Patterico's Pontifications

9/28/2015

The High Price Of Looking The Other Way

Filed under: General — Dana @ 9:33 pm



[guest post by Dana]

Last week, the NYT published a very disturbing story about U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan being told to look the other way while powerful Afghan men- and U.S. allies-took part in the common cultural practice of raping young boys:

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.

Also discussed in the story was Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland, who, when in Afghanistan, flat out refused to look the other way, and as a result of that decision, is being involuntarily discharged from the Army. Martland “body-slammed” an Afghan police commander who kept a little boy tied to a pole in his house where he raped him repeatedly from 10 days to two weeks.

Defending his actions in a statement released today, Martland said:

While I understand that a military lawyer can say that I was legally wrong, we felt a moral obligation to act.

And about the decision to discharge him, Martland maintains:

Kicking me out of the Army is morally wrong and the entire country knows it.

The day after the NYT story was published, the White House was pressured to respond. They “looked the other way”:

“For the rules of engagement and the kind of structure that’s in place to guide the relationship between the United States and Afghan members of the military, I’d refer you to the Department of Defense for that,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

Earnest was pressed further to say whether President Obama is looking to review that policy in light of a New York Times story outlining how soldiers were powerless to help child rape victims in Afghanistan, and got in trouble with their superiors if they tried. To that, Earnest said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

When asked why questions about preventing child abuse and protecting human rights was being punted to the Pentagon, Earnest said, “Because … you’re asking about a policy that governs the conduct of U.S. military personnel in a dangerous place.”

“We continue to urge the Afghan and civil society to protect and support victims and their families, while also strongly encouraging justice and accountability under Afghan law for offenders,” Earnest said.

In a fierce piece of writing, Kurt Schlichter considers today’s socially-aware military and explains how officers were able to look the other way in the face of child rape:

The revelation that our generals expect Americans solders to allow screaming young boys to be sodomized and not stop it is simply the latest manifestation of the utter moral bankruptcy infecting the senior ranks of the U.S. military.

The problems with America’s military—which has now failed to win three wars in a row against backward fanatics whom the nineteenth-century Brits would have handily dispatched to hell in time for tea—are not merely budgetary. You can’t buy real leaders, leaders with strategic competence and moral courage. Aging equipment, while a problem, is nothing compared to the incompetence and moral cowardice of our military’s senior leaders.

Note the term “moral cowardice.” Many of these generals are decorated combat veterans who would gleefully charge an enemy machine-gun nest. But that physical courage in the face of the enemy does not translate into moral courage in the face of politicians and social justice warriors. It’s disheartening to see officers with Combat Infantryman badges and silver stars sheepishly nodding along with the lies of the coddled liberal elite.

There are fine generals—I served under many. But enough are not that the ranks are demoralized and the best and brightest future leaders are abandoning military careers, not because they don’t want to serve, but because they know it will be difficult to succeed unless they likewise abandon the principles that propelled them toward service in the first place.

While acknowledging President Obama’s role as commander in chief, Schlichter cautions that the president’s ineptitude and disregard for the military is not an excuse for those who know better:

It would be too easy to blame Barack Obama. As commander in chief, he is responsible for everything those under his command do or fail to do, and his political agendas and bizarre social engineering priorities, enacted by the eager band of loyalists he has promoted into the senior ranks over more capable warriors, have little to do with fighting and winning. Without a media interested in holding him to account for the dreadful performance of the military since his inauguration, Obama has a free ride.

Yet focusing on the feckless community organizer in the Oval Office just serves to let the generals off the hook. Obama cares nothing for the military, and no one expects him to. But it is not too much to expect our generals to care about their organizations, to care about winning wars and protecting their soldiers more than about getting that additional star.

Read the entire piece. It is a gut-wrenching look at the horrible positions soldiers find themselves in when under the leadership of those too weak to stand up for what is morally right and instead seek to further their own personal interests and ambitions above all else.

Schlichter closes:

We have the greatest troops in the world, probably in all of human history. Fighting with old, worn equipment is a challenge, but that can be overcome. The lack of competent, morally courageous senior leaders can’t be.

Obama bears some of the blame because he could fix this with a few select firings and unequivocal guidance that values come first. But no one expects that of him, and there is no excuse why the generals have not done it themselves. They could demand competence. They could demand moral courage. They could resign rather than play along with misguided politics. But they have chosen their stars and positions and perks instead. It’s a disgrace, and our troops and little Afghan kids are paying the price.

