Afghan National Army discussion

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ANA stands for "army of apostates and nihilists".

Illiterate sodomists, drug-addicts, rapists, child molestors and *******s join the ANA and ANP.

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Drugs and desertion: how the UK really rates Afghan police

'Ghost recruits' and widespread corruption are hampering the fight against the Taliban and delaying Britain's withdrawal plans
Corruption, desertion and drug abuse within the Afghan police are threatening its ability to take over the fight against the Taliban and the UK's chances of an exit from the country, government documents show.
A series of internal Foreign Office papers obtained by The Independent on Sunday lay bare the deep concerns of British officials over the standard of recruits to the Afghan National Police (ANP), ranging from high casualty rates and illiteracy to poor vetting and low pay.
The memos, which warn that building an effective police force "will take many years", also reveal how non-existent "ghost recruits" may account for up to a quarter of the purported strength of the police force, often the front line against the Taliban insurgency. The "attrition rate" among police officers – including losses caused by deaths, desertion and dismissals, often due to positive drug tests – is as high as 60 per cent in Helmand province.
Helmand is repeatedly identified as among the worst areas for a series of problems. The documents reveal that half the latest batch of recruits in the province "initially tested positive for narcotics". British officials also raised concerns over the ANP's involvement in bribery, collusion with the drug trade, intimidation of schoolchildren and "limited engagement with the community". In a dramatic insight into the frustration felt by British officials in the country, one suggested arresting the worst offenders and handing them over to prosecutors, to "make an example of them". The alarm over the capacity of the police raises profound questions over the coalition strategy for pacifying Afghanistan and eventually withdrawing from the country. At the international conference on Afghanistan in January, Gordon Brown pledged to more than double "military mentoring teams" for the police as part of a wider Nato plan to increase Afghan security forces to 300,000.
A Foreign Office spokeswoman yesterday accepted that the challenges to police reform were "significant and long term", but insisted that progress was being made. She said: "We are aware of widespread criticisms of the ANP, some of which are deeply concerning. The UK is fully committed to police reform to ensure a professional and accountable police force."
In the past, ministers have carefully conceded problems with the creation of a huge force, but in recent months they have pointed to progress being made. The Prime Minister emphasised the importance of ANP development during a visit to Helmand province earlier this month, when he toured a police training centre in Lashkar Gah and confirmed plans to send 150 new police and army trainers to train the ANP. The Americans have ploughed more than £4bn into the campaign to establish Afghanistan's first viable police force.
"The Government has continually told us that the Afghan National Police force has been improving, but these documents suggest that even their own staff have not been convinced about this," said the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Nick Harvey. "Establishing the police force is a critical development for the coalition in Afghan. The longer it takes, the longer coalition forces will be there."
A dispatch from the British embassy in Kabul only four months ago underlined the continuing problems in producing a fit, efficient and untainted force, eight years after the Taliban were ousted from power. The "eGram" warned: "Leadership, particularly at middle ranks, needs to be thoroughly reformed and training improved. Vetting of recruits, often taken on the word of a village head, needs to be raised and drug testing made compulsory. Attrition needs to be addressed through less use as cannon fodder and greater pay in high-threat areas."
A month earlier, a grim briefing prepared for a UK official declared: "The scale of the challenge is immense. Building an independent, professional and accountable police force will take many years and require considerable international support."
Documents obtained under freedom of information legislation point to the Afghan government's failure to support efforts to establish a viable police force. However, a report, "Policing in Afghanistan: What Now and What Next?", also pointed the finger at foreign governments trying to resolve the nation's problems. It said: "International pressure to increase police recruitment has led to a focus on quantity rather than quality. Because police challenges are huge, there is a tendency to look for quick solutions. The risk is short-termism and a failure to develop a coherent and consistent approach to police reform."
But it was operational issues, notably the fact that so many recruits tested positive for drugs, that dominated discussions about the state of the police force, with poor literacy levels blamed for the high number of positive tests. A "situation report" from last November revealed that half of the latest batch of recruits taken on in June had initially tested positive for narcotics.
A briefing note prepared for Mr Brown after an Afghan policeman shot dead five British soldiers in Helmand last November said that all ANP in the province were subsequently "re-registered and drugs tested". The memo added: "Approximately 10 per cent have been rejected following failed opiate tests." As recently as last October, an official at the British embassy in Kabul was reporting suspicions that "up to 25 per cent" of the ANP's 82,000 strength could be "ghost police" – increasing concerns that corrupt local commanders were pocketing salaries of non-existent officers.
An independent report into corruption, commissioned by the Foreign Office, found evidence that police manning checkpoints were imposing "nuisance taxes" on travellers. Last September, a UK official in the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Lashkar Gah told a colleague: "It would be somewhat of a luxury to be working with ANP who are not corrupt. However, if you have [a senior official] strongly committed to addressing this, then one thing he could do is to lead by example and/or make an example of some ANP who are particularly bad by arresting them and referring them to the ANP prosecutor."
An Foreign Office spokeswoman said yesterday: "Police who have undergone training are recognised by the Afghan population as being of a higher calibre. New vetting procedures are in place to address issues with the integrity of the ANP, and we are working to further strengthen them as part of our overall efforts to support improvements within the ANP."

http://www.independent.co.uk

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Rapists and childmolestation by Afghan Police and Afghan army

The stated goal of the US-led War in Afghanistan, according to the Obama Administration, is to defeat the Taliban and establish a stable democratic government over the entire country. Critical to that goal is establishing a professional Afghan army and police force that is not corrupt, and that has the respect of the Afghan people. But reports out of Canada suggest that far from creating such a military and police force, the so-called International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) is turning a blind eye to the thuggish criminality of those organizations, both to avoid growing opposition in ISAF member countries, and to avoid offending those organizations in Afghanistan.
The issue in question is routine rape and sodomy of children by Afghan soldiers and police operating on Canadian-run bases in the Kandahar region.
As reported last fall in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, Canadian military chaplains and some soldiers have been complaining as far back as 2006 that Afghan security forces have been sodomizing young boys on their base. These military whistle-blowers charge that the military brass has been ignoring or burying their complaints, fearing the bad publicity they could generate.
The paper reports that Canadian military police have also complained, as reported by Brig.-Gen. J.C. Collin, commander of Land Force Central Area, that they were being told “not to interfere in incidents in which Afghan forces were having sex with children.”
According to the paper, the Canadian military command has argued that, even though sex with children is against the law in Afghanistan, the practice is culturally accepted and that the Canadian forces “should not get involved in what should be seen as a ‘cultural’ issue.”
Makes you wonder what other “cultural” issues involving Afghan security forces that the Western occupiers might not want to get involved in. Perhaps the oppression of women? That’s certainly part of the culture. How about bribery and extortion? Based on the evidence–that the police in Afghanistan are a wholly corrupt entity, and that the army is not much better–arguing that corruption is “culturally acceptable” would be easy to do. How about drug dealing? Again, that appears to be quite the culture in Afghanistan.
Kudos to the Canadian grunts, MPs and chaplins who found the sexual abuse of children more than they could stomach, and who brought their concerns to public attention at home in Canada when their own commanders sought to cover it up.
It makes me wonder, though, why here in the hyper-moralizing US, we haven’t heard a peep from our troops about similar behavior by Afghan forces on US-run bases.
It’s hard to believe that a practice so common on a Canadian base that it provoked such outrage among Canadian soldiers is not also occurring elsewhere.
This leaves us with two possibilities:
US soldiers and marines are just not as willing to go outside the chain of command and go public with their complaints, or
The US media are not interested in investigating this kind of story. It involves only Afghans, and who cares about Afghans? What American journalism covers is Americans. (Remember the big spate of stories about the sex escapades of guards at the US embassy in Kabul?)
I’d say it’s probably a combination of the two.
At any rate, the picture painted of Afghanistan’s army and police in the Ottawa Citizen article does not bode well for any plan that hinges on their taking over from US and ISAF troops any time soon…or for the fate of young children of Afghanistan, if and when they do.

