"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.”
"“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.”
The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.
After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military."
I don’t even know what to say. It sounds unbelievable.
If you want to be depressed check out the Vice documentary This is What Winning Looks Like. It’s one thing to read books or articles on how screwed up everything is over there, but to see it up close is just surreal. Not just the pedo stuff, but the corruption, drug abuse, the laughable lack of professionalism, and the despair of the locals who are just stuck. Not to mention American service members who are at their wit’s end.
For the dancing boys thing in particular, check this segment out. It’ll make your skin crawl.
You know you messed up somewhere when the Taliban looks preferable.
The cultural practice is known as Bacha bazi(“Playing with boys”). Officially illegal, but, well you know a lot of things are technically illegal but not if the criminal is sufficiently powerful.
Also take a look at the documentary, “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan” (what purports to be the full length video may be found here. as well as the Vice News documentary, “This Is What Winning Looks Like,” on the fighting in Helmand Province. The Nov. 2012 segment of the Vice Media doc deals with “Chai Boys”, another term for these sex slaves. From the article attached to the video:
And when you need that ANA/ANP commander and his troops if you want to be able to: claim that the area is secure, send your troops somewhere else, and secure your promotion to O-5… Plus, you’re pretty sure that the next ANA/ANP guy up is just going to do the same thing…well, what’s a little boy-raping when compared to that lofty goal?
(How do you chant, “We Are!!! Hel! Mand!!!” in Pashto/Dari anyway?)
Edit: Ninja’d by marshmallow in part. I knew I shouldn’t have taken the time for the Penn State crack. Still, go watch both documentaries.
It is sickening. I first learned about it when I read the novel The Kite Runner and went looking for more info, but I feel like I’d heard it before, as a child or a teen, in whispers. I mean, people talked about Afghani men in my circles (Indian circles), just not loudly.
I know you put this in the Pit, and that is the place for it, but the whole thing is so horrible and horrifying I don’t even think the Pit can do it justice.
We’re exiting the country. Sad as it may seem, we are not there to be the internal police force. Not any more.
This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you “nation build”. We can’t force them into a Jeffersonian Democracy, nor can we force them to abandon long-standing cultural practices. And this is why I’d like us to get the fuck out of that hell hole, once and for all. 100%. Get every last US military person out. We did what we thought we had to do, so let’s not dirty our hands by propping up a corrupt government.
Clarification: this is what happens when you do nation building on the cheap (Which is pretty much all that we can/will do). The Brits stopped quite a few long-standing cultural practices, as have lots other imperial powers over the centuries. Not too many widows jumping onto funeral pyres in India these days. I suspect we could stamp out the practice in a few years with a consistent policy of public castration, dispossession and exile.
Not that I’m advocating such a policy; just pointing out that it could be done, and in fact is done by the kind of people that are serious about empire-building.
Read this unclassified sociological report produced by the US government, tons of good info.
Short version they have almost no access to women, women are kept cloistered until married off which requires $$$ from her husband. The sex acts are not considered homosexual or pedophilia, and they will repudiate that label strongly, it is almost like situational homosexuality like in a prison. We’re not dealing with an American concept of sexuality here.
If the last woman a man had any kind of interaction with was his mom who he last saw at age 7, were told women are “unclean” and he doesn’t have a chance of interacting with one until he builds up a huge marriage dowry to “buy” her from her father sight unseen I imagine some fucked up sexuality might emerge.
Ok I was not referring to consensual relationships between adult men as fucked up sexuality, but the forced kidnapping and rape of underage and of age teen boys as fucked up sexuality. Before someone attacks me. The report pertains to both and I have a five year old on my back begging me to play.
It doesn’t sound unbelievable to many of us. Try to remember this is the same government and military that hasn’t been exactly forthcoming in prosecuting the rapes of its OWN soldiers by their fellow soldiers. While the problem of adult men raping adolescents is disgusting, to be honest, the only thing that surprises me is that so many Americans and other Westerns are shocked to discover this happens. War is hell and religious police states aren’t much better. Did they honestly think there weren’t going to be a ton of social problems in that region of the world?
Does anyone know if the Taliban made any effort to stamp out this practice when they were in power? I think this is where radical zealots get some of their support: from being seen as the only people who can put an end to certain deeply ingrained forms of brutality. For example, the Chinese Communists ended foot-binding.
Nor is this “cultural”. Anymore than rapes and pedophilla are cultural in the US. Its just one of the symptoms of society breakdown, violence, especially sexual violence is visited upon the helpless.
The “cultural” explanation is just the US Governments attempts to justify propping up such people.
I had never heard of this practice before. Morning Joe on MSNBC is calling for heads to roll, but the story doesn’t seem to be gaining a lot of traction, that I have seen.
I just can’t understand being told to look the other way. This morning I heard that you can tell which boys are being abused by the look of their fingernails.
I’m a little confused by what authority the US military has here. My uninformed understanding is that we’re still in Afghanistan at the pleasure of the Afghan government. The military bases aren’t “US soil” or anything and we don’t have any authority to arrest or prosecute people who aren’t US military or terrorists/insurgents/etc.
I guess what I’m asking is exactly what our options are/were to do anything about this? A soldier says he witnessed it and was told to stand down by his superiors but did his superiors have another option that didn’t violate Afghan sovereignty? Are people saying that we should have just violated that sovereignty anyway?
I’m not defending anyone – I legitimately don’t know what the full situation was or what anyone’s options were.
