Chai Boys: America Saving the World One Brutality Case at a Time

On a recent visit to Helmand, UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said the "transition is proceeding very well - it is on track."

"The Afghans are developing capabilities faster than we expected and we have every reason to believe that they will be able to maintain security as the Isaf forces draw down," he added.

The outgoing commander of Nato forces, Gen John Allen, is even more ebullient: "Afghan forces are defending Afghan people and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory. This is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words."

--BBC News

This is what, in Baltimore, they would call, "Dope on the table," meaning a lot of garbage signifying the men with the stars on their shoulders know what politically correct means.

Ben Anderson, a BBC reporter tagged along with a company of U.S. Marine advisers who were supposed to be "training" Afghan police. 

The police had their own ideas of about policing:  Arrest everyone at a particular place and hold them until their families can come in and pay ransom for their release. 

The Marine Major who has to watch all this happen, Bill Stuber, sputters when he is asked to comment. "Everything from skimming ammunition off their supplies to skimming fuel off their shipments." Police sell ammunition and rocket propelled grenades at the local bazaar.  Police sold off the security walls as scrap metal rendering a patrol base unsafe to occupy. 

But the part that really got to Major Stuber was the "chai boys." These boys are held by the police as sex workers. Some who have tried to escape the police station have been shot. Confronting the local police commander about these boys, the Major was stunned by how the commander shrugged it off. The boys enjoy giving their bodies to the police, he assured Major Stuber: "The kids want to stay at the patrol bases and give their bodies at night."

Major Stuber remarked, in what must be a milestone of understatement, even for the Marine Corps: "Working with child molesters, working with people who are robbing people, murdering them. It wears on you after a while."

I'll bet.

So now, tell us again, what exactly is our mission in Afghanistan?

Does this sound familiar yet?  America and its "allies" have arrived to lay a little "democracy" and "freedom" on an agrarian people, living somewhere in the 15th century, and forge an alliance with the "government" of the people we are there to "defend."  

Who was it, who said, "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it?"