Photo by Paul Avallone, former Green Beret and author of Tattoo Zoo: a Novel of the Afghan War
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Why did we do it? Why did we send and spend so many precious lives and billions dollars for a nation of pedophiles and child rapists? And why do we tolerate our own leaders, military and civilian, who have known all about it all along and done nothing but condone and cover it up?
The rampant pederasty of Afghans was already in the media back in 2008. The late Joel Brinkley reported on it five years ago; the murder of three Marines in 2012 was tied in with the practice on their own base; the Army has ruined careers of two Special Forces who beat up an abuser, an Afghan militia commander who kept a little boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. These and are other barbarous practices commonplace in Afghan culture -- the "marriage" of little girls, the torture of animals, etc. -- have been subject to examination in Pentagon studies of "murder inside the wire," with our own own good people being told -- ordered -- essentially to grin and bear it.
The stain is forever. And now this from the New York Times:
KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”
And their culture is Islamic.
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 policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militia to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.
Read the rest here.