U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Afghan Allies’ Sexual Abuse of Boys

Dan Quinn is a former Special Forces captain who was relieved of his command and pulled from Afghanistan after he fought an Afghan militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Too often throughout its history America has looked the other way when it comes to human rights abuses perpetrated by foreign "allies."  Worse yet, at times American soldiers have committed such abuses against enemies they deem inferior and/or less than human - think of Vietnam and the My Lai  massacre and more recently the atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.   But back to the issue of looking the other way when it comes to abuses by allies.  In Afghanistan, Islam is the predominant religion, but despite this fact and the dim view of homosexuality by Islamic clerics, many Afghan military commanders and local war lords engage in bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” often with brutal effect on the boys they victimize.   It is yet another example of America being anything but "exceptional."   A piece in the New York Times looks at the complicity of American military commanders in the brutality and the possibly deadly consequences faced by soldiers who did not remain quiet.  Here are highlights:

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.”

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.

“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 pedophilia 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.

[T]he 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.

The American policy of nonintervention was intended to maintain good relations with the Afghan police and militia units the United States has trained to fight the Taliban. It also reflected a reluctance to impose cultural values in a country where pederasty is rife, particularly among powerful men, for whom being surrounded by young teenagers can be a mark of social status. 

But the American policy of treating pedophilia as a cultural issue has often alienated the villages whose children were being preyed upon. The pitfalls of the policy emerged clearly as American Special Forces soldiers began to form Afghan Local Police militias to hold villages that American forces had retaken from the Taliban in 2010 and 2011.

By the summer of 2011, Captain Quinn and Sergeant Martland, both Green Berets on their second tour in northern Kunduz Province, began to receive dire complaints about the Afghan Local Police units they were training and supporting.

[A]nother commander absconded with his men’s wages. Mr. Quinn said he later heard the commander had spent the money on dancing boys. Another commander murdered his 12-year-old daughter in a so-called “honor killing” for having kissed a boy. “There were no repercussions,” Mr. Quinn recalled.

In September 2011, an Afghan woman, visibly bruised, showed up at an American base with her son, who was limping. One of the Afghan police commanders in the area, Abdul Rahman, had abducted the boy and forced him to become a sex slave, chained to his bed, the woman explained. When she sought her son’s return, she herself was beaten. Her son had eventually been released, but she was afraid it would happen again, she told the Americans on the base.

She explained that because “her son was such a good-looking kid, he was a status symbol” local commanders coveted . . . . Captain Quinn summoned Abdul Rahman and confronted him about what he had done. The police commander acknowledged that it was true, but brushed it off. When the American officer began to lecture about “how you are held to a higher standard if you are working with U.S. forces, and people expect more of you,” the commander began to laugh.

“I picked him up and threw him onto the ground,” Mr. Quinn said. Sergeant Martland joined in, he said. “I did this to make sure the message was understood that if he went back to the boy, that it was not going to be tolerated,” Mr. Quinn recalled.

Sergeant Martland, who received a Bronze Star for valor for his actions during a Taliban ambush, wrote in a letter to the Army this year that he and Mr. Quinn “felt that morally we could no longer stand by and allow our A.L.P. to commit atrocities,” referring to the Afghan Local Police. 

The father of Lance Corporal Buckley believes the policy of looking away from sexual abuse was a factor in his son’s death, and he has filed a lawsuit to press the Marine Corps for more information about it.

Lance Corporal Buckley and two other Marines were killed in 2012 by one of a large entourage of boys living at their base with an Afghan police commander named Sarwar Jan.

Lance Corporal Buckley had noticed that a large entourage of “tea boys” — domestic servants who are sometimes pressed into sexual slavery — had arrived with Mr. Jan and moved into the same barracks, one floor below the Marines. He told his father about it during his final call home.

Word of Mr. Jan’s new position also reached the Marine officers who had gotten him arrested in 2010. One of them, Maj. Jason Brezler, dashed out an email to Marine officers at F.O.B. Delhi, warning them about Mr. Jan and attaching a dossier about him.

The warning was never heeded. About two weeks later, one of the older boys with Mr. Jan — around 17 years old — grabbed a rifle and killed Lance Corporal Buckley and the other Marines.

Lance Corporal Buckley’s father still agonizes about whether the killing occurred because of the sexual abuse by an American ally. “As far as the young boys are concerned, the Marines are allowing it to happen and so they’re guilty by association,” Mr. Buckley said. “They don’t know our Marines are sick to their stomachs.”