–Dana

39 Responses to “The High Price Of Looking The Other Way”

  1. Hello.

    Dana (86e864)

  2. i served with Col. Schlicter, and can testify to his standards.

    as such, i’m amazed he made full bird.

    me?

    i got out with over 19 years, 11 months TIG as an SP4/E4.

    and a clear conscience, with #caring.

    Velox et Mortifer!

    redc1c4 (e52d59)

  3. 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.

    -Sir Charles Napier, a general of the British Army, Commander-in-Chief in India, conqueror of Pakistan.

    Fred Z (5db617)

  4. And now the SCOAMF wants to appoint a homosexual as Secretary of the Army.

    nk (dbc370)

  5. These sorts of things are above the pay grade of a community organizer. Which means the Army is on auto pilot with a herd of snarky JAGs looking to burnish their credentials as it blunders aimlessly.

    Schlicter needs to come back and run for Senate, and Martland for the House.

    BobStewartathome (a52abe)

  6. This type of story makes me so sad and I think is a perfect portrayal of moral slide this country is in.

    Dejectedhead (ba8561)

  7. the Colonel lives in the South Bay…and runs a law firm.

    redc1c4 (e52d59)

  8. Doesn’t the Military Code of Honor (some military code) require Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland to not look the other way? Isn’t the military required to act morally? Wouldn’t looking the other way be amoral?

    Tanny O'Haley (c674c7)

  9. Fred Z #3 – that led to the discontinuing of suttee as a religious practice in India …

    Alastor (2e7f9f)

  10. The fact that a man like Col. John Boyd never made general says all you need to know about the Upper Echelon of Military Hierarchy. It’s as bereft of sense and moral principle as most CEOs.

    And I’m hardly a corporation basher, as anyone can tell you.

    IGotBupkis, "Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses." (e171c2)

  11. Fred Z: Yup. From a time when perhaps nations were too certain of their moral superiority across the board, but on that, equally as it should be on this, there is a line which one culture’s rules or another’s eventually holds sway.

    And for this type of thing, I’m pretty sure mine are the right ones.

    IGotBupkis, "Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses." (e171c2)

  12. .

    The High Price Of Looking The Other Way

    Unfortunately, thanks to the modern media, there is no price to be paid, if you’re the PotUS.

    .

    IGotBupkis, "Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses." (e171c2)

  13. Under the Taliban, pederasty carried the death penalty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi But, hey, they’re the bad guys and we’re the good guys. Making the world safe for freedom, democracy and sodomy.

    nk (dbc370)

  14. let’s join carlycakes and meghan’s coward daddy let’s bust them caps and shower them with money

    happyfeet (831175)

  15. This stuff pre-dates Obama, and was celebrated in the New York Times back in 2007:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/opinion/27shweder.html

    scrutineer (b7d257)

  16. Doesn’t the Military Code of Honor (some military code) require Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland to not look the other way? Isn’t the military required to act morally? Wouldn’t looking the other way be amoral?

    it certainly is a violation of the UCMJ, at least as i understood it when i wore a uniform…

    to have knowledge of a crime, and to not act is as bad, IMHO, as committing the crime itself, if not worse.

    redc1c4 (e52d59)

  17. From the NYT:

    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.” An exception, he said, is when rape is being used as a weapon of war.

    Dana (86e864)

  18. Schlichter misses the point about losing wars. The US military can
    beat any force in the world except the dem party.

    Richard Aubrey (27bcd2)

  19. The problem in this mess as I understand it is that the administration ended combat operations and transitioned the residual force to a support force in an allied country putting US troops in the same type security relationship the US has with Germany or Japan. That’s the part that creates the morally reprehensible conflict for US troops witnessing bad conduct by Afghans – it’s not US jurisdiction any more.

    Some may argue we botched the war but all should agree that we seriously botched the transition to Afghan sovereignty. Having said that the punishment doesn’t fit the offense. Article 15 type punishment, a stripe or two or expulsion from Afghanistan should have been the most Martland faced for his assault on the host nation’s forces.

    The really disgusting part is that the administration doesn’t give a hoot about Martland or the children of Afghanistan.

    crazy (cde091)

  20. The US military can beat any force in the world except the dem party.

    Sadly, amen to that.

