In Afghanistan, We're Looking The Other Way As Police, Tribal Leaders Commit Child Rape
So our troops are fighting and dying for child rapists in a warped fundamentalist theocracy. And we're protecting them? This is too much for my mind to comprehend (h/t Matt Osbourne):
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."
Baghlan province is in the northeast, but Afghans say pedophilia is most prevalent among Pashtun men in the south. The Pashtun are Afghanistan's most important tribe. For centuries, the nation's leaders have been Pashtun.
President Hamid Karzai is Pashtun, from a village near Kandahar, and he has six brothers. So the natural question arises: Has anyone in the Karzai family been bacha baz? Two Afghans with close connections to the Karzai family told me they know that at least one family member and perhaps two were bacha baz. Afraid of retribution, both declined to be identified and would not be more specific for publication.
As for Karzai, an American who worked in and around his palace in an official capacity for many months told me that homosexual behavior "was rampant" among "soldiers and guys on the security detail. They talked about boys all the time."
He added, "I didn't see Karzai with anyone. He was in his palace most of the time." He, too, declined to be identified.
In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called "dancing boys" a "widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape."
So, why are American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud pedophiles, certainly more per capita than any other place on Earth? And how did Afghanistan become the pedophilia capital of Asia?
Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.
"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."
Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team "how his wife could become pregnant," her report said. When that was explained, he "reacted with disgust" and asked, "How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?"
That helps explain why women are hidden away - and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. It's not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren't in love with their boys.
Addressing the loathsome mistreatment of Afghan women remains a primary goal for coalition governments, as it should be.
But what about the boys, thousands upon thousands of little boys who are victims of serial rape over many years, destroying their lives - and Afghan society.
"There's no issue more horrifying and more deserving of our attention than this," Cardinalli said. "I'm continually haunted by what I saw."
Let's not kid ourselves that this is some foreign disease, though. The fact is, whenever you add extreme religious fundamentalism and sexual repression, you get a toxic stew -- as members of extreme cults of all kinds, including many right here in the United States, can testify.
Did we all think "The Kite Runner" was fiction?
Welcome to the real world, Neo.
The people of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage." J.K. Galbraith
Will more Republicans vacation in Afghanistan now?
*
I've never seen change without a fire
"in a warped fundamentalist theocracy"
What warped fundamentalist theocracy are you talking about? 2012 USA USA USA???
Why fight to get rid of the Taliban when this is what replaces it.
Curiously, isn't the northeast part of Afghanistan where our good friends, the Northern Alliance, hail from? I must admit, there's a fine line to walk when another's culture offends ones own. Of course, in this case it involves children who, in any culture, are nowhere near able to give an enlightened consent for this little practice.
On the upside, we'll soon be paying for (if we're not already) the bank run by Karzai's brother which is about to go bust due to "bad loans."
progressive groups in Afghanistan, such as the feminist group RAWA, have been warning for years that the USA removed one cruel theocracy and put another one up in its place (the Northern Alliance), and as usual we didn't listen.
I've never seen change without a fire
There is also a journalist covering this topic here in the U.S. His name is Nick Bryant and he wrote a book titled "The Franklin Scandal" that furthers the coverage of a documentary done by the Discovery Channel in 1993.
The Discover Channel ultimately decided to shelve the already paid for documentary after being pressured, but you can watch it at the Google Video link here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=86673...
We have a lot of cleaning up to do in our own country, as well as keeping an eye on the human rights abuses committed in other countries.
Thanks Susie for covering this extremely important and unpopular topic.!!
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
After years of arguing with conservatives who want to just level the whole place, I'm just going to stop arguing. Cultural differences are one thing, but this is subhuman. Eff the people who do it, eff the people who know about it and do nothing, eff the entire people.
This is the same saying found in Kazenzakis novels about the Turkish empire, or in Gide or Ginzberg about Northern Africa. The same seems to hold true in other Mediterranean countries where girls are kept separate from boys, such as many Greek isles. Sad, even horrible, but not limited to Afghanistan.
Paul C
yeah, let's not forget all the church scandals out there.
In the past at least, this was pretty common throughout the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean.
has found another vacation spot besides the Dominican Republic.
I belong to no organized political party -- I am a Democrat.
--Will Rogers
In other news....
US subsidized Bank Bailouts in Afghanistan
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/...
