EXCLUSIVE TO FOX NEWS: In a stunning reversal, the U.S. Army decided late Thursday to retain a decorated Green Beret it had planned to kick out after he physically confronted a local Afghan commander accused of raping a boy over the course of many days.

Sgt 1st Class Charles Martland, confirmed the Army’s decision to retain him when reached by Fox News, who has been covering the story in depth for the past eight months and first broke the story of the Army’s decision in August to kick out Martland over the incident, which occurred in northern Afghanistan in 2011.

“I am real thankful for being able to continue to serve,” said Martland when reached on the telephone by Fox News. “I appreciate everything Congressman Duncan Hunter and his Chief of Staff, Joe Kasper did for me.”

As first reported by Fox News, while deployed to Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, Martland and his team leader confronted a local police commander in 2011 accused of raping an Afghan boy and beating his mother. When the man laughed off the incident, they shoved him to the ground.

Martland and his team leader were later removed from the base, and eventually sent home from Afghanistan. The U.S. Army has not confirmed the specifics of Martland’s separation from service citing privacy reasons, but a “memorandum of reprimand” from October 2011 obtained by Fox News makes clear that Martland was criticized by the brass for his intervention after the alleged rape. Asked for comment in September 2015, an Army spokesman reiterated, “the U.S. Army is unable to confirm the specifics of his separation due to the Privacy Act.”

An Army spokesman said Thursday that Martland’s status has been changed, allowing him to stay in the Army in a statement to Fox News.

“In SFC Martland’s case, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records determination modified a portion of one of SFC Martland’s evaluation reports and removed him from the QMP list, which will allow him to remain in the Army,” said Lt. Col. Jerry Pionk.

Martland’s former Special Forces team leader, now out of the Army and living in New York said the Army is a better place with Martland in its ranks.

“This is not just a great victory for SFC Martland and his family- I’m just as happy that he can continue to serve our country and inspire his peers, subordinates and officers to be better soldiers. Charles makes every soldier he comes in contact with better and the Army is undoubtedly a better organization with SFC Martland still in its ranks,” said Martland’s former team leader Danny Quinn when reached by Fox News Thursday.

Quinn is a 2003 graduate of West Point.

“I am thrilled beyond words that my brother is able to continue his career of service to country. The relentless defense of Charles as a soldier and a man of integrity by his friends, family and colleagues sent a clear message that abhorrent decision making made in the interest of self promotion and lacking common sense will not be tolerated. Charles is where he belongs. He is an elite warrior. He belongs on the front lines. Our enemies last vision in this life should be of Martland’s face. They have earned that right,” said Casey a former Special Forces teammate of Martland’s who asked that only his first name be used due to the sensitive of his current work.

The American Center for Law and Justice, who was involved with a writing campaign to save keep Martland in the Army, called the decision a “significant victory.”

“The decision by the Army to retain this hero is long overdue and represents a significant victory for SFC Martland,” said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ. “Justice has been served. The U.S. military has a moral obligation to stop child sexual abuse and exonerate SFC Martland for defending a child from rape. The Army finally took the corrective action needed and this is not only a victory for SFC Martland, but for the American people as well.”

“The Army did the right thing and we won — the American people, won,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a phone interview with Fox News. “Martland is who we want out there.”

Lawmakers were not the only ones who supported Martland’s case.

One famous Hollywood actor also weighed in.

Harvey Keitel of “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs” fame also asked the Army to reconsider their decision.

Martland grew up south of Boston, in Milton, Mass. An all-state football player in high school, he set his sights on playing college football after graduating in 2001. Martland went for the Florida State University team, which just finished a season ranked fourth in the nation.

He made the team, impressing legendary head coach Bobby Bowden and famed defensive coordinator Mickey Andrews. Still, he often remained on the sidelines.

When Pat Tillman, a former NFL football player who volunteered for the Army Rangers, was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, he saw Tillman’s sacrifice as motivation to apply for another elite program.

Martland dropped out of college and graduated in 2006 from Special Forces Qualification Course, one of the U.S. military’s toughest training programs. Over the years he became a jumpmaster, combat diver and sniper.