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NATO frustration as Afghan police flunk drug tests

When British trainers administered random drugs tests to 25 Afghan police recruits at a base in southern Helmand province, most of them failed.

One recruit was kicked out of the force. The others were given warnings.
Heroin shouldn't be tolerated, but there is no point kicking out the ones who smoke hashish: there would be too few left, their Afghan commander said.
Training Afghan police is a central part of NATO's strategy to eventually turn over responsibility for security in the country to Afghan forces so that Western troops -- soon to number 150,000 -- can begin withdrawing next year.
NATO aims to increase the number of Afghan soldiers and police by 50 percent to a total of 282,000 by mid-2011, when U.S. President Barack Obama says he will begin withdrawing forces.
But commanders acknowledge it is an uphill battle. Afghan recruits are frequently illiterate, many desert soon after joining. Some may be insurgent infiltrators. One policeman killed five British soldiers in November.
And -- if the random testing administered in Helmand is anything to go by -- many are on drugs.
"So far we've found three tested positive for amphetamines and also opiates, approximately 15 for the use of hashish," British Army Captain Pete Alexander, a police instructor, told Reuters, looking over the results of the 25 tests.
The amphetamine and opiates test can only find traces of use of the drugs within the past three days. When the three who failed were given a second chance a few days later, two of them managed to pass. The other was fired.
Those who had failed the test for hashish were forced to stand up and be reprimanded in front of their class of 300 recruits at a parade. But there is no point in kicking them out, since use of the drug is so common, their commander said.
"At first when we understand someone is using hashish we tell them it is not right to use hashish. The second time we just give them a warning. The third time we try helping them to quit the stuff, and finally we sack them," Colonel Mahmoud Refik Sheriar told Reuters.
"When it comes to heroin we don't want those guys, we just fire them right away. It is not only harmful to themselves, it is sort of a contagious addiction. That's why we don't want them."

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Former communists serve under Americans in the ANA

U.S. Enlists Ex-Foes for Afghan Army

Soviet-Era Brass Take Command Again In Alliance of Former Battlefield Rivals

KABUL—The fledgling Afghan National Army has been created from scratch by the U.S. and its allies. But, at least in its senior ranks, it increasingly resembles an Afghan army of old—one the U.S. helped rout two decades ago.
The Afghan government is dominated by former mujahedeen guerrillas; both the minister of defense and the army chief of staff are former anti-Soviet insurgents. Most ANA generals and colonels appointed to serve just below them, however, are veterans of the Soviet-built Afghan military that hunted these insurgents through the 1980s.



Massimo Berruti for the Wall Street Journal Afghan participants in a recent commanders' course—including 16 Soviet-era veterans and three ex-mujahedeen—listen to a graduation speech.



Facing a dearth of professional officers, the U.S.-led coalition is bringing these former foes in from the cold, restoring their Soviet-era rank and giving them command positions. American officers say few other Afghans have the formal military training and know-how to run conventional divisions and brigades.
Numbering just over 100,000 soldiers, the ANA is slated to grow to 172,000 by the autumn of 2011. Turning it into a serious fighting force is a priority for the Obama administration—offering the only exit strategy for the U.S.-led coalition as Western public opinion sours on the Afghan war.
In this mission, grooming senior ANA commanders is just as important as bulking up the ranks with recruits.
"If you don't develop leaders, this military cannot succeed," says U.S. Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV, the commander of the coalition's program to build up Afghan security forces.
Soviet-era veterans—many of them exiled or unemployed during the tumult of recent years—offer a ready reservoir of such leaders.

"Former army officers are very experienced, and the more we expand our army, the more we need them," says Brig. Gen. Ali Ahmad Popal, commander of the Kabul Military Training Center, a sprawling facility that churns out thousands of new ANA soldiers every month.
The deputy corps commander of Kandahar in Communist times, Gen. Popal himself lived in exile in India until joining the ANA in 2008.
"The only difference between the old army and the new army is that before we had conscription, and now it's all-volunteer," he says. "We fight the enemies of our country and anyone who attacks our soil."
President Hamid Karzai said this week he is considering a reintroduction of the draft in Afghanistan.
This reliance on Soviet-era officers was evident at a recent graduation ceremony from a senior ANA command course. Nineteen colonels and brigadiers in their 50s and 60s graduated after several months of study with American and French instructors. Among them, 16 had fought in the Communist Afghan army, and only three hailed from mujahedeen backgrounds.
These Afghan Army veterans—most of whom were educated in Russia—often espouse a top-down, bureaucratic approach that can clash with the American military culture, which gives more leeway to individual commanders and puts more authority in the hands of noncommissioned officers.
Yet coalition officers say they've come to appreciate that some of these Soviet-style methods suit a force like the ANA, which is three-quarters illiterate.
"There are times when they'll bring up an idea, and we'll say, yes, it works," says Canadian Brig. Gen. Paul Wynnyk, who supervises the U.S.-led international coalition's effort to develop Afghanistan's army. "Some of what the Russians did here was pretty good."
American and allied officials speak with particular respect about two Soviet-era veterans with whom they deal daily while running the war against the Taliban insurgency.
One is the first deputy minister of defense, Lt. Gen. Mohammad Akram, who headed the Communist army's southern regional command in the early 1990s. The other is the ANA's operations chief, Lt. Gen. Sher Karimi—a career officer who was educated at the Sandhurst military academy in England in the 1960s and speaks fluent English.
Like many other army veterans brought back into service, Gens. Karimi and Akram hail from ethnic-Pashtun southern and eastern Afghanistan, the heartland of the Taliban insurgency.
Their presence in the senior ranks may defuse the perception among many Pashtuns that the ANA is dominated by the rival ethnic group, the Tajiks, whose militias overthrew the Taliban with American help in 2001, and who are still over-represented among the officer corps.
The ANA's chief of staff, Gen. Bismullah Khan Mohammadi, is one of these Tajik commanders. A former aide to the late mujahedeen leader Ahmad Shah Masood, the bearded Gen. Mohammadi beamed broadly when asked on a recent morning how he felt building the new Afghan army together with his former enemies.
Then he beckoned the mustachioed Gen. Karimi, who was standing beside a nearby helicopter, and firmly clasped his hand.
With a sheepish smile, Gen. Karimi acknowledged that he had "sometimes" fought against his current boss in the battlefield.
Gen. Mohammadi erupted in hearty laughter.
"We've opened a new page in our history," he proclaimed. "Whoever comes in and aims to serve our country is our brother now."

http://online.wsj.com

[pukhtana]

^Its better then nothing.

