One of my most cherished friends is a US Marine currently stationed in Afghanistan. A ten year veteran, he’s seen some bad stuff more than once. He is, hopefully, on his last tour before becoming a civilian (“There are no ex-Marines”) and has been moving around the country recently on an intelligence gathering mission. He sends me reports every now just to scare the dickens out of me and make me appreciate how soft we all have it here. Here are some excerpts from his latest communique:
The poverty here is apparent. And the people in the villages with even a small amount of authority behave like animals. They prey on the poor and on children. And “officials” are all investigating one another in order to further their own stations. And of course they are all doing the same thing — stealing money from their subordinates and extorting money and coercing obedience from local villages, among other things. Apparently it is common for older men to prey on younger boys. These boys are called “chai boys” in the villages. They are different from Bacha Bazi only in that they aren’t dressed up as girls and taught to dance like them. But they must endure everything else that bacha bazi endure. And from what the local friendlies tell me, there is quite a bit of bestiality going on as well. I have no reason to doubt them, from what I’ve seen of the local men in rural Afghanistan. There are some rural villagers who admit the situation is so bad that they prefer the Taliban. Although they are brutal, they at least offer some sort of law.
The US troops all know this is going on in the backrooms of the village offices, the police stations, and the patrol bases, but the senior officers are apparently not interested. I suppose the generals and diplomats have a job to do, but the scale on which corruption exists in this country is so massive that I’m beginning to believe the entire coalition effort is a complete charade. I can’t understand why we don’t lean on the Afghan senior leadership harder. Perhaps our civilized men of importance know the truth about the Afghans. And perhaps the Afghans aren’t interested in a better future. Perhaps they are interested in their own individual futures. Which would make sense. Imagine living here — among you are the Taliban and a myriad of other affiliated insurgent groups, and beside you are the Pakistanis, the Iranians and the Chinese, not to mention the Russians and former Soviet states to the north — and then there is the coalition. All of them imposing their particular wills on you…at gun point! For as long as anyone can remember this has been the norm. And then of course there are all the degenerate behaviors many, but not all, Afghan men would have to give up: Beating their wives, raping their boys and their domesticated animals, stealing from their friends and families, and killing each other over scraps.
And we think that Coalition forces are going to change all this is a couple years? These folks are still living in the 10 century only now they have automatic weapons. In 100 hundred years things will probably be just the same. Why we continue to try and salvage this hopeless morass of degeneracy and corruption with massive infusions of money and materials in beyond my poor brain’s ability to comprehend. I just want to see my friend again . . safe and sound. Until then…
This is an echo of my last post on the bzbtrader site: http://bzbtrader.blogspot.com/2010/08/last-word.html
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