Monday, September 21, 2015

Man Love Thursday in Afghanistan

A few years ago, a friend of mine, then a Captain in the Army, was sent to Afghanistan. When he got back he told us that there was a tradition among the Afghani military of "man love Thursday". He was quite serious:

Obama Policy Defends ‘Boy Play’ in Afghanistan; U.S. Troops Punished
Apparently, this is what “Hope and Change” looks like:
. . . “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 Army contends that Martland and others should have looked the other way (a contention that I believe is nonsense),” Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who hopes to save Sergeant Martland’s career, wrote last week to the Pentagon’s inspector general. . . .
When asked about American military policy, the spokesman for the American command in Afghanistan, Col. Brian Tribus, wrote in an email: “Generally, allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law.” He added that “there would be no express requirement that U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan report it.”
(Hat-tip: Jamie Weinstein on Twitter.) Let’s begin by praising the New York Times for actually reporting this story, a rare exception to their usual see-no-evil approach to the Obama administration’s policy failures. But also notice the rest of the media, while finding time to jump on Ben Carson for criticizing Islam, is not asking Democrats about this horrific policy of arming gay Muslim pedophiles at U.S. taxpayer expense, and punishing American troops who don’t like it.
It seems likely to me that this has been well known since the beginning of the ground war in Afghanistan (and probably long before). This is part and parcel of our deliberate "turning the blind eye" to the problems of women's rights and human rights in general in Afghanistan, which is basically a 12th century country, with working guns,

Our goal in Afghanistan was not to fix it's broken culture,  but rather to make sure the Taliban could never again support Salafist jihadi attacks on the US or our allies. It would be nice to fix their culture, but it think that's beyond the scope of the mission.

Although, if it came to that, I'd be more than happy to draft and ship off every SJW we could get our hands on to Afghanistan, where they could try, without any guns of course, to convert all the Afghans to their pacifistic, all organic philosophy.

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