Who will protect the Afghan people?

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Cracks are appearing in plan to build up the Afghan army

Afghan soldiers surprised the roadside bombers as they laid a device south of Garmsir. According to one British officer familiar with the incident, there were five bombers. The Afghan army unit that found them had just lost three of their own to a roadside bomb. So three of the Taleban were killed by the road.
The architects of the military mission in Afghanistan face a finely balanced set of problems as they try to build up Afghan forces to 400,000 by the end of next year from their current 96,000 soldiers and 89,000 police.
The problem so far, according to the American commander of the training mission, Lieutenant-General Bill Caldwell, is that “the mission has been under-resourced” in Western trainers. That has meant sacrificing quality for quantity on the basis that quantity has a quality all of its own. It does, but only in the short term. Only 15 per cent of Afghan soldiers have any reading ability.
The American commander claims however that the situation is changing. About 850 US trainers will arrive this month. Moreover, Afghan police and army are paid a decent wage, about $165 (£100) a month against the average government salary of $50. With hazard pay, this can rise to $245. The US foots the bill.
This goes some way to explaining why army re-enlistment rates are now 75 per cent and desertion rates for units posted to Helmand have dropped from 45 per cent to about 7 per cent.
Another reason is that the Afghan forces are getting good weaponry, body armour and even attack helicopters.
Still, there is a particular underlying problem that troubles Western commanders. The ethnic make-up of Afghanistan is complex and fracture lines are not always obvious.
The Afghan National Army (ANA) is balanced carefully to include appropriate representation of all ethnicities. However, the representation of Pashtuns, the dominant ethnicity that lives in the insurgency hit areas, is skewed. Only 3-5 per cent of the ANA comes from the southern areas of the country. The Pashtuns in the army are, therefore, overwhelmingly eastern Pashtuns and consequently native Dari speakers rather than of Pashto, spoken in the south. This helps to make the ANA outsiders in the south, and that is a problem.
“Success is not a foregone conclusion,” General Caldwell said. “Ultimately it is going to have to be the Afghans themselves who make the difference here.”
That difference may also mean more suspected members of the Taleban being summarily executed by the road.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk

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^Its better then nothing.

Who will protect the Afghan people?

if you rely on rapists, drug-addicts and pedophiles for security I wonder what your definition of security is? Sodom and Gomorra?

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The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

Six billion dollars later, the Afghan National Police can't begin to do their jobs right—never mind relieve American forces.


Mohammad Moqim watches in despair as his men struggle with their AK-47 automatic rifles, doing their best to hit man-size targets 50 meters away. A few of the police trainees lying prone in the mud are decent shots, but the rest shoot clumsily, and fumble as they try to reload their weapons. The Afghan National Police (ANP) captain sighs as he dismisses one group of trainees and orders 25 more to take their places on the firing line. "We are still at zero," says Captain Moqim, 35, an eight-year veteran of the force. "They don't listen, are undisciplined, and will never be real policemen."
Poor marksmanship is the least of it. Worse, crooked Afghan cops supply much of the ammunition used by the Taliban, according to Saleh Mohammed, an insurgent commander in Helmand province. The bullets and rocket-propelled grenades sold by the cops are cheaper and of better quality than the ammo at local markets, he says. It's easy for local cops to concoct credible excuses for using so much ammunition, especially because their supervisors try to avoid areas where the Taliban are active. Mohammed says local police sometimes even stage fake firefights so that if higher-ups question their outsize orders for ammo, villagers will say they've heard fighting.
America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force, buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits—but the program has been a disaster. More than $322 million worth of invoices for police training were approved even though the funds were poorly accounted for, according to a government audit, and fewer than 12 percent of the country's police units are capable of operating on their own. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the State Department's top representative in the region, has publicly called the Afghan police "an inadequate organization, riddled with corruption." During the Obama administration's review of Afghanistan policy last year, "this issue received more attention than any other except for the question of U.S. troop levels," Holbrooke later told NEWSWEEK. "We drilled down deep into this."
The worst of it is that the police are central to Washington's plans for getting out of Afghanistan. The U.S.-backed government in Kabul will never have popular support if it can't keep people safe in their own homes and streets. Yet in a United Nations poll last fall, more than half the Afghan respondents said the police are corrupt. Police commanders have been implicated in drug trafficking, and when U.S. Marines moved into the town of Aynak last summer, villagers accused the local police force of extortion, assault, and rape.
The public's distrust of the cops is palpable in the former insurgent stronghold of Marja. Village elders welcomed the U.S. Marines who recently drove out the Taliban, but told the Americans flatly they don't want the ANP to return. "The people of Marja will tell you that one of their greatest fears was the police coming back," says Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who took over in November as chief of the U.S. program to expand and improve Afghanistan's security forces. "You constantly hear these stories about who was worse: the Afghan police that were there or the Taliban." The success of America's counterinsurgency strategy depends on the cops, who have greater contact with local communities than the Army does. "This is not about seizing land or holding terrain; it's about the people," says Caldwell. "You have to have a police force that the people accept, believe in, and trust."
More than a year after Barack Obama took office, the president is still discovering how bad things are. At a March 12 briefing on Afghanistan with his senior advisers, he asked whether the police will be ready when America's scheduled drawdown begins in July 2011, according to a senior official who was in the room. "It's inconceivable, but in fact for eight years we weren't training the police," replied Caldwell, taking part in the meeting via video link from Afghanistan. "We just never trained them before. All we did was give them a uniform." The president looked stunned. "Eight years," he said. "And we didn't train police? It's mind-boggling." The room was silent.
Efforts to build a post-Taliban police force have been plagued from the start by unrealistic goals, poor oversight, and slapdash hiring. Patrolmen were recruited locally, issued weapons, and placed on the beat with little or no formal training. Most of their techniques have been picked up on the job—including plenty of ugly habits. Even now, Caldwell says, barely a quarter of the 98,000-member force has received any formal instruction. The people who oversaw much of the training that did take place were contractors—many of them former American cops or sheriffs. They themselves had little proper direction, and the government officials overseeing their activities did not bother to examine most expenses under $3,000, leaving room for abuse. Amazingly, no single agency or individual ever had control of the training program for long, so lines of accountability were blurred.
Coalition efforts to build an Afghan police force were painfully slow at first. By 2003 the U.S. State Department decided to speed things up by deploying the Virginia-based defense contractor DynCorp International, which had held previous contracts to train police officers in Kosovo and Haiti. The company began setting up a string of training centers across the country. After the Defense Department took a role in overseeing that work in 2005, it squabbled constantly with State over whether the training should emphasize police work or counterinsurgency.
Neither the State Department nor DynCorp was prepared for the job they faced. Most of the recruits are rural villagers who have never been inside a classroom. Roughly 15 percent test positive for drugs, primarily hashish. Few know how to use a toothbrush or drive, and nearly 90 percent are illiterate. In 2005 DynCorp opened a new police academy on the outskirts of Jalalabad, and within a few months the academy's drains backed up. Maintenance workers discovered that the septic tanks were full of smooth stones—a toilet-paper substitute used by many rural Afghans. DynCorp had to bring in backhoes to repair the problem, and the company had to add two days of classes in basic hygiene.
The ANP still takes just about anyone who applies. "Our recruits are unemployed youth with no education and no prospects," says Police Col. Mohammad Hashim Babakarkhil, deputy commander of Kabul's central police-training center. Since January 2007, upwards of 2,000 police have been killed in action—more than twice the figure for Afghan Army soldiers. U.S. officers say as many as half the police casualties were a result of firearms accidents and traffic collisions.
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It's practically impossible to produce competent police officers in a program of only eight weeks, says a former senior DynCorp executive, requesting anonymity because he continues to work in the industry. But that was the time frame State and Defense set for the course. "They were not going to be trained police officers. We knew that. They knew that," the former executive says. "It was a numbers game." In fact, the course has now been cut from eight weeks to six in order to squeeze in more trainees. ("We believe the training is appropriate under the circumstances," says Assistant Secretary of State David Johnson. DynCorp spokesman Douglas Ebner says the basic-training course is part of a more extensive 40-week program, and is supported by further "field monitoring, mentoring, and advising." Training hours have been extended to make up for the lost weeks, he says. DynCorp does "not make the policies, recruit the police candidates, or design the program," he adds, saying the company has "fully met" its objective of providing highly qualified police trainers.)
Whether or not recruits have mastered their subjects, almost everyone graduates. Even if they fail the firearms test, they're issued a weapon and put on the street. Only the Interior Ministry can flunk a candidate, and that rarely happens. "There were a lot of Afghans who seemed to have some patriotism and wanted to make their country better," recalls Tracy Jeansonne, a former deputy sheriff from Louisiana who worked for DynCorp from May 2006 to June 2008. "But a lot of the police officers wanted to be able to extort money from locals. If we caught them, we'd suggest they be removed. But we couldn't fire anybody. We could only make suggestions."
A former midlevel DynCorp official calls the program "dysfunctional." Requesting anonymity because he doesn't want problems with his former employer, he displays dozens of weekly reports sent to State and military officials; almost all include some mention of an Afghan police officer or commander as "corrupt." Yet of the 170,000 or so Afghans trained under the program since its inception, only about 30,000 remain on the force, according to State and Defense officials. "In terms of retention and attrition, we can say there's a problem," says Steve Kraft, who oversees the program for the State Department. The cops' base salary and hazardous-duty pay were recently raised to match Afghan Army levels, but no one knows if those changes are really helping. "Once they leave the training center, we currently don't know whether they stay with the force or quit," Kraft says. "The bottom line is, we just don't know."


