Afghanistan Bacha Bazi and the Long Good-bye

 

Six years ago, I read an article about Bacha Bazi, the practice of Afghanistan military officers chaining young boys to their beds and raping them.

I say, "practice' because this is something which was common, widespread and longstanding in the official Afghan army. 

It was just something the Afghan officers liked to do when the moved into a town. 

Why they preferred boys is anyone's guess. I prefer not to think about it. 

Dan Quinn, an American Army officer, and his soldiers could hear the screams from the children drifting down to  his quarters, and  he finally confronted an Afghan officer and beat the daylights out of him, for which Quinn was court marshalled. He had been ordered to allow the Afghans to maintain their local customs and to not interfere with a culture he did not understand.

Dan Quinn could not stomach bacha bazi

Quinn did not understand the United States Army tolerating child rape by the allies we were fighting to keep in power. He was drummed out of the Army.

Bacha Bazi culture

This took me back to college, where anthropology courses spawned discussions about whether it is appropriate to impose on other cultures the values in our own culture. Are there some basic values common to all mankind or are cultures so different as to make all values "relative?"

I don't know: for me, I would have thought raping children chained to beds all night long would qualify as something all cultures would decry, but apparently not. 

Dexter Filkins

This is a problem with "nation building" if we are building a nation in our own image, as we tried to do in Vietnam and again in Afghanistan.

Trump, apparently, for reasons which are not clear, simply told his deputies to "Just get the fuck out" of Afghanistan.

This is the one thing Trump got right in 4 years, not that I give him credit for that--it was just part of the package-- he just was simple minded enough to not overthink anything, as Obama did with Afghanistan.

Dexter Filkins, who has a piece about Afghanistan in this week's New Yorker, spoke  on the New Yorker podcast and he noted that after 20 years there is now an urban part of Afghanistan with people with cell phones, big buildings, women who are lawyers and doctors and judges but once the Americans leave, the only armed people may be the Taliban and whoever the Americans left behind in the military, and it's anyone's guess how they will lean. 

So there is a population which would want to fight the Taliban. 

The only question is whether female lawyers and doctors will be enough to fight off the guys in the black turbans. 

Whatever happens, however, it will not be our problem. We cannot fight in a culture we cannot stomach.