The NYT article cited above was surprisingly clear-sighted, and I applaud them for their sympathetic treatment of the brave men who tried to stop the abuse.
Rot, rot, and more rot. It gets harder to bear every day.
I agree. In Hornblower, they didn’t always manage to look away. But it was still clear why, in the bigger picture, it was necessary to do so. I appreciated the sorts of moral dilemmas the books wrestled with; fact is, however unPC it is to say so, that you were dealing with civilized people attempting to deal with uncivilized people.
Hmmm? Yeah, I posted about this a month ago, but you never commented.
” A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, and a melon for shear delight”.
Persian proverb.
I’m not asking anyone to break CoC but what do men do with boys that wouldn’t be as disgusting, if not more, than what men and women do? I mean ‘rape’ is vaginal or anal penetration. With a boy, it can only be one way. Is that what is going on? Just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is enough.