Would the Tea Partiers support this?
It's big government, but it's for social engineering of foreigners, so it's probably considered a good thing.
Pederasty was the Greek term for it
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://ww...
"We also sent Lut: He said to his people: Do ye commit lewdness such as no people in creation (ever) committed before you? For ye practice your lusts on men in preference to women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds. And his people gave no answer but this: they said, "Drive them out of your city: these are indeed men who want to be clean and pure!"" (Surah 7:80-82)
"And (remember) Lut: behold, he said to his people: "Ye do commit lewdness, such as no people in Creation (ever) committed before you. Do ye indeed approach men, and cut off the highway? - and practise wickedness (even) in your councils?" But his people gave no answer but this: they said: "Bring us the Wrath of Allah if thou tellest the truth." (Surah 29:28-29).
And of course these were men on men, not men on boys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PK6QkZG_Y0
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Obama is doing a great job
how are we supposed to Blame Bush when you guys keep pointing out things that happen under Obama?
Still slightly better than McCain.
McCain Bill Enables US Citizen Imprisonment Without Trial
http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2010/0...
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
it happened under bush, too... and why should we stop pointing out terrible things that are ignored by the media and government just because of who's president?
of the quote which forms the body of this post? "For centuries" would be the correct answer. Now why, I ask, would anyone think this is either Obama's or Bush's fault? And if you do subscribe to that sort of "thinking" why don't you blame them for, say, hurricanes that happen on their respective watches?
Hasa Diga Eebowai
Are their lives actually ruined? Or do they simply grow up to be adult members of the population, perhaps taking boys for themselves? I'm thinking of ancient Greece, where it was considered perfectly normal for older men to have affairs with teenage boys, who then grew up to take the other role when they were old enough. In that society, women were also sequestered away in the home, with no outside social life
So what I'm wondering is: what happens to the boys? Obviously they don't die from these relationships. Are they ostracized, or do they have a separate place in the society as they grow up, or do they just take on the other role when they themselves are men?
There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby. - Tom Waits
grow up and violate boys.
Tried to reply to a comment above, but it came out down here. Why?
There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby. - Tom Waits
Cynthia McKinney grilled Donald Rumsfeld about child prostitution among the corporations, DynCorp, in particular who get our military contracts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px1t1-a9uxk
This is a GREAT Clip. She was a true representative of the American people. Hence she was attacked and election rigging took place against her. Here she is taking on the sex trade among defense contractors. Do your self a favor and see what a true example of representing us looks like.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Okay, SECOND TIME. I keep hitting the "reply" button for a comment, but my reply ends up at the bottom of the queue instead of as a reply to the comment.
WHAT GIVES?
There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby. - Tom Waits
the box next to "Disable Ajax comments" had a check in it. I unchecked it for you. It should work now.
To be fair to the Greeks, I think the chose boys who were somewhat sexually mature, but not legally mature in our laws. That would be roughly 13-18 years old.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
My point is that you can't always choose who you are in bed with. For some of these people it is the only sexual outlet that is offered to them, so they make it a custom out of it out in the hinterlands. We've fought against the Taliban, but who is to say what they do on this subject. They are the people who want to return to the times when there was little outside influence, to the times of strict separation, subjugation and deprivation of women. They're under the same pressures that caused this situation.
Yes, they are ruined in that they are forced into sexuality by those older than them. They have little choice in the matter because there is little value to children who have a high death rate in these countries. When they reach their teens, they are confirmed in their religion and accepted as men. And it is seen as right because it has been what many have suffered and feel is a right of manhood to do it to other when they reach manhood. This is similar to our perception that those who are abused as children have a higher propensity to become abusers when they grow up.
Yet, they would look at our trying to deny them the right to hire boy dancers as an infringement on their manhood and culture. Look at the trouble we have in trying to educate girls. Educating women makes women independent and inspires them to look for better conditions elsewhere.
Paul C
This behavior has been going on for centuries. There is no access to contraceptives, and, even if there was, pre-marital heterosexual sex is a big no go. These are some factors that lead to this.
BTW "bacha baz" was the first Farsi I learned there.
we are never going to 'change' the culture of other nations, especially those that are still living in the 19th century.
Let's also be clear that Bush/Cheney et al an now Obama is not sending our brave soldiers to Afghanistan to 'fight and die for a warped fundamentalist theocracy'. Nor, are we searching for OBL (where's McSame's damn map??).