    Hoagie (f4eb27)

  21. http://neoneocon.com/2015/09/25/we-have-lost-the-courage-to-see-things-as-they-are/

    This article features a prescient “letter to the editor.” It was published in the Manchester Guardian on October 4, 1938, right after Munich, and titled “The Funeral of British Honour.”” It was “written by F.L. Lucas, an acclaimed Cambridge literary don, a decorated – and severely wounded – veteran of WWI and recipient of an OBE for his intelligence work at Bletchley Park in WWII.”

    Here is part of the text:

    I appreciate the Prime Minister’s [Chamberlain’s] love of peace. I know the horrors of war – a great deal better than he can. But when he returns from saving our skins from a blackmailer at the price of other people’s flesh, and waves…a piece of paper with Herr Hitler’s name on it, if it were not ghastly, it would be grotesque. No doubt he has never read Mein Kampf in German. But to forget, so utterly, the Reichstag fire, and the occupation of the Rhineland, and 30 June 1934 [the Night of the Long Knives], and the fall of Austria! We have lost the courage to see things as they are. And yet Herr Hitler has kindly put down for us in black and white that programme he is so faithfully carrying out…

    …Mr. Chamberlain, canting of ‘peace with honour,’ has debased the moral currency of England…

    A few thoughts as they occur to me. So stand by; this is likely to be long.

    – What is the point of our continued involvement in Afghanistan? These commanders are raping boys with our support. There are no two ways about it.

    …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…

    This may have long been a problem but it didn’t happen under the Taliban. That fact is well known in Afghanistan. It is only happening again now with our help. The only reason these predatory commanders are again dominating the rural landscape and bullying the population is because we are aiding and abetting them. This may be part of their culture, but it isn’t a popular part with most of the population. Which is why these child sexual predators prey on fatherless boys. Otherwise they might be in danger. Village elders complain about the military and police commanders that we put in power over them. And our official response, per Josh Earnest, is to wash our hands of the situation the Obama administration has created.

    So why stay if all we’re doing is turning the rural population against us, creating fond memories of how things were better under the Taliban, and creating a generation of angry young men who were sexually abused by men we placed in power over them, then turned a blind eye?

    – Our troops are told to turn a blind eye to child rape because “it’s part of their culture.” Yes, it is, and this aspect of culture isn’t limited to the Afghan part of the Islamic world. Child rape, and good old-fashioned boy on girl rape, is epidemic in “refugee” centers across Europe. So, why does Obama think it’s a good idea to import this culture? As if we’re going to be enriched by it.

    – I bolded the part about reading Mein Kampf. Nowadays if you read the
    Quran and the Sunnah for the same reason Professor Lucas read Hitler’s
    screed, to know your enemy, you get called an Islamophobe. I realize the
    comparisons between Obama and Chamberlain are imperfect (Obama and his
    Iran deal are far more despicable than Chamberlain and his Munich
    Accords on so many levels) but the similarities between our situation
    now and the situation in the 1930s are still striking.

    Obama says the only alternative to his deal is war. Yes, and Churchill opposed Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and he and others like him were called warmongers, too. Coming from our historically illiterate, anti-American President these names are something of a badge of honor.

    Of course, the comparisons are imperfect. Why does the Hamas-linked (
    and therefore Muslim Brotherhood

    Steve57 (ca1277)

  22. Optical mouse strikes again!

    Point being, CAIR is to Hamas/the MB today what the German American Bund was to the Nazi party in the 1930s. There is ample evidence (per the judge) in the transcript of the Holy Land Foundation trial.

    CAIR is to Islamic ideology what the German American Bund was to the Nazi party. There is a reason why CAIR is banned in Dubai as a terrorist organization. Why are we stupider today than in the ’30s? Nobody then was stupid enough to pretend that the Bund was an honest broker, yet the LHMFM is stupid enough to give CAIR reps air time as if they are who they say they are. As if they’re honest brokers instead of fifth columnists.

    – In what way is Obama the CinC?

    “For the rules of engagement and the kind of structure that’s in place to guide the relationship between the United States and Afghan members of the military, I’d refer you to the Department of Defense for that,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

    Shorter Josh Earnest: “Don’t ask us. We’re just the WH. We have no control over the DoD. How would we even know what they’re doing?”

    Isn’t it sweet, by the way, how they pretend the DoD policy of looking the other way is out of an abundance of concern for the safety of our personnel.