And what has become of all the billions of dollars this program has cost America? Government investigators aren't entirely sure. Fundamental questions are raised in an audit of the Afghan police-training program released in February by the State and Defense departments' inspectors general. When State finally sent an "invoice-reconciliation team" to review expense receipts submitted under one particular contract, it discovered that $322 million in invoices had been "approved even though they were not allowable, allocable, or reasonable." What's more, the auditors said, half those invoices included errors.
The lapses don't stop there. The audit says State Department officials "did not conduct adequate surveillance for two task orders in excess of $1 billion." According to the auditors, State's contract supervisors didn't adequately oversee the use of government-owned property, failed to maintain contract files properly, and sometimes neglected to "match goods to receiving reports"—meaning, evidently, that they didn't verify that the U.S. government had actually received the goods it had paid for. (DynCorp's Ebner responds: "We are fully engaged with the Department of State to ensure complete and thorough reconciliation of all invoices, and recognize and welcome the emphasis on sufficient oversight personnel to complete this process.")
Those failures should have been no surprise. The audit also found that State routinely short-staffed its contract-monitoring office in Afghanistan. At one point, only three contract officers were on the ground overseeing DynCorp's $1.7 billion training contract. A former DynCorp official who worked in Afghanistan, asking not to be named because he remains in the government contracting business, says he asked the State Department repeatedly for concrete goals for the police contract but never got firm answers. "I'd ask them: 'Please explain to me what a successful training program was. What are the standards you want us to apply?' There was no vision for the future." (Assistant Secretary Johnson says, "From the start, our training program was based on a clear, professionally developed curriculum ... A simple head count of the number of individuals on the ground ignores the substantial back-office support our contract oversight personnel had from Washington.")
A new set of difficulties arose last summer. Caldwell's predecessor, Gen. Richard Formica, decided that Defense should take direct control of the training contract. To avoid a lengthy bidding competition, he suggested folding the police-training mission into an existing anti-drug and counterterrorism program overseen by the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command. Bids were limited to companies already under contract to the missile command, effectively shutting out DynCorp. In the end, only two firms wound up bidding: Northrop Grumman and Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.
DynCorp fought back. In December the company filed a formal protest to block the Defense Department from seizing control of the contract. Last week the Government Accountability Office upheld DynCorp's complaint and suggested that the competition be open to all comers, including DynCorp as well as Xe and Northrop. DynCorp's CEO, William Ballhaus, recently told investors that the company's contract had been extended until July in any case; now it seems the new bidding process will take much longer.
At Kabul's police training center, a team of 35 Italian carabinieri recently arrived to supplement DynCorp's efforts. Before the Italians showed up at the end of January for a one-year tour, the recruits were posting miserable scores on the firing range. But the Italians soon discovered that poor marksmanship wasn't the only reason: the sights of the AK-47 and M-16 rifles the recruits were using were badly out of line. "We zeroed all their weapons," says Lt. Rolando Tommasini. "It's a very important thing, but no one had done this in the past. I don't know why."
The Italians also had a different way of teaching the recruits to shoot. DynCorp's instructors started their firearms training with 20-round clips at 50 meters; the recruits couldn't be sure at first if they were even hitting the target. Instead the carabinieri started them off with just three bullets each and a target only seven meters away. The recruits would shoot, check the target, and be issued three more rounds. When they began gaining confidence, the distance was gradually increased to 15, then 30, and then 50 meters. On a recent day on the firing range only one of 73 recruits failed the shooting test. The Italians say that's a huge improvement. (DynCorp says its civilian police advisers are "highly qualified"; the average trainer has more than a decade of law-enforcement experience.)
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Caldwell also says it's just easier to work with paramilitary police units, such as the Italians and the French gendarmerie, than with contractors. Active-duty police units have a coherent and disciplined chain of command, Caldwell says. "When I bring in a contractor unit I'm getting a different group of folks," he says. "It may be someone who was a state patrolman, a local sheriff, or a policeman from New York City, each operating under different standards and with different backgrounds." Everything has to be negotiated. "If I say to my contractor that I want to make a change, he may say, 'Well, I'm not sure if that's really the best way,' " says Caldwell. "But if I can bring in a gendarmerie force, they're ready to go ... and take instructions well."
By the end of October, Caldwell hopes to build the force to 109,000 members, including an "elite unit" that so far has roughly 4,900 members. That outfit is called the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP). It'll be used for particularly sensitive assignments like Marja. ANCOP members get 16 weeks of training, and they're required to have at least a third-grade proficiency in reading and writing. So far, reviews from Marja are mixed. "The new police are more organized, committed, responsible, and helpful than the previous police, who were more like a criminal gang," Assadullah, a school principal, tells newsweek. (Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.) Local shopkeeper Hajji Noruddin Khan disagrees. "We are as disappointed with the new police as we were with the old police," he complains.
Quality matters. "In the rush to increase the number of trained police officers, we must remember that the end goal is a civilian police force capable of promoting good government, not a paramilitary adjunct for the counterinsurgency fight," warns Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the top U.S. Marine commander in southern Afghanistan, puts it more succinctly: "I'd rather have one well-trained cop than 10 untrained." Besides, the fact is that no one is quite sure how many Afghan police there really are. The Americans are only now in the process of trying to create a database that will positively identify and track recruits. Without such data, it's more than difficult to catch "ghost" troops who exist only as names on the payroll, not to mention possible Taliban infiltrators.


