US Occupation Made Afghanistan Into a Paradise…for Child Rapists

There is a story doing the rounds along the American mainstream media circuit of how US soldiers in Afghanistan were told the pedophilic practice of “dancing boys” was culturally accepted in Afghanistan and to pay it no mind. Marine Times:

American troops were told to ignore the rape and abuse of children by Afghan security forces they were partnered with, according to a report released Thursday by the Pentagon’s inspector general.

Although the report found that there was no written guidance telling U.S. troops to ignore abuse allegations, cultural-awareness training for U.S. personnel deploying to Afghanistan identified child sexual abuse as a culturally accepted practice in Afghanistan.

Actually this is not news. The new part is that this has now been confirmed by the Inspector General of the Department of Defense. However, for years now many US veterans of the Afghan occupation have been telling this story. Once in country, they were told by superiors to turn a blind eye to US-backed Afghan troops, police and officials sexually abusing boys, and a number of them found themselves in trouble when they attempted to intervene regardless.

The US-sponsored police is especially famous for doing so:

Practically all of Uruzgan’s 370 local and national police checkpoints have bachas — some up to four — who are illegally recruited not just for sexual companionship but also to bear arms, multiple officials said.

Some policemen, they said, demand bachas like a perk of the job, refusing to join outposts where they are not available.

What most of these reports fail to spend any significant time on, however, is that, unlike the Americans, the Taliban had no tolerance for this practice and punished it by death:

Under the Taliban, bacha bazi was declared homosexual in nature, and therefore banned. The Taliban’s opposition to bacha bazi was that they considered it incompatible with Sharia Law, and outlawed the practice after coming to power in 1996. As with other homosexual activities, the charge carried the death penalty.

In fact even today, dancing boys are prone to seek refuge and revenge in the arms of the Taliban:

Horrifying abuse at checkpoints makes the boys, many unpaid and unregistered, hungry for revenge and easy prey for Taliban recruitment — often because there is no other escape from exploitative commanders.

Keep that in mind the next time you hear how the US has to keep ruling Afghanistan so that ‘girls may go to school’ and so on. The Taliban were cracking down on the practice until….Americans rolled into town, toppled the Taliban and allowed the rape of enslaved boys, sometimes as young as 10, to flourish again, lest they ruffle the feathers of their Quisling troops and cronies.

In this case the US is literally fighting on the side of boy rapists against those who would stop them.

Yes, the Taliban ran a harsh and oppressive regime (it would be a wonder if a regime that emerged from 15 years of war was a liberal one). But the American regime that replaced it somehow managed to be so cowardly and disgusting that it can not claim the moral high ground even over the medieval Taliban.