Afghan Child Rape: Not A U.S. Priority But Should Be

By Steve Hynd

Joshua Foust has a post today on the problem child-rape by Afghan security forces creates for the U.S. and its allies as they desperately try to stand up some form of legitimate indigenous security structure.

The horrifying scourge of child exploitation, both male and female, is a gut-wrenching refrain on this blog (see here, for example, or here, or here, or here).

Several months ago, reports surfaced in Kandahar that Canadian troops were so disturbed by seeing rampant child abuse they had to enter counseling. Now directives have been issued, ordering Canadian troops to �stop or report� instances of child-rape (the story limited the discussion to boys, but I think reporting the rape of little girls is implicit). While it would be one thing to witness this kind of thing out in the boonies, the incidents that inspired this new directive apparently took places on Kandahar Air Field itself. On at least two separate occasions, people witnessed little boys, sometimes dressed up in whigs and makeup, being escorted into the tents of Afghan interpreters and soldiers.

I'd seen the same report and asked a couple of journalists who had been to Afghanistan in the past couple of years how U.S. policy worked out on this. All three said that while policy was in general to "stop or report" any crimes, obviously including child-rape without being explicit about it, in practise U.S. forces looked the other way. Someone in the A-league of reporters should be asking hard questions at the White House and Pentagon, because as long as this story is only in the Canadian press and about Canadian soldiers' complicity by inaction, cynically, it will be a non-story South of the border.

Joshua continues:

What�s interesting about Afghanistan is the prevalence of child rape among the U.S.-funded Afghan National Security Forces...

It�s no small matter. In the hagiography of Mullah Omar, he swept through Kandahar, and established the Taliban as a legitimate force in Afghanistan, by attacking the leftover mujahidin commanders raping and pillaging the city. He lynched one commander who had raped a 16-year old girl, so the story goes, hanging by the neck from his own tank. Then, when he hear of little boys being snatched off the streets for the powerful men to have some bacha bazi, he gathered a small coterie and chased the mujahidin out of town, to cheers.

The stakes for addressing our own complicity in child sexual exploitation could not be higher.

I'm forcibly reminded of one Afghan's words when talking about the horrific toll Coalition airstrikes have taken of civilians:

..."We know they don't intend to kill the civilians but we don't believe they care enough not to"

That statement says all there is to say about the fatal disconnect between the reams of paper on best practises in COIN or CT that the military generates, and the institutionalized reality on the ground. It could just as easily be formulated:

We know they don't intend to [insert bad thing here] but we don't believe they care enough [to stop it]

And that really is at the heart of my misgivings about U.S. reliance on reaching for force as it's primary foreign policy tool. The slip between cup and lip is there every time.