The New York Times has a truly horrifying story about how the U.S. military has turned a blind eye to child sex abuse in Afghanistan as a matter of official policy:
“At night we can hear [the children] 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 Times even notes that one special forces commander, Dan Quinn, was relieved of his command for beating up a militia commander who was keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. In sane world, soldiers who attack military commanders who are keeping sex slaves would be hailed as heroes. Quinn, however, has subsequently left the military.
Even more distressing, this has been going on for years. A 2007 New York Times op-ed noted that the military was using Yale Ph.D. anthropologists to help understand Afghan culture. The result of bringing in academics appears to have been an appalling embrace of cultural relativism:
Nevertheless the military voices on the show had their winning moments, sounding like old-fashioned relativists, whose basic mission in life was to counter ethnocentrism and disarm those possessed by a strident sense of group superiority. Ms. McFate stressed her success at getting American soldiers to stop making moral judgments about a local Afghan cultural practice in which older men go off with younger boys on “love Thursdays” and do some “hanky-panky.” “Stop imposing your values on others,” was the message for the American soldiers. She was way beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and I found it heartwarming.
Obviously, the American military's primary objective shouldn't be one of cultural imperialism. But there are many questions where we cannot pretend that American values aren't obviously superior, and the fact we're even discussing whether we should enforce our cultural prohibition on sex with children in Afghanistan is a terrifying indicator of how debased our military culture has become. As Dan Quinn's story suggests, what decent person wouldn't have trouble serving in a military that won't let them rescue children who are being sexually abused?
In the 19th century, British general Charles James Napier was confronted with what to do about Sati, the Hindu custom of burning widows alive on their husband's funeral pyres. He replied:
This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
American soldiers did not volunteer to risk their lives to be complicit in the sexual abuse of children. This is a national shame. The Commander-in-Chief needs to answer for this and put a stop to it, immediately.