But the buildup continues, and so does the training. On the firing range just outside Kabul, one of the few decent marksmen is Khair Mohammad, an illiterate 24-year-old from northern Afghanistan. "I've already had a lot of practice shooting at the Taliban," he says. He's been a cop for two years, serving one year in Kandahar and another on checkpoints just outside Marja. "I lost a lot of friends in the fighting," he says. Now he's getting his first taste of formal training, and hoping to join ANCOP. He figures he'd earn about double the $180 a month (including combat pay) he's been getting. His trainers are doing their best to make him worth the extra salary. "One thing the police don't know is good relations with the people," says Carabinieri Lt. Col. Massimo Deiana. "We're trying to train them to respect and relate to people." If such a skill is teachable at all, it could be far more important in the long run than knowing how to shoot straight.
With Sami Yousafzai in Kabul
T. Christian Miller is a senior reporter with ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit news organization that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. For more of Miller's previous reporting on defense contractors, go to www.propublica.org/contractors

[pukhtana]

I think we need a proper discussion on this.

We just sort of derailed his thread of images.

Should I message admin khan to break the thread?

[شمله ور خراساني]

South Asia

Dec 1, 2009

Tajik grip on Afghan army signals strife
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Contrary to the official portrayal of the Afghan National Army (ANA) as ethnically balanced, the latest data from United States sources reveal that the Tajik minority now accounts for far more ANA troops than the Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group.

The shift in the ethnic composition of ANA troops in recent years is leading to another civil war between the Pashtuns and a Tajik-led anti-Pashtun ethnic coalition, similar to the one that followed


the fall of the Soviet-supported regime in 1992, according to some observers.

Tajik domination of the ANA feeds Pashtun resentment over the control of the country's security institutions by their ethnic rivals, while Tajiks increasingly regard the Pashtun population as aligned with the Taliban.

The leadership of the army has been primarily Tajik since the ANA was organized in 2002, and Tajiks have been over-represented in the officer corps from the beginning. But the original troop composition of the ANA was relatively well-balanced ethnically.

General Karl Eikenberry, then chief of the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan, issued guidelines in 2003 to ensure ethnic balance in the ANA, according to Chris Mason, who was a member of the Afghanistan Inter-agency Operations Group from 2003 to 2005. Eikenberry acted after then defense minister Marshall Mohammed Qasim Fahim had packed with Tajiks the first group of ANA recruits to be trained.

The Eikenberry guidelines called for 38% of the troops to be Pashtun, 25% Tajiks, 19% Hazaras and 8% Uzbek.

Since then, US officials have continued to put out figures indicating that the ethnic balance in the ANA was in line with the Eikenberry guidelines. As recently as 2008, the RAND Corporation was given data showing that 40% of the enlisted men in the ANA were Pashtun and that Tajiks accounted for less than 30%.

The latest report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, issued on October 30, shows that Tajiks, which represent 25% of the population, now account for 41% of all ANA troops who have been trained, and that only 30% of the ANA trainees are now Pashtuns.

A key reason for the predominance of Tajik troops is that by mid-2007 the ANA began to have serious problems recruiting troops in the rural areas of Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

At least in the Pashtun province of Zabul, the percentage of Pashtuns in the ANA has now been reduced to a minimum. In Zabul province, US officers embedded in one of the kandaks (battalions) reported earlier this year that they believed only about 5% of the troops in the entire brigade are Pashtuns, according to a report by Army Times correspondent Sean D Naylor published in the Armed Forces Journal last July. The brigade commander in Zabul is a Tajik.

Meanwhile, Tajiks have maintained a firm grip on the command structure of the ANA. Marshall Fahim put commanders from the Tajik-controlled Northern Alliance in key positions within the Ministry of Defense as well as in the ANA command.

Mason recalled that the US thought it had an agreement with President Hamid Karzai under which the command structure of the ANA would be reorganized on the basis of ethnic balance, starting with the top 25 positions. But Karzai never acted on the agreement, Mason said.

Even after Fahim was stripped of his government and military positions by Karzai in 2004, his appointee as ANA chief of staff, General Bismullah Khan, remained as head of the army. Tajiks have continued to occupy the bulk of the positions in the Ministry of Defense.

A United Nations official in Kabul estimated that, as of spring 2008, no less than 70% of all kandaks were commanded by Tajiks, as reported by Italian scholar Antonio Giustozzi.

Even in overwhelmingly Pashtun Zabul province, there are only two Pashtun kandak commanders out of a total of six, Matthew Hoh, the senior US civilian official in Zabul until he submitted his resignation in September in protest against the war, told Inter-Press Service (IPS) in an interview.

Mason views the process by which the ANA is coming to be seen as an increasingly Tajik institution as making a civil war between the Pashtuns and the Tajiks and other ethnic minorities virtually inevitable.

"I believe the elements of a civil war are in play," Mason told IPS.

Mason said the refusal of Pashtuns in the south and east to join the ANA is part of a "self-reinforcing spiral". The more Dari, the language spoken by Tajiks, becomes the de facto language of the ANA, said Mason, the more Pashtuns will see it as an alien institution.

"The warlords have already started rearming," said Mason.

Although the US "has done as good a job as it could have" in trying to make the ANA mirror the broader society, Mason said, it can only "attenuate" rather than prevent such a war in the future, even with a larger troop presence.

Hoh believes a civil war between the Pashtuns and a Tajik-led alliance of ethnic groups has already begun but could get much worse. "It is already bad now," he said, but unless US policy changes, "we could see a return of the civil war of the 1990s".

To avoid that outcome would require putting priority on political reconciliation in order to "integrate all elements of society into the Afghan government and security forces", said Hoh. That, in turn, would require an international framework, probably involving the United Nations, he said.

