Child Soldiers in Afghanistan

By John Ballard

The headline reads Afghans Plan to Stop Recruiting Children as Police.
Interesting.
That only took just over a decade. My guess is the operative word is plan, meaning "it hasn't happened yet and is not likely to happen any time soon."  (Think DADT, 1993-2010. What, seventeen years?)

Afghanistan is expected to sign a formal agreement with the United Nations on Sunday to stop the recruitment of children into its police forces and ban the common practice of boys being used as sex slaves by military commanders, according to Afghan and United Nations officials.

The effort by Afghanistan�s international backers to rapidly expand the country�s police and military forces has had the unintended consequence of drawing many under-age boys into service, the officials conceded.

Stung by Afghanistan�s inclusion on the United Nations� blacklist of countries where child soldiers are commonly used, like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, government leaders are expected to sign an undertaking with Radhika Coomaraswamy, the secretary general�s special representative for children and armed conflict, during her visit to Kabul on Sunday, the officials said.

With the agreement on an action plan to combat the problem, the government will for the first time officially acknowledge the problem of child sex slaves. As part of the Afghan tradition of bacha bazi, literally �boy play,� boys as young as 9 are dressed as girls and trained to dance for male audiences, then prostituted in an auction to the highest bidder. Many powerful men, particularly commanders in the military and the police, keep such boys, often dressed in uniforms, as constant companions for sexual purposes.

Tawdry details at the link. I posted a few links looking into this practice last year. 

This story illustrates once again the reality gap separating what Americans believe and what's happening in the world beyond. This practice (bacha baza) has long been practiced in Afghanistan. There is no doubt in my mind that Americans serving there are as aware of that part of the country's culture as the prostitutes and civilian shadow economies that are part of US military installations all over the world. But when soldiers come home, that is one of the subjects they just don't discuss.

Americans are not alone in their bubble of ignorance.

When I heard Kandahar mentioned again I remember that when it was first in the news I was working with a young Pakistani assistant manager who was in the unhappy position of having to work with me. This was about seven years ago. I have this habit of going online to keep up with current events, and often I come across information that is either not widely known or directly contradicts popular opinion. (A woman from Sarajevo who worked briefly with me was surprised when I asked her specific questions about her home country. This was during the time that Yugoslavia was coming apart and Serbs in Belgrade wore bulls-eye teeshirts in one of the most impressive public demonstrations of our lifetime. I had just finished one of Misha Glenny's books and was able to sketch an outline map of what was soon to be referred to as the former Yugoslavia.)

So this poor guy was just as naive about his own country as most Americans are about the USA. When I asked him hard questions about why so much of the country remained backward in the Twentieth Century he replied with canned excuses about their "Third World' status and how hard it is to change attitudes. He was partially correct, of course, but also blindingly ignorant about everyday realities that foreign reporters were discovering almost daily.

For example, as a good Muslim he could not imagine that the practice of sodomy was anything but a rarely-encountered terrible sin, certainly not the everyday social phenomenon that was being reported from Afghanistan. Google "birds fly over Kandahar" and see what comes up. It was harsh of me to chide him, a young Pakistani, for the foibles of Pashtun tribesmen in Afghanistan, but as an educated young man with a bright future, it would have been unfair to let him remain ignorant of realities that the rest of the world was learning.