US Afghanistan Policy: Promote Women’s Rights, Allow Rape of Young Boys

 Retrospective articles covering the US role in Afghanistan will be plentiful.  Fintan O’Toole provided a thought-provoking one for the New York Review of Books: The Lie of Nation Building.  His task is to review two well-timed books on the war: The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock, and The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian.  O’Toole is not so much a reviewer of books as a clever and effective purveyor of his opinions.  He always delivers a good read.  His basic theme is that the US went into Afghanistan with a limited goal, but an unlimited mandate for action.  We went in without understanding the nature of the conflict between the Taliban and other armed parties.  Instead of eliminating Osama bin Laden and leaving we defeated the ruling Taliban because they had harbored bin Laden, necessitating some sort of effort to control the chaos that would follow. 

We could never quite decide if we were waging a war against the Taliban or trying to create a democratic state in Afghanistan.  Those two competing goals often demanded contradictory means and led to success with neither.  We will not wade deep into O’Toole’s thoughts here.  Rather, we will discuss an astonishing revelation of how our muddled approach allowed us to wage a noble campaign for the rights of women as we tried to build a stable nation, while at the same time allowing an equally horrible abuse of human rights to occur as being justified by the war being waged.

“Equally shaky was the American commitment to the principle underlying its insistence on equal dignity for Afghan women. That principle had to be instituted against the traditions of the rural Pashtun heartlands: men could not do what they pleased to women merely because that was part of an established way of life. But organized pedophilia was also a traditional practice, and the Americans tolerated and enabled it.”

“It is striking that in his history of the war, Malkasian mentions this issue in passing as one of the reasons why many Afghans welcomed Taliban rule, but returns to it as a post-2001 problem only in a single footnote, explaining local hostility to Dad Mohammed Khan, the warlord who was appointed chief of police in the town of Sangin: ‘The police chief and his men were also rumored to kidnap little boys out of the bazaar.’ In fact, as The Afghanistan Papers confirms, the kidnapping and rape of boys by senior Afghan army and police officers was not a rumor. It was well known to American officials as an institutionalized practice. Whitlock summarizes the evidence from the official records:

Afghan military officers, warlords and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. US troops referred to the practice as “man-love Thursday” because Afghan pederasts would force boys to dress up or dance on Thursday evenings before the start of the Afghan weekend. Although American soldiers were sickened by the abuse, their commanders instructed them to look the other way because they didn’t want to alienate allies in the fight against the Taliban.”

“In 2015 Joseph Goldstein reported in The New York Times that US soldiers were instructed not to intervene in the kidnapping and rape of boys, even when the crimes were being committed on their own military bases. He interviewed a former Special Forces captain, Dan Quinn, who beat up a US-backed militia commander who had a boy chained to his bed. Quinn was relieved of his own command and sent home from Afghanistan. In response to the story, an army spokesman blithely confirmed that ‘there would be no express requirement that US military personnel in Afghanistan report’ child sexual abuse by allied forces.” 

So, the US was trying to build a sustainable democracy by allying itself with people who were even more disliked than the Taliban, and who had no interest in democracy, in order to defeat the Taliban.  O’Toole is a master of the snide remark. 

“As early as 2002, Jon Lee Anderson, in The Lion’s Grave, perhaps the most widely read American book about the US-led invasion, wrote that ‘one of the first things the Taliban did—a popular move—was to punish mujahideen commanders who were accused of rape or pederasty.’ If this was known to be a popular move by the Taliban, did it not occur to American policymakers that taking the opposite approach might be unpopular and indeed alienating?” 

“More broadly, the arbitrariness of the decision to disregard child rape undermined the principle of the universality of human rights on which US support for female equality was based. One US officer is recorded in The Afghanistan Papers explaining American tolerance of child abuse by saying, ‘You have to accept what they do and don’t interject your personal feelings about their culture.’ But if this was so, why object to the Taliban’s confining women to their homes or banning music or destroying ancient images? The US, which has never managed to consistently apply human rights and the rule of law to its own citizens, could not do so for Afghans either.” 

Hannah Arendt wrote of the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem and created the phrase “the banality of evil.”  A quote from her is perhaps appropriate.

“Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” 

There will always be Eichmanns among us.  They are everywhere. 

O’Toole always says things worth noting, and he always says them well.  We finish not with his concluding words, but with his opening statement.

“The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application of human rights, a clear understanding of what policies are trying to achieve, the prevention of corrupt financial influence over political decisions, and the fundamental truthfulness of public utterances. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the American republic was fighting, and often losing, a domestic battle to uphold those values for its own citizens.” 

“It is grimly unsurprising that the US could not infuse them into a very foreign country. While the political system of the US was approaching the crisis that culminated in the presidency of Donald Trump and the Capitol riots, its most enduring external adventure could not avoid moving in tandem toward the grim climax of the flight from Kabul. Afghanistan became a dark mirror held up to the travails of American democracy. It reflected back, sometimes in exaggerated forms, the weaknesses of the homeland’s political culture. Critics of the war argued that the US could not create a polity in its own image on the far side of the world. The tragic truth is that in many ways it did exactly that.”