Hoh recalled a scene he witnessed in Zabul suggesting that Tajik commanders view the ANA as belonging to the Tajik-led Northern Alliance. At an Afghan independence day event at a military base August 19, attended by hundreds of ANA and national police, the large photograph adorning the wall was not of Karzai but of the Tajik commander of the entire Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The previous civil war between Pashtun and Tajik-led armies was triggered by the disappearance in 1992 of the national army of the Soviet-supported Najibullah regime, which had maintained a tenuous balance between the two major ethnic groups.

The collapse of the Najibullah regime and its army was followed immediately by fierce fighting between the Northern Alliance, which had reached Kabul first, and the forces of the Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had previously been allied with the non-Pashtun mujahideen against the Soviet-backed regime.

In a sign that Tajik commanders don't trust Pashtuns in the south and east, the Tajik senior ANA officer in Zabul, Major General Jamaluddin Sayed, dismissed the locally recruited national police in the province as being under Taliban influence and called for recruitment of police from outside the province.

"If we recruit ANP [Afghan National Police] people from Zabul province, probably they have some relationship with the Taliban," Jamaluddin told Army Times reporter Naylor.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

(Inter Press Service)

[شمله ور خراساني]

I think we need a proper discussion on this.

We just sort of derailed his thread of images.

Should I message admin khan to break the thread?

No. I think the articles perfectly suite the photo thread. First a glance of the looks and appearance of these drug-addicts and pedophiles, and then extensive reporting on what they actually are like.

Very good combination.

[شمله ور خراساني]

Afghan Army Lacks Enough Pashtuns


Updated: 61 days ago

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Sharon Weinberger Contributor
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(Feb. 19) -- Despite a salary increase meant to keep pace with what the Taliban is paying its foot soldiers, the Afghan National Army is still having problems recruiting Pashtuns into its ranks, according to a senior U.S. military official.

The force's ethnic makeup is a "very sensitive issue," Army Maj. Gen. David Hogg, deputy commander of the NATO Training Mission, told reporters on a conference call about rebuilding the Afghan National Army.

A major goal of the troop surge that President Barack Obama announced last year was to help train the Afghan National Army and security forces so they can eventually take over when U.S. and coalition troops pull out of the country. Recruitment has been a major challenge for the nascent army in the past.
Chris Hondros, Getty Images
Afghan men sit on a long bench in a desperately poor Pashtun village near the Pakistani border.


Though recruitment numbers have been going up in recent months -- in part because of the pay increase -- the army still has problems retaining recruits and meeting the goals for overall ethnic composition. "Our biggest challenge is with the Pashtuns from the south," Hogg said. "We don't have a lot of Pashtuns from the south."

The Afghan National Army is supposed to reflect the multi-ethnic makeup of Afghan society, with specific goals set for each group. Currently, it is supposed to be about 44 percent Pashtun and 25 percent Tajik, with the remaining numbers divided among Afghanistan's other ethnic groups.

There have been long been concerns that Tajiks, who dominated the Northern Alliance, exert increasing control over the Afghan National Army. Currently, there is a disproportionately high number of Tajiks in leadership positions in the military, Hogg said.

Signing up more Pashtuns is considered particularly critical not only because they are the single largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, but also because they are the main ethnic group in the Taliban, which continues to wage war against coalition forces and Afghanistan's central government.

One of the ways that coalition forces are trying to address the Pashtun shortfall is by recruiting former mujahedeen fighters into the military; those recruits, who are often older, are put through an eight-week retraining course that helps integrate them into the Afghan National Army.

For now, at least, that reintegration course is not being targeted at former Taliban, Hogg said.

Recruitment and ethnic balance aren't the only challenges facing the Afghan military. Corruption, particularly the problem of Afghans paying for senior military positions, is still a problems, Hogg acknowledged.

"The facts are [that] positions are still being bought," he said. 'I can't give you grand jury evidence, but it is happening."
Filed under: World

[شمله ور خراساني]

Canadian military aware of sex abuse of boys by Afghan allies




By David Pugliese, Ottawa CitizenSeptember 19, 2009Be the first to post a comment