The one American service member who was punished in the investigation that followed was Major Brezler, who had sent the email warning about Mr. Jan, his lawyers said. In one of Major Brezler’s hearings, Marine Corps lawyers warned that information about the police commander’s penchant for abusing boys might be classified. The Marine Corps has initiated proceedings to discharge Major Brezler.

I  have no problem with gay sex among consenting adults. But sexual abuse and worse - be it against boys or girls - is simply immoral and NOT something America should be condoning by its inaction.  Afghanistan has been a Hell hole for millennia and, as this story shows, little has changed.  Bush/Cheney embroiled the nation in an non-winable war and set the stage for such horrors.  Action against members of the military who did not remain silent or turn a blind eye needs to cease and instead be directed at their superiors who used supposed expediency to allow evil.    By teaming up with monsters, America has often defeated its own purposes. 

Iran's Secret World of Sex

Remember how former Iranian President and utter nut case Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that there were no gays in Iran?  Well, a new study shows just how out in fantasy land Ahmadinejad was - 17% of the Iranians interviewed sad that they were gay.  Not only, that sex is much more prevalent among unmarried heterosexuals than the mullahs (who bear a bizarre resemblance to the Catholic Church hierarchy when it comes to being obsessed with policing the sex lives of others) want to admit.   Note how clerics are suspected of being the most common users of "sigheh," i.e., temporary marriage, to cover their adulterous affairs.  It seems whether it is the Catholic clergy of Islamic mullahs, no one is more engaged in hypocrisy than the "holy men."    The Economist has details: 

IT IS the last thing Iran’s religious rulers want to talk about, but they may just have to. An official report has documented the nation’s worst-kept secret: sex of every kind is taking place outside the marital bed in the Islamic Republic. Something, in the ruling ayatollahs’ view, must be done.

An 82-page document recently issued by Iran’s parliamentary research department is stark in its findings. Not only are young adults sexually active, with 80% of unmarried females having boyfriends, but secondary-school pupils are, too. Illicit unions are not just between girls and boys; 17% of the 142,000 students who were surveyed said that they were homosexual.

In Tehran, the capital, long known for its underground sex scene, chastity is plainly becoming less common. The scope and pace of change are challenging the government and posing a headache for the clerics who dispense guidance at Friday prayers.

The report is also a rare official admission of the unspoken accord in Iran: people can do what they want so long as it takes place behind closed doors. Parliament’s researchers, on this occasion, were allowed to say the unsayable.

Their suggestion for stopping unsanctioned sex is remarkably liberal. Instead of seeking to cool the loins of the youngsters altogether, they should be allowed publicly to register their union by using sigheh, an ancient practice in Shia Islam that lets people marry temporarily.

Clerics themselves have long been suspected of being among its biggest beneficiaries, sometimes when they are on extended holy retreats in ancient religious cities such as Qom.

Iran’s media, always wary of being shut down, have played safe by ignoring the report. So have members of parliament. In most official circles, sex in Iran is still too hot to talk about.

Historically, Iran - or Persia as it has been known through most of history - was an advanced culture, something that continued under the Shah.  That all ended when the Islamic extremists overthrew the Shah and brought in a reign of terror that either killed or drove into exile some of the country's best and brightest.  If one wants a glimpse of what America would be under Christofascist rule, Iran offers a good example.  Fundamentalist religion and knowledge/modernity and personal freedoms are mutually exclusive.   It really is that simple.

Pakistan: HomophobiscYet Addicted to Gay Sex and Pornography

Just as in the homophobic and supposedly "family values" Bible Belt where Internet porn use is off the charts, so too in Islamic Pakistan it seems that gay sex and pornography are likewise rampant.  The hypocrisy in both instances is, of course, exquisite.   The lesson is that the more a social or faith group feigns religiosity and would be piety, the  more likely it is that it's all a crock of bullshit when one sees what happens behind closed doors.  The Atlantic looks at the gay sex that some claim is rampant in Pakistan.  Here are story excerpts:

Pakistan is one of the most homophobic countries in the world. Yet gay sex is apparently prevalent in the country, which is home to 183 million people, some 97% of whom are Muslim. 

As the BBC's Mobeen Azhar reports in a fascinating investigation, the combination of the prevalence of gay mobile apps like Grindr and Scruff, plus the onus of arranged marriage, has made the Pakistani city of Karachi — the nation's biggest city, at nearly 24 million people — a hotbed of gay sex, even if actually maintaining a gay lifestyle is still incredibly difficult.

"[S]ome say the country is a great place to be gay — even describing the port city of Karachi as 'a gay man's paradise," Azhar writes.

Gay rights don't exist there, being openly gay is still looked down upon, gay relationships are hard to come by, and Karachi pretty much fails on every metric of gay life except for one: man-on-man sex. Karachi is home to a lot of it. 