    When asked why questions about preventing child abuse and protecting human rights was being punted to the Pentagon, Earnest said, “Because … you’re asking about a policy that governs the conduct of U.S. military personnel in a dangerous place.”

    The clear evidence is that they’re putting the troops’ lives in greater danger. Yet they hide behind the troops who they’re getting killed.

    And, by the way, looking away from Afghan child rape is clearly the President’s deliberate policy.

    That’s exactly what Josh Earnest does in this press conference. He looks the other way and dodges the question. The fact that instead of taking any sort of responsibility for the issue he referred the question to their subordinates at DoD is the clearest evidence we can have on that score. Because they’re setting the example for the entire chain of command. Put the onus on your subordinates. And that is exactly what the chain of command is doing all the way down. Following this President’s example.

    Precisely as Kurt Schlichter states in his article.

    …So, faced with these two options, the craven generals selected the worst possible option, and failed to give clear guidance one way or the other. Instead of taking on the responsibility that comes with the job, they punted. They chose not to give clear orders—“See it and stop it” or “See it but do nothing”—putting the risk they should bear as commanders onto their subordinates. Now, soldiers have to decide whether to do what is right or do what their generals telegraph they want done but won’t say because they don’t want to be held accountable for it…

    Steve57 (ca1277)

  23. Slightly O/T, but Schlichter’s article about the moral cowardice of our senior military and political leadership combined with the political leadership’s insane desire to import en masse a hostile violent culture put me in mind of something.

    It was just this past January that world leaders were marching in Paris pretending to be in solidarity with the murdered satirists at Charlie Hebdo. Less than ten months ago they were pretending to support the Western principle of free speech.

    Right in front, arm in arm with French PM Hollande was German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And what is she doing today? Cracking down on free speech lest anyone criticize her mass importation of a violent extremist culture. And no doubt lest anyone’s execise of free speech cause Muslim violence. Working with Mark Zuckerberg to police facebook and report “hate speech” or “xenophobia.” No doubt anything like a Charlie Hebdo cartoon is now illegal in Germany.

    No wonder that ISIS is certain the West is ripe for the taking. You can smell the moral cowardice, the hypocrisy, from continents away.

    Steve57 (ca1277)

  24. Greetings:

    For me, it’s just another triumph of the JAGs, JAGoffs, and JAGettes. Uncle Joe Stalin had his political commissars, America’s 21st Century all-volunteer Army has all off those enforcing President Obama’s idea of “social justice”, which, if you all recall was what Uncle Joe was bringing to the Russian Empire.

    11B40 (0f96be)

  25. “Looking the other way” is a commandment given by the State-established pro-choice cult that prescribes tolerance and even normalization of dysfunctional and violent orientations and behaviors.

    The members of the cult severely lack self-awareness or they are practicing a psychological defense in order to avoid the neurosis associated with the cognitive dissonance innate to the pro-choice doctrine.

    n.n (e651b0)

  26. There is no way that Obama could give firm guidance on this issue. To do so, he would need to have some morals, amd he doesn’t. Futhermore, I doubt like hell he knows anyone who does.

    C. S. P. Schofield (c5e809)

  27. Don’t go comparing Obama to Stalin, C.S.P.. Stalin was intelligent, energetic, serious and competent.

    nk (dbc370)

  28. Sorry, 11B40.

    nk (dbc370)

  29. Perhaps it’s time to take a page from the SJW playbook and start a #theobamaadministrationisobjectivelyprochildrape trend online.

    M. Scott Eiland (acaef4)

  30. 25. There is no way that Obama could give firm guidance on this issue. To do so, he would need to have some morals, amd he doesn’t. Futhermore, I doubt like hell he knows anyone who does.

    C. S. P. Schofield (c5e809) — 9/29/2015 @ 10:32 am

    I realize there is no way Obama would give firm guidance on this. But it’s not due to a lack of a sense of morality. His sense of morality, indeed that of the entire left, is that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with sexualizing children nor with pedophilia.

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-sexual-revolution-and-children-how-the-left-took-things-too-far-a-702679.html

    In the spring of 1970, Ursula Besser found an unfamiliar briefcase in front of her apartment door. It wasn’t that unusual, in those days, for people to leave things at her door or drop smaller items into her letter slot. She was, after all, a member of the Berlin state parliament for the conservative Christian Democrats. Sometimes Besser called the police to examine a suspicious package; she was careful to always apologize to the neighbors for the commotion.