Army staff and National Defence headquarters officials were told in 2007 that young boys had allegedly been sexually abused by Afghan security forces at a Canadian base in Afghanistan, but the concern at the time was that the incident might be reported in the news media, according to military records obtained by the Ottawa Citizen.
In addition, last year Brig.-Gen. J.C. Collin, commander of Land Force Central Area, passed on to senior army leadership concerns raised by military police who said they had been told by their commanders not to interfere in incidents where Afghan forces were having sex with children.
The newly released records raise questions about a military investigation that earlier this year concluded that allegations of sexual abuse of Afghan children by members of the Afghan army and police were unfounded. The Canadian Forces National Investigation Service also stated that its thorough investigation concluded allegations of such incidents were never reported to Canadian military commanders.
The allegations first surfaced publicly in June 2008 after the concerns about the incidents, originally raised by soldiers and military chaplains, were reported in the news media.
Former Cpl. Travis Schouten told military officials he had witnessed an Afghan boy being sodomized by two Afghan security personnel at Canada's Forward Operating Base Wilson in Afghanistan in 2006. Another soldier also came forward to a Toronto newspaper to report a similar occurrence at the same base in 2006.
A military chaplain talked about the abuse in a report sent up the chain of command at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa. Two other chaplains have also come forward to state that soldiers came to them upset about such abuses.
The issue is sensitive for the Canadian Forces and the federal government as the Afghanistan mission has been promoted to the public as being about protecting Afghan civilians. The Afghan National Army and police are seen as key to Canada's military withdrawal from that country in 2011.
It is the position of the Canadian Forces that its troops have no jurisdiction over the activities of Afghan military and police personnel, even those operating on Canadian bases.
The military records obtained by the Citizen through the Access to Information law note that a 90-minute meeting was held between an army public affairs staff member and a member of army commander Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie's executive staff in the summer/fall of 2007. According to the June 2008 e-mail written by Lt.-Col. Stephane Grenier, an adviser on operational stress injuries, the meeting focused on various controversies that might be brought out in the news media, including, "ANP/ANA members having anal sex with young boys."
ANP stands for Afghan National Police while ANA refers to Afghan National Army.
A second meeting about Afghan police and soldiers having sex with children was held later that week at National Defence headquarters involving senior members of the Defence Department's civilian and military public affairs staff, according to the e-mail.
In addition, on June 18, 2008 Brig.-Gen. J.C. Collin, commander of Land Force Central Area, passed on to Leslie's staff and Brig.-Gen. Ian Poulter the concerns raised by several military police officers. Collin called the e-mail from the military police commander "rather disconcerting."
Included were details from military police who noted it was well known among Canadian troops that ANA and ANP personnel had sex with kids. Another was upset that military police were told not to intervene in such matters, according to the e-mail.
"At this late date I cannot specifically remember who delivered the said briefings however I can say that it was delivered in Gagetown and that it sparked considerable debate amongst the MP pers(onnel)," noted one police officer in an e-mail Collin forwarded to the army's senior staff. The e-mail had been written by Maj. V.R. Ethier, the commander of 2 MP Unit, the army military police unit of Ontario.
"Of greatest concern to the MP members was the belief that if they were (to) intervene in any instances of this nature that they would not be supported by the C o C," the e-mail added. C o C is a military term for chain of command.
Having sex with children is against the law in Afghanistan but some military officers have argued that since it is practised by some Afghans, particularly in Kandahar, then the Canadian Forces should not get involved in what should be seen as a "cultural" issue.
Maj. Francis Bolduc, deputy commanding officer of the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service, said his organization's examination of the issue found no evidence to support the sexual abuse allegations.
He said a thorough review of military police records showed no complaints were made about the issue and "all the allegations were unfounded." Bolduc noted that the investigation found the sexual abuse concerns were never reported to commanders.
Asked about the e-mails, he replied: "This is outside our lane."
Bolduc said those issues could be looked at by a board of inquiry into the issue that had been ordered by Lt.-Gen. Leslie.
Last June, Defence Minister Peter MacKay told the House of Commons that troops would not turn a blind eye to the abuse of children.
"Let us be clear, in no way, shape or form have Canadian soldiers and certainly the Canadian government ever condoned or excused allegations of sexual abuse against children in this country or anywhere else," he said.
Another incident recounted in the Ethier e-mail detailed how a complaint was made about the sexual abuse of children to his chain of command in 2005-2006 in Kandahar and after that an Afghanistan commander dealt with the situation.
In addition, Poulter received an e-mail on June 17, 2008, indicating that the sexual abuse issue had been raised by a Canadian colonel, a veteran of the war, during a military training session about Afghan culture. "He emphasized that it is not a practice that Afghan men discuss or practise in an open manner . . . one of those things that Afghans know happens but nobody talks about," noted the e-mail to Poulter.
In addition, it appears senior Canadian commanders were also concerned about the abuse. In a June 13, 2008, letter to army commander Leslie, the office of Lt.-Gen. Michel Gauthier asked that an investigation be started into the sexual assault allegations. "Furthermore, initial queries suggest there appeared to be some concern of the part of the Roto 2 BG chain of command with respect to certain off-duty activities related to the same incidents later raised to the reporter," the letter noted.
The records also indicate the allegations sparked much debate inside the military on what to acknowledge in public. The first response was to deny anything ever took place.
However, a series of "talking points" were produced on June 17, 2008, in which it was acknowledged in regard to "Afghan male sexual abuse of underage males" that "Soldiers are generally aware of this practice taking place in Afghanistan; They know that abuse, let alone of minors is wrong by our standards; They will report this activity to the appropriate authorities."
It is unclear how the NIS investigation concluded the allegations were unfounded when other organizations inside the Canadian Forces were acknowledging that the sexual abuse was indeed taking place.
A board of inquiry, ordered by Leslie last year, is still underway. The board, which has not released its report, will look only at whether the one assault reported in media occurred.
The board is to "identify the actions taken by individual CF members and the chain of command in response to that incident," as well as assess whether medical care was provided to any soldier who witnessed the incident.
Recommendations will be made on how to address future incidents of that nature, noted the board of inquiry outline produced by Leslie.
Leslie will review the contents of the report even though, according to military records, a member of his staff was informed about the sexual abuse issue back in 2007.
Leslie, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed as the board is still ongoing.
Asked whether there was a conflict of interest in allowing Leslie to review the findings of the board examining how the senior army leadership responded, an army official noted that Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Walt Natynczyk will also review the records.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

[شمله ور خراساني]

The Rape of the Afghan Boys

We talk about the possibility of losing the war in Afghanistan, but what if we lose our soul in Afghanistan?
Indirectly, Frontline will be asking that very question on April 20 with an underground report on the resurgence of bacha bazi or "boy play" among the wealthiest and most powerful men in northern Afghanistan. It’s the pustule threatening to burst all over the righteousness of our humanitarian effort there, and just the tip of the sick fact of how poor Afghan children are systematically used, abused, and tossed away by the ruling elite and even Afghan soldiers living, training, and fighting alongside our own.

Bacha bazi is an old Afghan tradition of taking young boys, dressing them up like girls, and making them perform for older men in tea rooms, weddings, and other private venues. The boys are "owned" by single or married men who trade or keep the boys as concubines. According to reports, the boys’ ages range from eight to 19, when they "age out" of the practice and are released.
"The bacha dancers are often abused children whose families have rejected them," saidthe Guardian’s Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who wrote about the practice in September. He described one boy who was sexually assaulted by a mechanic in his town. The boy’s family blamed him and turned him out. He was forced to live with the man who attacked him. "Now I am with someone else, and he taught me how to dance," the boy, now 16 years old, said.
Other reports describe bacha bazi as an increasingly lucrative business, in which the boy slaves are seen as important status symbols of the elite. "Everyone tries to have the best, most handsome, and good-looking boy," a former mujahedin commander told Reuters back in 2007.
A 42-year-old landowner in Baghlan province named Enayatullah told Reuters, "I was married to a woman 20 years ago, she left me because of my boy. … I was playing with my boy every night and was away from home, eventually my wife decided to leave me. I am happy with my decision because I am used to sleeping and entertaining with my young boy."
The boys, who often know no other life but as chattel, call the men "my lord." Attempting escape could result in severe physical punishment, or even death. The family of a dead 15-year-old boy told Frontline that a policeman was eventually thrown in jail in connection with his murder. But they believed the boy’s former owner, a wealthy drug baron whom he was escaping, bribed local officials to set the policeman free after only "a few months" of jail time.
"If only these people were punished, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen," the boy’s mother said. "Whoever commits these crimes doesn’t get punished. Power is power."
I remember the first time I ever heard of bacha bazi. A soldier friend of mine who had been in Kabul told me of a disconcerting evening when he stumbled into a tea room in which a group of well-dressed Afghan men were gathering. His Afghan interpreter yanked him by the arm and out of the place, warning of danger. That was bacha bazi, he explained, in which young boys are forced to dance for men. He had better move on and forget.
He moved on, but he never forgot. Like me, my friend had grown up in a working class New England town, and these were horrors that men were beaten and even killed for in prison. We call it pedophilia, and most here would say is worth an eternity of damnation for its perpetrators, not a high social rank and adulation among the town’s elite.
"It’s gotten limited attention," admitted Rachel Reid of Human Rights Watch. "There’s been some Afghan investigative journalists who have tackled it, though in areas where the perpetrators are also local ‘commanders’ whether official or unofficial, there will always be fear of reprisals."
Approaching the issue as Americans we are flummoxed, as if it occurs on another planet. Reprisals for exposing the sexual abuse of children? The Catholic Church spent more than a half-century hiding its abusive priests because it feared that reprisals from the outside might destroy the institution. Here, we have authority figures – former commanders and warlords – flaunting their dancing slave boys, practically daring interference from outside.
(ABC/Four Corners)

