After years of looking away and maintaining silence over the rampant pedophilia within Afghan security forces, the US State Department has issued a statement over recent revelations made over the Afghan custom of ‘Bacha Bazi’. The traditional response of the US government over such allegations has been either denial or maintaining that they have taken up the matter with the relevant Afghan authorities.
We call on Afghan authorities, including the Attorney General’s Office, to take decisive action on deeply troubling reports of sexual abuse in Logar schools. Sexual violence and practices like bacha bazi have no place in any society. AGW
— State_SCA (@State_SCA) December 3, 2019
It was recently reported in the media that the Afghan government has arrested two human rights activists after they exposed a pedophile ring in the country’s schools in Logar province. It is reported that as many as 165 boys were raped in just three schools. They were raped by their teachers, local authorities and even older boys at the school. If all the six schools are taken together, then the number may be in excess of 500.
Pedophilia is extremely normalized in Afghan culture. The culture of Afghanistan is precisely what one would call ‘rape culture’. In the custom of ‘Bacha Bazi’, which is extremely common, little boys and adolescents would often be forced to dress in feminine attire and made to dance in front of the men before being raped. President Ashraf Ghani had vowed in 2015 to crack down on the practice but despite his statement, Bacha Bazi is still rampant and prosecution of pedophiles is rare.
As the arrest of the human rights activist demonstrates, there’s an extreme lack of willingness on part of the Afghan government to take any serious action on the matter. The US State Department’s response comes after the Assistant Secretary of State announced last month that the Trump administration was closely monitoring the situation.
Heartbroken and sickened by story of teachers raping over 150 boys (500+ allegations) as young as 14, & resulting murders of victims. U.S. is closely following and greatly concerned. We call on the Afghan gov to take action to protect survivors and bring perpetrators to justice. https://t.co/15YiYJYsJn
— Assistant Secretary Robert A. Destro (@DRL_AS) November 14, 2019
The conduct of the Trump administration on the matter appears to be significantly different from that of its predecessor. There’s sufficient evidence that indicates that the Obama administration was perfectly aware of the ghastly practice that was rampant even in the Afghan Security forces. It was reported in 2015 by the New York Times that US Soldiers were told by their commanders to look away even as their allies raped children in front of them. There have also been speculations that Bacha Bazi even led to the murder of one US soldier.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the father of the deceased soldier, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr., recalled his son as saying. He continued, “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.” “As far as the young boys are concerned, the Marines are allowing it to happen and so they’re guilty by association,” he stated. “They don’t know our Marines are sick to their stomachs.”
The deceased Marine’s father believes that Bacha Bazi had played a critical role in his son’s death. Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. was killed at a checkpoint where he was stationed with a pedophile commander who had a harem of bacha bazi boys. The Marine had complained about that commander and was killed, along with two other Marines, by one of the pedophile’s boys.
The American Military has also forced soldiers to retire for refusing to look away from the pedophilia in military bases. Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed Afghan militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave, told NYT in 2015, “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. 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.” Quinn’s career in the US military was ruined because he thrashed a pedophile.
In a government report released in January 2018, it was revealed that on 5,753 occasions from 2010 to 2016, the United States military asked to review Afghan military units to see if there were any instances of “gross human rights abuses.” It did not happen even once. “DOD’s continuing to provide assistance to units for which the department has credible information of a gross violation of human rights undermines efforts by U.S. government officials to engage with the Afghan government on the importance of respect for human rights and rule of law,” the report said.
“Departments of Defense and State only began efforts to address this issue after it was raised by The New York Times (2015 report),” John F. Sopko, the special inspector general, said. “And even after that story, the sufficiency of policies they’ve put in place and the resources they’ve committed seem questionable. When Congress passed the Leahy laws they prioritized the issue of gross human rights violations. As our report clearly shows, both agencies failed to live up to that task.”
Quite clearly, the US Government chose to look away from the rampant pedophilia among its allies. While the USA keeps lecturing everyone else about human rights, they are themselves extremely willing to cooperate with pedophiles to achieve strategic geopolitical objectives. While it’s true that the blame for it does not lie with the American soldiers or their government, it does reveal the farcical nature of the West’s supposed crusade for human rights. The conduct of the US government reveals that human rights are merely a convenient excuse for the West to pursue its geostrategic objective with the means of its military.
The Democrats in the US have been lecturing India a lot about human rights following the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu & Kashmir. However, they were conspicuously silent when the US government was collaborating with pedophiles during Barack Obama’s presidency. They didn’t have much to say either when the US was funding terrorists in the Middle East.
The Western media, too, have lad lots to say about rising intolerance in India since Narendra Modi came to power. However, they did not subject the US government to even a fraction of the scrutiny for refusing to take any actions against Bacha Bazi. Like the political establishment, the media too remained silent when the US government was busy funding terrorists in Syria.
It’s not surprising considering the fact that the US mainstream media serves as the propaganda wing of the US military-industrial complex and the deep state. Until recently, the ‘deep state’ was considered a conspiracy theory but in recent times, since Donald Trump came to power, various intellectuals have asserted that the Deep State is actually very honourable because they want to enforce a coup against a democratically elected President the intellectuals don’t like.
The silence of the US over Bacha Bazi in Afghanistan also shows that the current clamour against China for the latter’s human rights violation in Hong Kong and Xinjiang is one giant joke. The real concern here isn’t human rights, the actual concern is that China is threatening to undermine the global hegemony of the United States. As we, at OpIndia, had said as far back in August 2018, China will not ever be made to regret its gross treatment of Uyghur Muslims.
The only reason we see the political establishment of the United States screaming about human rights violations in China is that the latter poses a serious threat to the current global world order that is designed to serve the West. If China allied itself with the West, then the latter would have been more than willing to ignore the human rights violations committed by the Chinese regime. They forced American soldiers to quit when they protested against the institutionalized pedophilia. The United States is by no means morally superior to the brutal Chinese regime.
Thus, the clowns in the Indian ‘intellectual fraternity’ who are ever more willing to fellate the US government and are often found claiming that ‘rising intolerance’ in India could affect India’s standing in the international scene are either blithering idiots, utterly naive or in the pockets of the American Establishment. The fact of the matter is, India is vital to US interests at the moment and regardless of whatever picture the ‘intellectuals’ may try to paint of the Modi Government, India’s stature would continue to rise provided there is domestic political stability. The US establishment was willing to ignore rampant pedophilia among its Afghan allies, they will be more than willing to cooperate with India, the only world power that can legitimately lay claim to moral superiority.
