Ignoring Child Abuse in Afghanistan

More often than not things like this are due to the idiotic civilian leadership, not the military itself. Here is Eric Metaxas writing at Breakpoint:

We sent our troops to fight for this?

Some of our purported allies in Afghanistan abuse young boys. And the U.S. military wants to protect them. Not the boys. Our so-called allies.

Last autumn, Marine Corps Major Jason C. Brezler got into trouble for sending classified email via an unclassified email server. But the principle source of his trouble had nothing to do with email servers or even classified documents—it was the subject of those emails: child sexual abuse by our so-called “allies” in Afghanistan.

A year ago, I told you about a disturbing story in the New York Times whose headline read, “U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies.” BreakPoint listeners learned about the ancient Central Asian phenomenon known as “bacha bazi,” which means “boy play.” The form of sexual abuse was the subject of the 2010 PBS documentary, “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan.”

As I noted, “since the early 20th century there have been several attempts to outlaw the practice, but with one notable exception, these have met with limited success. The exception was the Islamist Taliban, which made the practice punishable by death. Their success in eradicating the practice was part of the reason that ordinary Afghans supported, at least initially, the Taliban’s coming to power.”

The ouster of the Taliban meant open season on young boys, which is horrendous enough. But making matters even worse, the United States, as the Times reported, is turning a blind eye to this abuse out of fear of offending our “allies.”

Which brings me back to Major Brezler. According to the Washington Post, Brezler was “asked by Marine colleagues to submit all the information he had about an influential Afghan police chief suspected of abusing children.”

Read more: Breakpoint

Image credit: www.breakpoint.com.