We invaded Afghanistan and spent billions of tax dollars in order to secure rights to energy resources and pipelines, which will enrich the already greedy oil/gas and MIC corpora-fascists currently benefiting the most from the never-ending wars.
So, technically, we're all being Screwed!!!
"Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of Stupidity" - Frank Leahy
We push other countries BS down their throats the more they pick up new recruits.
We have become our own enemy for the sake of opening the doors to foreign countries jobs markets and to take their resources.
We are not buying foreign countries products. They are OUR products which Companies which were in our country are now partners with foreign nations.
We bailed out the banking empire and not they are setting up more jobs with the money they have in China.
What in the he.. is the matter with US.. We know these Global Monopolies do not give a d... and now the elected officials are showing us the same d... thing.
None
that from the start.
Remember Bush used the republican controlled court system to steal the election from the very start. It has been all down hill every since.
None
I am really done with the mess over there. I understand different cultures, but this is human rights, whether it is a boy or a girl who is abused. Let these people be swallowed by the earth. Not another one of our military people should give up their life to try to save this miserable country. Not another US boy or girl should grow up without a father or mother because they gave their life over there. Get out now.
They're children. I'm pretty tolerant about cultural and religious differences, but this I can't stomach. It's a form of abuse, assault, victimization, etc.
is alive and well, but I'm surprised to find it at Crooks and Liars. The rush to judgment is dizzying.
None of the pertinent questions have been asked here or in the article cited, except by Excelsior in the comments above -- what is the context? What are the boys' attitudes? What are the attitudes of others toward them? What happens to them when the affair is over? I suspect that ascribing this to a warped interpretation of Islam is missing a point -- it's just as easily a matter of grafting Islam onto an existing tradition, which is the kind of thing that happens repeatedly throughout history. Traditions have a way of sticking around, as witness most of the trappings of Christmas. (In that vein, the comment about "enlightened consent" is beside the point -- this is probably more a cultural assumption than an aberration, and our criteria don't necessarily apply.)
We're talking about an institution going back thousands of years in some areas that seems to have been fairly widespread in Indo-European cultures, but filtered through the lens of contemporary American society. Yes, here that kind of behavior would quite rightly be condemned -- it's not part of our cultural matrix. I'm not going to condemn it in Afghanistan until I have a much better understanding of what is at work there, which I'm not going to get from a horribly slanted article.
Up until a few of decades ago, a guy could totally beat the shit out of his wife here, rape her, and it was all good the next day.
Hell, I was in London living underneath a couple who practiced wife beating on a regular basis. My roommate and I called the old bill after we heard the missus being tossed around the place like a medicine ball, and after the PC went up to talk to the family, he came downstairs and told us to piss off about the beating stuff. The noise was another thing though. If we wanted to make a noise complaint...
BTW, Pam finally was battered to death by her loving husband, but it was in the context of cultural correctness.
Same with slavery, women not being able to vote, women owning property, not being allowed to work for a wage or a wage equal to that of men, queers being allowed the same rights as breeders...it's all cultural relativsm, and we should have just kept that shit on the cultural plate, so to speak. Oh wait. the equal wage and the queer thing...oh well, since it's been going on for a long time, we should just lie back an enjoy it, quit bitching about it. If there's a proper context, fucking little boys is AOK. It's been going on with priests in the Catholic church for ages...
me-oww!
Kudos Hunter. Cultural Imperialism is a thorny subject.
I am a liberal but the idea of cultural relativism is evil. Abusing children is wrong. I don't care if it's part of their culture. It's wrong! Either you support human rights or you do not. It's actually pretty simple no matter how one goes about rationalizing it away.
No, it's not ok to sa, "This is a part of their culture," and turn our heads the other way.
This is all a part of a culture, here and abroad, that allows men to brutalize women and children, in the cruelest ways possible.
It's not ok for grown people to have sex with children. Raping children or women is never ok and is never funny or to be tolerated as a "cultural" esthetic.
Some things are truly wrong. Consensual sex is not wrong. Preying on children who cannot decide or defend themselves is wrong not a part of "culture". It's just plain evil.
