If You Replace Devils with Devils, You Get Hell on Earth

Last updated on: September 21, 2015 at 10:10 am by Tony Rossi

If You Replace Devils with Devils, You Get Hell on Earth 2015-09-21T10:10:10-05:00 Tony Rossi

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I generally use this space to share stories of people who light a candle rather than curse the darkness, but today I’m highlighting a level of darkness that’s screaming for some light. This horrific story was revealed in a New York Times article by Joseph Goldstein, with the headline: U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies.

Here is the article’s opening:

KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“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,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “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.”

The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.

After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.

Read the rest. It gets worse. Captain Quinn sounds like he deserves a medal for standing up for the voiceless and powerless victims he encountered. That should, after all, be part of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. It doesn’t make sense to replace the Taliban with other leaders who are just as bad or even worse in some ways. If you replace devils with devils, you just wind up with hell on earth.

Reporter Goldstein should be applauded for bringing this story to light so the American media and the American people can pressure our government and military to change their way of doing business with the Afghans. The village elders and average citizens whose children are being abused strongly oppose what’s going on, so their principles should carry serious weight.

No doubt there aren’t any easy solutions here, but the United States should not be complicit in enabling or ignoring the rape of children. That much is clear.

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