The recent outrage over reports of systematic child rape by Afghan security forces may be justified, but sadly there is little novelty to the reports themselves. Even the Sunday New York Times article that brought the matter into public view cited a list of earlier dispatches addressing it: articles in the Times itself in 2002 and 2011, as well as a 2010 Frontline documentary, “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan,” that explored at length the pedophilic practice of bacha bazi—the keeping of boys by Pashtun men for sex. A 2013 Vice documentary, This Is What Winning Looks Like, also examined the issue, with a focus on how U.S. Marines were struggling to stop such exploitation by Afghan police commanders in Helmand Province, largely without success.
What did seem new about the Times report was its claim that soldiers and Marines had been told to look the other way when confronted with the rape of children more or less in their midst. In one of two harrowing cases discussed by the reporter, a Marine, Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr., told his father in a telephone conversation that he could hear the screams of the victims at night, two weeks before being shot to death in 2012 by one such victim in a so-called insider attack. The father is now suing the Marine Corps. In the second case, an Army Special Forces officer, Capt. Dan Quinn, was relieved of command after throwing to the ground a militia commander who had kept a local boy chained to his bed. Quinn has since left the Army, which is still pursuing disciplinary action against a second soldier involved in the incident, Sgt. First Class Charles Martland.
It is reasonable to question what on earth has happened to the moral compass of commanders who, upon hearing that one of their officers has used physical force against an Afghan commander who is raping young boys, chooses to discipline the officer—whose moral instincts, at least, seem beyond reproach. It is also reasonable to question whether or not these two cases prove the existence of an unspoken but consistent military policy of noninterference, as the Times article suggests.
The Pentagon responded by firmly rejecting that suggestion, and the commander of American troops in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell, released a statement on September 22 in which he claimed, “I personally have served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and am absolutely confident that no such theater policy has ever existed here, and certainly, no such policy has existed throughout my tenure as commander.”
There was, indeed, no such policy in 2009 and 2010 when I served in Afghanistan as a Marine. We received no guidance or training—official or otherwise—dealing with the matter. We were aware of the fact that Pashtuns often had sex with younger men, but never encountered the kidnapping and rape of local boys that others have reported, probably because we were working primarily with the Afghan National Army—an organization dominated by northerners and non-Pashtuns and, by Afghan standards, a more professional outfit than the local police units that became critical to the success of the U.S. drawdown beginning in 2011. Though the Afghan Army has its problems, including corruption and surely sexual assault as well, lost in the discussion this week is a fine but important distinction: The crisis of systematic child rape primarily involves Pashtuns who have joined the police or government-backed militias in the eastern and southern parts of the country during the period when Americans have been focused on their own departure.
Faced with the prevalence of bacha bazi and an absence of guidance from above, adviser units working with the police and militias largely had to make up their own minds about what to do. Ben Anderson, the journalist who made the 2013 Vice documentary, told me in an interview that what Lance Corporal Buckley said to his father about hearing the screams of victims at night was something he himself had experienced on roughly two-thirds of the patrol bases he had stayed on while reporting on the Afghan security forces. The Marines he followed in Helmand for This Is What Winning Looks Like are filmed making repeated efforts to deal with the problem after receiving news that three boys kept as sex slaves have been shot by the police. They report what they are dealing with to their chain of command, where the grim news is suppressed by midlevel commanders working to put a positive spin on the progress of the drawdown.
“If you are an ambitious officer you accentuate the positive and minimize the negative,” Anderson says of the disconnect he witnessed between the grim reality in Helmand, where the police were at least as feared by the locals as the Taliban, and rosy reports sent to Kabul and beyond.
Among the more disturbing aspects of the situation is the conclusion reportedly reached by at least some service members and commanders that, since what they were dealing with seemed to be a cultural issue, there was not only little they could do about it, but little they should do about it.
Michael Skerker, a professor in the Leadership, Ethics, and Law Department at the U.S. Naval Academy, pointed out the condescension behind such an assumption. “Is this really the local culture?” he said in an interview. “Are parents giving their children, selling their children, encouraging them to have sex with adults? Or is it criminal in Pashtun culture?”
Indeed, like tax evasion or drug use in the United States, there can be behavior that is both widespread and widely known to be wrong. The fact that the Pashtun-dominated Taliban have long used reports of rapes committed by government agents as a recruiting tool—indeed, among the elements of Mullah Omar’s rise to power was his reputation for taking violent action against those who kidnapped and raped children—indicates that Pashtun parents, like parents everywhere, disapprove of seeing their children raped.
Referring to the dilemmas that American advisers found themselves facing, Skerker said, “Afghanistan is where all the gruesome philosophers’ thought experiments are actually case studies.” While it would be both unreasonable and unrealistic for American commanders to expect their troops to be knights-errant of liberal democracy, going out into the land in search of wrongdoing with a general mandate to eliminate all evil, it is nonetheless unconscionable that commanders in at least some cases felt they were supposed to tolerate systematic child rape among the Afghans they were responsible for advising.
It is not only unconscionable—it is counterproductive, as every incident only strengthens the moral position of the Taliban. But actually defeating the Taliban, as opposed to departing Afghanistan as quickly as possible, hasn’t been a goal of the U.S. military or the Obama administration for years now. In the haste to get American troops out of the country, good news going up the chain of command has been smiled upon and bad news quietly deemphasized. A lot of evil has been ignored in the effort to wind down what the president once referred to as “the good war.”
Aaron MacLean is managing editor of the Washington Free Beacon.