    The students had proclaimed a revolution, and Besser, the widow of an officer, belonged to those forces in the city that were sharply opposed to the radical changes of the day. Three years earlier, when she was a newly elected member of the Berlin state parliament, the CDU had appointed Besser, a Ph.D. in philology, to the education committee. She quickly acquired a reputation for being both direct and combative.

    The briefcase contained a stack of paper — the typewritten daily reports on educational work at an after-school center in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, where up to 15 children aged 8 to 14 were taken care of during the afternoon. The first report was dated Aug. 13, 1969, and the last one was written on Jan. 14, 1970.

    Even a cursory review of the material revealed that the educational work at the Rote Freiheit (“Red Freedom”) after-school center was unorthodox. The goal of the center was to shape the students into “socialist personalities,” and its educational mission went well beyond supervised play. The center’s agenda included “agitprop” on the situation in Vietnam and “street fighting,” in which the children were divided into “students” and “cops.”

    Pantomiming Intercourse

    The educators’ notes indicate that they placed a very strong emphasis on sex education. Almost every day, the students played games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.

    According to the records, a “sex exercise” was conducted on Dec. 11 and a “fucking hour” on Jan. 14. An entry made on Nov. 26 reads: “In general, by lying there we repeatedly provoked, openly or in a hidden way, sexual innuendoes, which were then expressed in pantomimes, which Kurt and Rita performed together on the low table (as a stage) in front of us.”

    The material introduced the broader public to a byproduct of the student movement for the first time: the sexual liberation of children…

    …The self-deception of these supposedly enlightened parents began when they tried to force an uninhibited relationship with sex on the children. In theory, their goal was to enable the children to act on their sexual needs. But because children are not spontaneously inclined to become sexually active in front of adults, they had to be stimulated to do so. The parents were constantly telling sex jokes and using words like “c**k,” “butt” and “vagina.” “Actually, my sons really liked going to the Kinderladen,” says Schuller, “but they thought the constant chatter about sex was horrible.”

    In her novel “Das bleiche Herz der Revolution” (“The Pale Heart of the Revolution”), Sophie Dannenberg strikingly described how agonizing it can be for children when their boundaries of privacy are violated. Dannenberg, whose parents, motivated by their affiliation with the German Communist Party, sent her to a Kinderladen in the western city of Giessen in the 1970s, used the stories told by her mother and other contemporary witnesses to write her account of an atmosphere of constant enlightenment.

    …Although the people Dannenberg interviewed did not recall any instances of physical advances, they did describe “softer forms of sexual assault,” such as pushy demands on children to show their naked bodies. In the novel, which is based on Dannenberg’s research, the eight-year-old character Simone is told to strip in front of several adults and other children. “Why do you want to hide yourself,” the mother says, to the amusement of the people standing around, when the child instinctively holds a pillow in front of her genitalia. “It’s a beautiful thing you have there! Show it to us!”

    I think that’s enough; read the whole thing for a fuller measure of the depravity of the left. This wasn’t confined to the German left. I grew up in a metropolitan area, one city over from a very liberal college city, in the 1960s and 70s. I was very aware there were urban communes where bathrooms didn’t have doors, or if they did they were glass doors. No privacy was allowed. The very desire for privacy was suspect. Just like in the USSR at the same time.

    I’m sure more was going on than that, but Americans aren’t as diligent about documenting their activities as Germans.

    This has never gone away. In the ’60s it was couched in the language of liberating children from bourgeois inhibitions. In some ways it still is. Recall Obama’s old “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings, who refused to report the fact one of his high school students admitted he was meeting and having sex with older men in public restrooms. I almost used the words “failed to report” but it was no failure on Jennings part. He approved of the activity. He founded the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network which is h3ll bent on affirming homosexuality beginning in Kindergarten. He wrote a forward for a book on “queering” elementary education that among other things praised teaching a 7 year old girl to masturbate.

    Now it’s often couched in terms of rights. Self-identified transgendered kids have a “right” to use the same bathroom and locker rooms and showers as kids of the opposite sex. And if the children object having to shower next to someone obviously of the opposite sex, then it’s those who object who will get in trouble.

