A Pentagon funded study reported upon by Joel Brinkley in the The San Francisco Chronicle a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times, entitled Afghanistan’s dirty little secret :-
Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy’s father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to “touch and fondle them,” military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. “The soldiers didn’t understand.” All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, “Pashtun Sexuality,” startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked – and repulsed.
John Cook at The Upshot, a Yahoo News blog reporting on how the Pentagon didn’t investigate hundreds of purchases of child pornography by its personnel:-
But new Project Flicker investigative reports obtained by The Upshot through the Freedom of Information Act, which you can read here, show that DCIS investigators identified 264 Defense employees or contractors who had purchased child pornography online. Astonishingly, nine of those had “Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information” security clearances, meaning they had access to the nation’s most sensitive secrets. All told, 76 of the individuals had Secret or higher clearances. But DCIS investigated only 52 of the suspects, and just 10 were ever charged with viewing or purchasing child pornography. Without greater public disclosure of how these cases wound down, it’s impossible to know how or whether any of the names listed in the Project Flicker papers came in for additional scrutiny. It’s conceivable that some of them were picked up by local law enforcement, but it seems likely that most of the people flagged by the investigation did not have their military careers disrupted in the context of the DCIS inquiry.
RAWA post an IPS report by Gareth Porter-
The strategy of the major U.S. and British military offensive in Afghanistan’s Helmand province aimed at wresting it from the Taliban is based on bringing back Afghan army and police to maintain permanent control of the population, so the foreign forces can move on to another insurgent stronghold.
But that strategy poses an acute problem: The police in the province, who are linked to the local warlord, have committed systematic abuses against the population, including the abduction and rape of pre-teen boys, according to village elders who met with British officers.
Anger over those police abuses runs so high that the elders in Babaji just north of Laskgar Gah warned the British that they would support the Taliban to get rid of them if the national police were allowed to return to the area, according to a Jul. 12 report by Reuters correspondent Peter Graff.
Afghans are not a monolithic entity that endorse child rape and the casual reader of Pentagon funded studies who might infer that they are, are probably not aware (as the report on the military funded study was in a mass circulation newspaper but the Pentagon’s cover up was on a blog) of the Pentagon’s lack of action on paedophiles within their -sometimes elite- ranks. This is not to say either ‘side’ do not have great problems (cultural or otherwise), but in war the homeland’s transgressions are minimised while the target’s are emphasised and subsequently opinions of people in the protagonist nations regarding themselves as informed, independent & sophisticated follow accordingly. A larger scale, higher stakes and slightly more sophisticated version of a tabloid ’Get the Paedo’ campaign thus bolsters arguments in favour of government pro-war policy couched in a critique of policy priorities, yet as the final extract shows, the difference between humanitarian arguments funded by the military with the imprimatur of a distinguished journalism professor intended for consumption by domestic audiences and what actually happens on the ground are two entirely different things. One might expect awareness of such a basic and common dissonance during wartime to be axiomatic to the informed, independent & sophisticated person with centuries of imperial, economic and political history to learn from, but apparently not.
