The War in Afghanistan has cost us far more than thousands of American soldiers dead, tens of thousands wounded, the trillions of dollar in national treasure (including $18 billion in U.S. aid) being spent at the rate of $4 billion to $6 billion a month. It has cost us our souls. A study commissioned by the Defense Department has revealed that for centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. One half of the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and throughout southern Afghanistan are ‘bacha baz’, the term for an older man with an underage boy lover. ‘Bacha bazi’, slang for ‘boy play’, often includes slavery, child prostitution and sex trafficking. Understand, it isn’t a concealed or silent shame. Afghani men 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.” Boys who refuse to participate are murdered without punishment. The Pashtun tribe has controlled Afghanistan for centuries.
It has long been reported that pedophilic behavior “is rampant” among “soldiers and guys on the security detail” at the palace, reportedly “talking about boys all the time.” In Kandahar (population 500,000), dance parties are a weekly event. Young boys dressed as girls, wearing makeup, with bells on their feet, dance for groups of middle-aged men who throw money at them, trade them, and later take them home to use them for sex. Once they age out of pedophilic interest, they are sent home where they are largely rejected, traumatized and homeless. A recent State Department report called “dancing boys” a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.”
Nevertheless, in a pathological nod to multiculturalism, US military personnel have been told to look the other way. Under the Obama Administration, when soldiers attempted to publicize the practice, they were punished by the administration. You may recall the disciplinary action taken against Green Beret SFC Charles Martland who violated the direction of the Army to look the other way by striking a child rapist on an American base while serving in Afghanistan. According to Martland, the boy’s nightly screaming while being repeatedly raped on the American military base by an Afghani officer … got to him. Apparently, only him.
We say that “we” care about children. It’s not true. We have spent trillions of dollars and sacrificed countless lives to fight terrorists in Afghanistan. But, while we have been there, we have been turning a deaf ear to the screams of boys being raped, trafficked, and traded like baseball cards for sex on our own military bases, instructing our troops to refrain from 'interfering' and punishing them for criticizing pedophilia. This malignant tolerance of bacha bazi takes us one step closer to the recognition of the ‘virtuous pedophile’ as a valid sexual orientation that should be ‘protected by antidiscrimination laws.’ Disagree? Wasn’t eleven (11) year old “Drag Kid” just suggestively dancing on a New York City bar top for the entertainment of adult men and to the approbation of transgender advocates? Afghanistan may be 7,500 miles away. But, it’s closer than you think.
All sexual predators have their protectors. In Afghanistan, you could count among them the United States government, its military, and the civilian population that largely ignored the persecution and prosecution of Charles Martland. Charles Martland, the only man on an American military base that dared to oppose the nightly rape of a small boy ... and was criminally charged for it. That is ... until the Trump administration changed this policy.