    To sum it up, to leftist statists like Obama the idea of self-ownership is anathema. Hence SSM and the HHS contraceptive mandate. The sole reason he and the left latched onto those as causes is to create an excuse to have others place demands upon individuals which the individual has no right to refuse.

    http://www.richmondregister.com/news/obama-religious-freedom-no-excuse-to-deny-rights-to-others/article_6fd8fd88-65f3-11e5-8fce-93536d1affe4.html

    The left has been on a jihad to destroy the Constitution for decades. They figured out the way to destroy the Bill of Rights was to invent rights that aren’t in the Constitution, which then take precedence over the ones that are. Why?

    The state owns you. The Bill of Rights gets in their way; it says you own yourself. To a leftist statist collectivist that can not be allowed.

    The point of those 1960s communist experiments on children wasn’t designed to liberate children from anything except the idea that they owned their own bodies. As Dannenberg’s research showed (as if we need research on this) it was agonizing for the children when their privacy boundaries were violated. Our children and our grandchildren will experience the same psychological and emotional agony in the name of transgender rights.

    Simply put, you do not have the right to privacy, to your body, or your own mind.

    So in that light, to a statist leftist progressive are those Afghan military and police commanders really doing anything all that wrong?

    Steve57 (ca1277)

  31. C. S. P. Schofield, I responded to your comment. Unfortunately I quoted too liberally from this article.

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-sexual-revolution-and-children-how-the-left-took-things-too-far-a-702679-2.html

    Essentially it documents the German left and how it even attempted to normalize pedophilia. And there are instances of words I didn’t catch, so now my comment is in moderation and I doubt it will ever get out.

    Read the article if you care to remind yourself of the depravity of the left.

    But the left is never honest about why it does anything. The idea of self-ownership is anathema to the left. You do not have a right to privacy, to your own body, or your own conscience. You are owned by the state.

    So from that perspective these Afghan government officials didn’t do all that much wrong. That’s why Obama won’t take a stand. On the one hand it’s not that big of a deal as far as he’s concerned. On the other hand he can’t admit that publicly.

    Steve57 (ca1277)

  32. Tangential, but the British needed two tries to bring the Afghanis under their thumb, the first probably the worst defeat they suffered in modern times..
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War

    kishnevi (9cb6b5)

  33. yes, the entire british contingent except for dr. bryden was wiped out,

    http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/member-clintons-secret-spy-network-worked-cbs-news-helped-shape-benghazi-coverage_1034186.html

    the narrative isn’t going to appear on it’s own,

    narciso (ee1f88)

  34. Every once in a while it is important to take some egregious actors and make examples out of them.
    did some Pashtun boy rapists get a red hot poker stuffed up their ass and then die by hanging at dawn?
    Nope.
    We made an example out of the man whose moral compass would not allow him to allow rape to continue.
    Another fine time for the #failamerica hashtag.
    From Afghanistan west to Syria, down through Yemen and over to Nigeria, the religion of peace is overachieving on the child rape and sex slavery. Where are the fatwas, and how can this go on, but the USA is the Great Satan.
    Whatever. I think we should let them kill each other and stay out of it until the godforsaken place self purges for 4 years or so.

    steveg (fed1c9)

  35. So …….ffffffffff@#$ing SARGENT BERGDAHL, served with valor and distinction?????????
    What has happened to us. AMERICAN SERVICEMEN died in attempts to RESCUE a DESERTER. Bergdahl was a TRAITOR who deserted. Obama used Bergdahl and BERDAHLS MORON PARENTS. And OBAMA RELEASED 5 HIGH VALUE HIGH LEVEL TALIBAN LEADERS for a DESERTER.

    We are in BIZARRO WORLD.

    Gus (7cc192)

  36. Dana,

    I love your posts, but I cringe every time I see anyone describe a Marine as a “U.S. Soldier.”

    We are Marines and we like being called Marines.

    Otherwise, mighty fine post.

    Sincerely,

    A loyal Marine reader

    Ryan (b16f18)

  37. This is nauseating in the extreme. I have to think God won’t wait much longer.

    Mark Johnson (98dde3)

  38. Ryan,

    Thank you for pointing this out. As the daughter of a former Marine, and now myself the parent of a Marine readying to deploy, I do know better. My apologies. I offer this in my defense: I did an enormous amount of reading about the “cultural practice” of child rape in Afghanistan before I wrote the post, and by the time I was ractually eady to write, I was quite a bit undone by the awfulness of my research, thus not as attentive to said distinctions as I should have been .

    Dana (9d375d)


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