U.S. Military Commanders Turning Blind Eye to Afghan Child Rape:

KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them 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.

Anyone who has ever served in Afghanistan has known about this. I’ve covered it before, specifically Army Special Forces soldiers Captain Dan Quinn and Sgt. Charles Martland. Sofrep’s own SF author Jeffrey Forker covered this issue very well in a recent article, laying out the details with a great article that showed calmness, logic and restraint about the issue.

Since he did that so well, I’m going to go in a, uh, SLIGHTLY different direction: Reading this article made me sick.  So I’m going to say some things now.

First, my small editorial note: Anyone who has read my columns knows that I’m not above a well-placed bit of profanity, when appropriate and/or hilarious. And everyone also knows that I mock the “trigger warning” culture constantly.  But: fair warning, this is going to contain some language that you may not be comfortable with. I am not doing this to be gratuitous. I am doing it because I feel the terms, “rape” and “sexual assault” are too vanilla. They don’t begin to cover the horror of what this actually is, I’m trying to paint a picture, and I am angry.

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