Bacha Bazi Pederasty: Captain Dan Quinn and the Silence of the Lambs

We knew the United States has stayed too long in Afghanistan before this.  If I recall correctly, we landed our troops and our tanks and flew our drones to rout the Taliban, which is a group who we did not like because they may have embraced Osma Bin Laden and even if they did not know the guy, they sounded pretty unappetizing because they beheaded teachers in front of their students for the crime of teaching girls to read. 

We were there, I had thought, to get out. To get Bin Laden and get out. 

But like so many other American quagmires, we just could not resist getting involved with local politics and culture and we had all sorts of neo-cons pontificating about the importance of staying with Afghanistan for the long run, not like all the other American interventions where we left too soon.

The New York Times runs an article today which tells us why staying more than ten days in that cesspool of a nation is always a bad idea. 

It turns out the local military and police officers being trained and supported by our troops like to rape boys for fun, to keep them chained to beds for easy accessibility and occasionally one of them will murder his own daughter for kissing a boy and disgracing the family. 

When an American officer responded to such behavior by beating the stuffing out of one of these Afghan pederasts, he was drummed out of the military.  We are there to help fight whoever the American generals deem to be our enemy and not to get in fights with people who offend us by raping local village boys in a practice so entrenched it has a name:  bacha bazi, "boy games." 

When a German concentration camp guard does not resist the atrocities he sees, we try him at Nuremberg. When an American soldier resists an atrocity, we drum him out of the military.  

Cultural relativism says we ought to respect the culture of others, not impose our values upon a culture.  When we are sending our young to fight in Afghanistan, I don't see the value of cultural relativism. We are there with guns and we can tell people to do what we think they ought to do or we'll kill them. Once we leave, they can go back to raping their children, murdering their daughters and growing poppies to feed the craving for heroin in Manchester, New Hampshire. 

Captain Dan Quinn

Until then. we should be pinning medals on men like Daniel Quinn, the soldier who beat up the pederast, not getting rid of men like him.  The men we should be drumming out of the military are the generals who drummed Quinn out of the military. 

It's entirely possible there is more to this story: Maybe Captain Quinn was a bad actor in some ways which did not come out in the NY Times story. Maybe he did not talk enough before he started throwing fists.  This is a story which ought to be explored and presented more fully. But it is entirely possible to imagine a narrative of upper rear echelon general officers falling all over themselves to enforce "discipline" on a junior officer who saw an appalling offense and took action to stop it.  The Times documents other reports from American soldiers in Afghanistan saying they heard boys screaming all night long on these bases, as they were, presumably, raped.  The soldiers reported this up the chain of command and were told this is something Americans had no right to interfere with.

You can just imagine the folks at the Obama White House who are now scrambling to manage this story.  I am looking forward to hearing President Obama address this at a news conference, which I hope will be soon.