Obama administration condones child-rape

I had discussion with a friend of mine over the weekend. We go back a long ways, having served together a company commanders in the same battalion. Naturally, politics came up and we both agreed that now we easily believe allegations against the Obama administration that we would have laughed at and dismissed out of hand as crazy talk back in 2009. This is one of these stories.

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.

This would strike most people as a horrific situation. A couple of American soldiers stepped up:

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.

After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.

Four years later, the Army is also trying to forcibly retire Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, a Special Forces member who joined Captain Quinn in beating up the commander.

The instruction that Captain Quinn and Sergeant Martland received was patently illegal. By knowing the child rape was going on and doing nothing they became vulnerable under Article 95 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Misprison of a Felony. The fact that they were ordered to ignore it is actually of no import. That order was, itself, illegal, and under the UCMJ you cannot use obedience of orders (aka the Nuremburg Defense) as a defense if a reasonable person knew they were illegal. (As an aside, William Calley’s defense at the My Lai trial was based on the theory that he was not smart enough to understand an order to kill prisoners was wrong.)

But rather than prosecute the clowns who came up with the idea that having the US military associated with known child-rapists was a great military strategy, the US Army — which these days seems more concerned in accommodating homosexual and cross-dressers than actually fighting wars — decided to boot two highly trained soldiers with a few decades of experience.

It isn’t like this deference to child-rapists wins us friends. Far from it. It actually makes our job much harder.

But the American policy of treating child sexual abuse as a cultural issue has often alienated the villages whose children are being preyed upon. The pitfalls of the policy emerged clearly as American Special Forces soldiers began to form Afghan Local Police militias to hold villages that American forces had retaken from the Taliban in 2010 and 2011.

By the summer of 2011, Captain Quinn and Sergeant Martland, both Green Berets on their second tour in northern Kunduz Province, began to receive dire complaints about the Afghan Local Police units they were training and supporting.

First, they were told, one of the militia commanders raped a 14- or 15-year-old girl whom he had spotted working in the fields. Captain Quinn informed the provincial police chief, who soon levied punishment. “He got one day in jail, and then she was forced to marry him,” Mr. Quinn said.

The New York Times lists case after case of rape and murder carried out with impunity by these local “police commanders” as we covered for them.

Not only was the policy self-defeating, it resulted in the deaths of no less than three US Marines.

The father of Lance Corporal Buckley believes the policy of looking away from sexual abuse was a factor in his son’s death, and he has filed a lawsuit to press the Marine Corps for more information about it.

Lance Corporal Buckley and two other Marines were killed in 2012 by one of a large entourage of boys living at their base with an Afghan police commander named Sarwar Jan.

Lance Corporal Buckley had noticed that a large entourage of “tea boys” — domestic servants who are sometimes pressed into sexual slavery — had arrived with Mr. Jan and moved into the same barracks, one floor below the Marines. He told his father about it during his final call home.

Word of Mr. Jan’s new position also reached the Marine officers who had gotten him arrested in 2010. One of them, Maj. Jason Brezler, dashed out an email to Marine officers at F.O.B. Delhi, warning them about Mr. Jan and attaching a dossier about him.

The warning was never heeded. About two weeks later, one of the older boys with Mr. Jan — around 17 years old — grabbed a rifle and killed Lance Corporal Buckley and the other Marines.

But the Obama administration was consistent. They are discharging the officer who filed the complaint against the child-rapists:

The one American service member who was punished in the investigation that followed was Major Brezler, who had sent the email warning about Mr. Jan, his lawyers said. In one of Major Brezler’s hearings, Marine Corps lawyers warned that information about the police commander’s penchant for abusing boys might be classified. The Marine Corps has initiated proceedings to discharge Major Brezler.

Mr. Jan appears to have moved on, to a higher-ranking police command in the same province. In an interview, he denied keeping boys as sex slaves or having any relationship with the boy who killed the three Marines. “No, it’s all untrue,” Mr. Jan said. But people who know him say he still suffers from “a toothache problem,” a euphemism here for child sexual abuse.

David French, at National Review, writes about how the perverted sense of cultural sensitivity makes it exceedingly difficult for Americans to fight a counterinsurgency.

In reality, however, deference to culture often made enemies of potential allies. The abusers did not admire Americans for their restraint. Instead, they often viewed us contemptuously and flaunted their disregard for our culture. They despised and exploited our perceived weakness. The official American descriptions of Iraqi culture were painfully simplistic, and did a grave disservice by treating it as a singular, monolithic entity. There is a culture of the abusers, but there is also a culture of the abused. By viewing the culture of the oppressors as the default standard, we took sides with the worst of the worst while abandoning the oppressed to their fate.

This is not a hard problem. General Sir Charles Napier was British commander-in-chief in India the mid-19th century. He was determined to stamp out the practice of suttee, that is, burning widows alive on the funeral pyre of their husband. When he was told by Indian leader that this was an Indian custom he replied:

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.

This goes back to the utter lack of moral compass in this administration. They killed Mexican civilians on the southern border in Fast & Furious and have probably killed many Americans in the dozens of similar “gun walking” schemes in US cities. They unleashed the IRS on political opponents. They have gutted the US Constitution on college campuses. They set off at least two civil wars (Iraq and Syria) just because it looked like it would be cool to do it. They encouraged mass illegal immigration from Latin America. The list is nearly endless.

Like I said, a mere 6 years ago I would have banned commenters for suggesting as possible acts that we are covering as news today.