aNewDomain — By any objective standard, Sunday’s story about American military policy on bases in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan is so shocking that it ought to blow everything else, Donald Trump, the Pope’s visit, everything, off the front pages and top-of-the-hour broadcast ledes.
This is a story that points the finger at imperialist America’s sainted military class. But even the fact that it appeared in a prominent position in The New York Times doesn’t appear to be enough to save it from the, “Hey, do you remember that piece about …” file.
“Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed (Afghan government, not Taliban) 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,” Joseph Goldstein reported September 20th.
More:
The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias 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 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.”
Official U.S. policy is to look the other way when rapists sodomize helpless young boys.
Even when they do it on U.S. military bases.
And when a man of integrity like Captain Quinn intervenes, as when he assaulted a commander “who abducted [a] boy and forced him to become a sex slave, chained to his bed” and beat the child’s mother when she asked for his return, he is drummed out of the army.
This is the face of the U.S. military in its Afghan and Iraqi vassal states: looting tens of millions of dollars, feeding a culture of graft and corruption, and enabling serial child rape by serial child rapists.
“Thank you for your service?”
No thanks.
For aNewDomain, I’m Ted Rall.