Maybe we can make NAMBLA part of the coalition to get the Afghan men to work with us and stop fighting.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows...
all this and more, but never forget the history, afghanistan had a secular socialist government, which the usa promptly attempted to overthrow; hence the soviet intervention, at the request of the legitimate government of the country.
we financed the mujahadeen, we caused the taliban to come to power, now the afghans reap the whirlwind.
this dancing boys deal was on PBS, or somewhere, a few weeks back.
all the "cultural colonialism" crap i read here is just that, crap. these kids are being raped, and we are only seeing what they wanted us to see, methinks the really sordid stuff much be must worse.
in our countries reflexive destruction of anything remotely socialist we have wrecked country after country, all in the name of the "free market".
not to mention that sharia is now the law of the land in afghanistan; thanks to our intervention which began in the 80's. whitewash it any way you want it, but there is no way that women and children will experience anything close to western standards of human rights. why do i see people apologizing for the real world effects of islam? oh, yeah, geez, i forgot, it's not really islam? yes it is, just like the catholic church sex scandals are really the catholic church. sad but true, this is what we are going to leave behind after 30 years of cia and u.s. military involvement in afghanistan.
...there are studies which suggest that the more sexually repressed a society is -- and when women are required to wear burqas which cover them completely from head to foot, I think it's safe to say that Afghanistan qualifies as extremely repressed -- the more likely it is that the people of that culture will express their sexuality in maladaptive or even abusive ways.
Never trust anyone who insists that patriotism requires you to blindfold yourself with the flag.
This comment is directed at the people that want to call this cultural relativism or who suggests that this practice is not that bad. Go and watch the documentary, I did. What's going on is rich men are buying poor boys from their parents. These children are owned sexual slaves and they are sometimes beaten and murdered when they don't do as their masters say. At one point in the documentary, two of the male tribal leaders were discussing one young boy (they forgot they were being taped) and the conversation that was recorded sounded like this boy had been gang raped. One young man was bought from his parents when he was 11 and he ran away the first chance he got. Last but not least, these boys are discarded when they are 18 which happens to be the age of consent for boys in Afghanistan. These boys are used and abused and know no other way of life and have no marketable skills and then are cast aside when they are considered too old for these men. This whole scenario is a game that only rich men can afford to play, and it is considered a status symbol for a man to own a boy. It's the rich preying on the poor and then beating, murdering, or discarding them at their leisure. That's wrong no matter how you look at it. Here's the link to the documentary if you have the stomach to watch it.
http://vimeo.com/11352212
People and cultures around the world should just be more American.
I'd much prefer to be damned for something I actually wrote.
I'm neither condoning nor condemning the "dancing boys" -- certainly not on the basis of sources that appear to be biased and incomplete. We read that "sometimes" boys are kidnapped or they "may be" gang raped. I'm not denying the possibility at all, but "sometimes" and "maybe" don't strike me as a very solid foundation for making judgments. Nor am I going to say that any sexual relationship involving a teenager is necessarily "abusive." Even age of consent laws allow for individual circumstances, and a significant number specifically allow for sex with a "minor" within certain age ranges if there is no abuse of authority or trust.
Let me state it plainly: My objections were to reporting that reeks of bias and gives every evidence of going for sensationalism at the expense of a complete picture, and to seemingly unconsidered reactions to those reports based on moral and cultural attitudes that probably don't fit the circumstances. I'm sure there are abuses -- there are in any human institution, and in this case we're talking about a society that has been systematically trashed. I'm not arrogant enough to jump in with my own moral preconceptions and demand that things be fixed to suit me until I'm damned sure that I'm right and that "fixing" them will actually do some good. The West has an abysmal record in that regard.
I think that's rather different than accusing the U.S. Army of subsidizing "child rapists."
You can dismiss criticisms of the documentary with a swipe of the hand and say that cultural imperialism means nothing. But you obviously haven't lived in a third world country..., well, even if you had then you were likely on an expat or religious organization package. And, even if not that, you still failed to deal with your middle class American conditioned responses and expectations. You are blindsided by that conditioning and so fail to critically assess information. In addition, your argument leaves nothing to deal with translation issues affecting the message, and you also use a lot of cited non-facts to bolster your excitement.
This reminds me of dolphin slaughter documentary hysteria. To be certain, of course such things are tragic. But, when the noise of denouncement comes from a country that slaughters and traumatizes innocent humans everyday in its war for peace and then writes it off as collateral damage, that country loses its moral authority. Clean your own house first.
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