"What was so unnerving about the men I had met was not just their lack of concern for the damage their abuse was doing to the boys," said Najibullah Quraishi, the Afghan journalist who was escorted through the underground by one of the bacha bazi pimps for six months. His harrowing footage and reporting was broadcast by Australia’s Four Corners in February and will make its American debut via Frontline. "It was also their casualness with which they operated and the pride with which they show me their boys, their friends, their world. They clearly believed that nothing they were doing was wrong."
The behavior of these modern slave owners belies an endemic problem that human rights advocates and even NATO military personnel operating in Afghanistan have observed for some time now, according to reports. (The U.S. State Department included the rape, abuse, and exploitation of Afghan children in its 2009 annual human rights report, released in March).
But observers say the age-old ritual of man-boy predatory sex, which is obliquely condoned throughout Afghanistan because of a pervasive fear or indifference about prosecuting it on any serious level, according to numerous reports, has proliferated after decades of poverty, corruption, and a lack of enduring social institutions. All reports indicate that while bacha bazi and the abuse is illegal, perpetrators rarely pay for their crimes. Meanwhile, poor families sell their children, and orphans are snatched off the street. They are the meekest, preyed upon by the strongest – the kind of wealthy, powerful men who have benefited most from the Western occupation and generous foreign aid.
This has put us in a moral and ethical quandary too painful and perhaps too shameful to contemplate more openly.
Take the military, for example. First, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgment on the part of Western soldiers that Afghans they serve with in the field are engaging in homosexual activity (no irony there, of course). Many have written about how the strict segregation of Afghan men and women (who are also treated as property in traditional Afghan society) before marriage prevents the course of natural physical and emotional relationships between the sexes, and as one Afghan historian told me, "Straight guys find that their sexuality is flexible in these sorts of situations … soon [sex between men is] widely accepted with a wink and a nudge."
But it is when Afghan soldiers move beyond consensual "man-love Thursdays" with each other to procuring young boys in broad daylight that the flood of revulsion, resentment, and awkward questions comes to bear. Do they have the right to discipline? Would there be reprisals if they complained?
In 2008, apparently fed up, Canadian soldiers and chaplains did begin to complain.
In June that year the Toronto Star reported that a Canadian soldier said he witnessed in 2006 injuries sustained by a boy he had heard was raped by an Afghan soldier at one of the Canadian outposts in Kandahar. These injuries included the boy’s intestines falling out of his body, a "sign of trauma from anal rape." The Canadian’s testimony, in addition to other complaints, including an eyewitness account of the rape of a boy by two Afghan military personnel at Canada’s Forward Operating Base Wilson in 2006, formed the basis of an official investigation into whether the brass were ignoring complaints about systematic abuse up through 2007.
According to the press, an initial military investigation concluded in 2008 that the allegations were unfounded. Another investigation, launched by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Services (CFNIS), concluded in May 2009 that Canadian Forces Military Police in Afghanistan "did not receive any complaints on the alleged sexual abuse of Afghan male children." It did not answer the question of whether there had been any abuse, and it curiously noted that "the CFNIS has no jurisdiction over Afghan National Army or locally contracted interpreters in Afghanistan."
Nevertheless, subsequent testimony from Canadian personnel and newly released documents shed light on an utterly confusing landscape of conflicting official statements and reports, and they raise the question of who knew what and when, and whether the chain of command was listening or passing the buck. There are more than a few official/unofficial acknowledgments that Afghan police and military members were "having anal sex with young boys," plus disturbing allegations that the Canadian brass were told about the rapes and pressed soldiers to ignore them.
A new board of inquiry was opened last year, but what will it conclude? Is the military so afraid of overstepping cultural and political boundaries that it is paralyzed from doing the right thing?
The Ottawa Citizen described the soldier who had witnessed the intestines falling out of the boy’s body as now suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. If anecdotal evidence now surfacing that our own troops are witnessing similar things is true, we can only imagine the kind of moral and ethical hell they can be living out every day they risk their lives for this still largely undefined mission.
In writing about the rape of boys and its implications on the sustained Western alliance with the Afghan government and military in the Long War, journalist Patrick Cockburn commented in September, "one reason Afghan villagers prefer to deal with the Taliban rather than the government security forces is that the latter have a habit of seizing their sons at checkpoints and sodomizing them."
The Taliban reportedly banned these practices when it was in power. Today, clerics we would consider radical openly and regularly condemn bacha bazi and sex with children. "Under Islamic law, those who practice this would be stoned to death," Mawllawi Mohammaed Sadiq Sadiqyar, a prayer leader and scholar in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, told Reuters.
Nothing is ever black and white, and Taliban soldiers certainly don’t always "practice what they preach," as one source pointed out to me. But the Western mission sure gets complicated under these conditions. As usual, there are more questions than answers.
If the U.S. mission is to kneecap the Taliban, a radical religious movement that at one point managed to ostensibly restrain the cruel and morally abominable activities of creepy pimps/masters who liked to dominate and play with boys when they weren’t warring with one another and shaking down the weakest among them, what in the end, does it all mean for the Afghans whom President Obama has vowed to uplift? If Hamid Karzai sits on the top of this worm-infested confection without one word about prosecuting these crimes or protecting the children of his country, what does it say about the billions of dollars we have poured into his government to assist him?
What do we really know about the former mujahedin commanders we view as allies against the Taliban? What do they do at night while their wives wait patiently at home? Does it turn your stomach to think that American money went to train the police who now stand shoulder-to-shoulder each night with Afghan men gaping at underage boys dancing in silk with bells on their feet?
Are we the world’s biggest chumps or the world’s biggest enablers?
Cockburn made a practical point about what turning a blind eye may mean for Western soldiers in the long term:
"[T]he fact that male rape is common practice in the Afghan armed forces has, unfortunately, a great deal to do with the fate of British soldiers.
"There was a horrified reaction across Britain last week when a 25-year-old policeman called Gulbuddin working in a police station in the Nad Ali district of Helmand killed five British soldiers when he opened fire with a machine gun on them. But the reason he did so, according to Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times, citing two Afghans who knew Gulbuddin, was that he had been brutally beaten, sodomized, and sexually molested by a senior Afghan officer whom he regarded as being protected by the British.
"The slaughter at Nad Ali is a microcosm of what is happening across Afghanistan."

If winning the war against the "evildoers" means ignoring evil among our allies, then we have truly lost our soul. Cockburn argued that our governments should not put another Western soldier into Afghanistan while there is such obvious corruption snaking through the Afghan security services, not to mention the Karzai government. Too late. The U.S. military is set to expand its footprint of 100,000 by the end of the summer. Complaints within the ranks about Afghan military’s worthiness in the field will continue to simmer, while most of this stuff about debauchery, man-love Thursdays, sexual abuse, and the like will be left to percolate on the milblogs and in the tales soldiers bring home. Forget the State Department reports and the undercover investigative journalism; until the military (which is, like it or not, the face of America in Afghanistan) starts publicly condemning bacha bazi and the abuse of Afghan children with all the force and authority it can muster, then we might as well be putting our red scrawl on a pact with the devil.
No doubt the military cannot and will not seriously envisage withdrawing from that country now, but it should nonetheless consider this: take a long look at the boys shackled in the prisons, the orphans in the streets, the blank resignation of the victims of rape – they will no doubt be history’s next mujahedin, and they will be coming for the devil’s consorts.

http://original.antiwar.com