Like any other country in the world (despite Iran's claims to the contrary), Pakistan has a homosexual population. Earlier this summer, for example, the Pew Research Center found that Pakistan was simultaneously one of the most intolerant countries in the world for gay people while at the same time being one of the world leaders in searching for gay porn. "As of this writing, Pakistan is by volume the world leader for Google searches of the terms 'shemale sex,' 'teen anal sex,' and 'man fucking man,'" Mother Jones's Alex Park wrote.

But despite all this gay sex, life for gay people is still pretty awful in Karachi. That's because gay people, like straight people, crave relationships. And that's still not possible in Pakistan. Many of the men engaging in gay sex acts, Azhar explains, are married. "Sex between men will be overlooked as long as no-one feels that tradition or religion are being challenged. At the end of it all, everyone gets married to a member of the opposite sex and nothing is spoken about," a local told Azhar. 

So gay relationships become an anomaly. Azhar uses the word "occasional." And its led to plots like what's currently going in China—gay men and lesbians "marrying" each other out of convenience.

Actually, Karachi doesn't sound too different from the Hampton Roads area of Virginia.  Go on craigslist or any gay hook up site and you will find countless married men looking for quick nearly anonymous gay sex. 

Afghanistan: “This Is What Winning Looks Like” - Child Rape

I make no secret that I view America's venture into Iraq and Afghanistan as a fool's errand that was launched by a cretin in the White House and a megalomania consumed monster at Blair House.  The result has been thousands of Americans killed and many times more seriously wounded, some horrifically, and the squandering of billions and billions of dollars.  And what has our "nation building" created?  Something very ugly and as hypocrisy filled as the world of the "godly Christian" Christofascists and the Catholic Church hierarchy only this nightmare operates under Islam.  Besides the rampant corruption and pilfering of American funds there is the rape and trafficking in children by those American taxpayers are supporting financially.  A new documentary, “This Is What Winning Looks Like,” provides a picture of the horrors done by our "Afghan allies."  Here is a sampling via the American Conservative: 

In December 2012, Maj. Bill Steuber heard that three boys had been shot dead while fleeing the Afghan police headquarters. A fourth was shot point blank in the knee as punishment for trying to escape.

Steuber, a U.S. Marine in charge of the police advisory team in Sangin district, Helmand province, marched into the office of Qhattab Khan, the assistant district chief of police. Journalist Ben Anderson filmed the exchange for the new stomach-churning documentary, “This Is What Winning Looks Like.”

“Why was there a boy on that police base?” Steuber asks Khan, “What did that commander say to you?”  There’s sadness and anger in Steuber’s voice, because he already knows the answer: police commanders routinely abduct young boys to serve as “chai boys,” house servants who are also kept as sex slaves.

This extent of child rape in Afghanistan is hard to measure, but it’s a practice widely attested by journalists, human rights investigators, NATO soldiers, and Afghans themselves. As the White House considers how to wind down the war in Afghanistan, it’s worth reflecting on one of the saddest, most sordid of aspects of that sad and sordid war.

In 2009 the Defense Department was concerned that NATO soldiers were bewildered and outraged by the sexual practices of Afghan civilians and soldiers: seeing old men trying to fondle young boys, being shown cell phone pictures of children by their Afghan counterparts. The military commissioned an anthropological study, “Pashtun Sexuality.” In 2010 the San Fransisco Chronicle reported on the study’s findings:

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means “boy player.” The men like to boast about it.

“Having a boy has become a custom for us,” Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. “Whoever wants to show off should have a boy.”

The authors of “Pashtun Sexuality” venture that the practice of bacha baazi is a function of a culture of extreme fear of female sexuality. The Chronicle article cites a 29-year-old who told a reporter, “How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face?…We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful.”

The State Department has called bacha baazi a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.” For instance, one military intelligence reservist related a story about an Afghan colonel who stood before a judge after he hurt a chai boy by violently raping him: “His defense was, ‘Honestly, who hasn’t raped a chai boy? Ha ha ha.’ The judge responds, ‘You’re right. Case dismissed.’”

Cracking down on this practice is nearly impossible, as the main culprits are often the very law enforcement and military personnel that the U.S. works alongside.

Steuber tells the camera later, “working with child molesters, working with people who are robbing people, murdering them. It wears on you after a while.”

Khan seems considerably less concerned.  “If they don’t f–k the asses of those boys, what should they f–k?” he asks at one point. “The p—–s of their own grandmothers? Their asses were used before, and now they want to get what they are owed.”

Yep, this is what American taxpayers are financially underwriting.  We need to leave Afghanistan NOW.