The Rape of Afghanistan, by Justin Raimondo

From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

Why are we shocked by the practice of boy rape in Afghanistan – when we put the rapists in power?

The rape of young boys in Afghanistan by our “allies” is getting a lot of press attention these days, provoked by the revelation that US military personnel who tried to stop it are being disciplined for interfering. Two US officers apparently beat up one of our pet warlords, who insisted on keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave: this kind of rough justice got one relieved of his command and the other is being forced to retire.

The US military denies ordering its personnel to look the other way, but this is a lie: why else would they be discharging one of the Special Forces soldiers who beat up that Afghan commander? If he didn’t disobey orders to ignore the practice then on what grounds are they forcing him out?

Writing in National Review, Mark Krikorian fulminates:

“While punishing our soldiers for roughing up pedophile rapists is outrageous, the general policy that “allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law” (in the words of an Army spokesman) is unavoidable given our policy of semi-colonization. If it were up to me, we’d wash our hands of Afghanistan, making clear that if the Taliban (or whichever armed gang manages to take power) makes the mistake of again serving as a safe haven and training ground for people planning to attack the United States, we’ll come back and kill a bunch of them again. But that until that day, and that day may never come, they’re on their own and are free to go on raping their children, if that’s what their primitive and barbarous culture calls for.”

Krikorian goes on to pose another alternative: go all out and “simply colonize the place.” While he acknowledges this isn’t going to happen – after all, “that’s never worked out well in Afghanistan” – “it would have the advantage of allowing us to impose our (objectively superior) standards on them.” Citing the example of the British suppression of suttee in India, the practice of burning Indian women on their husbands’ funeral pyres, he concludes with a slap at “semi-colonization,” which he says “is forcing us to tolerate the depraved norms of this savage culture without any authority to change them.”

A word about those “objectively superior standards”: Krikorian has it exactly backwards regarding who imposed what standards on whom. While the inversion of truth may not be unusual for National Review writers, it’s particularly egregious in this case because, as I pointed out here – way back in 2002 – it was outrage at the prevalence of boy rape that brought the Taliban to power in the first place.

To continue reading: The Rape of Afghanistan