After a deployment to Iraq in 2008, he deployed to Afghanistan in January 2010 as part of a 12-man unit. He and his team found themselves fighting large numbers of Taliban militants in volatile Kunduz Province.

In 2014, three years after being sent home from Afghanistan, Martland was runner-up Special Warfare Training Group Instructor of the Year from a pool of 400 senior leaders in Special Forces.

FoxNews.com’s Judson Berger contributed to this report.

Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow him on Twitter: @LucasFoxNews

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KABUL, Afghanistan — 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.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.

After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.

Four years later, the Army is also trying to forcibly retire Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, a Special Forces member who joined Captain Quinn in beating up the commander.

“The Army contends that Martland and others should have looked the other way (a contention that I believe is nonsense),” Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who hopes to save Sergeant Martland’s career, wrote last week to the Pentagon’s inspector general.

In Sergeant Martland’s case, the Army said it could not comment because of the Privacy Act.

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.

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The American policy of nonintervention is intended to maintain good relations with the Afghan police and militia units the United States has trained to fight the Taliban. It also reflects a reluctance to impose cultural values in a country where pederasty is rife, particularly among powerful men, for whom being surrounded by young teenagers can be a mark of social status.

Some soldiers believed that the policy made sense, even if they were personally distressed at the sexual predation they witnessed or heard about.

“The bigger picture was fighting the Taliban,” a former Marine lance corporal reflected. “It wasn’t to stop molestation.”

Still, the former lance corporal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending fellow Marines, recalled feeling sickened the day he entered a room on a base and saw three or four men lying on the floor with children between them. “I’m not a hundred percent sure what was happening under the sheet, but I have a pretty good idea of what was going on,” he said.

But the American policy of treating child sexual abuse as a cultural issue has often alienated the villages whose children are being preyed upon. The pitfalls of the policy emerged clearly as American Special Forces soldiers began to form Afghan Local Police militias to hold villages that American forces had retaken from the Taliban in 2010 and 2011.

By the summer of 2011, Captain Quinn and Sergeant Martland, both Green Berets on their second tour in northern Kunduz Province, began to receive dire complaints about the Afghan Local Police units they were training and supporting.

First, they were told, one of the militia commanders raped a 14- or 15-year-old girl whom he had spotted working in the fields. Captain Quinn informed the provincial police chief, who soon levied punishment. “He got one day in jail, and then she was forced to marry him,” Mr. Quinn said.

When he asked a superior officer what more he could do, he was told that he had done well to bring it up with local officials but that there was nothing else to be done. “We’re being praised for doing the right thing, and a guy just got away with raping a 14-year-old girl,” Mr. Quinn said.

Village elders grew more upset at the predatory behavior of American-backed commanders. After each case, Captain Quinn would gather the Afghan commanders and lecture them on human rights.

Soon another commander absconded with his men’s wages. Mr. Quinn said he later heard that the commander had spent the money on dancing boys. Another commander murdered his 12-year-old daughter in a so-called honor killing for having kissed a boy. “There were no repercussions,” Mr. Quinn recalled.

In September 2011, an Afghan woman, visibly bruised, showed up at an American base with her son, who was limping. One of the Afghan police commanders in the area, Abdul Rahman, had abducted the boy and forced him to become a sex slave, chained to his bed, the woman explained. When she sought her son’s return, she herself was beaten. Her son had eventually been released, but she was afraid it would happen again, she told the Americans on the base.

So Captain Quinn summoned Abdul Rahman and confronted him about what he had done. The police commander acknowledged that it was true, but brushed it off. When the American officer began to lecture about “how you are held to a higher standard if you are working with U.S. forces, and people expect more of you,” the commander began to laugh.

“I picked him up and threw him onto the ground,” Mr. Quinn said. Sergeant Martland joined in, he said. “I did this to make sure the message was understood that if he went back to the boy, that it was not going to be tolerated,” Mr. Quinn recalled.

There is disagreement over the extent of the commander’s injuries. Mr. Quinn said they were not serious, which was corroborated by an Afghan official who saw the commander afterward.

(The commander, Abdul Rahman, was killed two years ago in a Taliban ambush. His brother said in an interview that his brother had never raped the boy, but was the victim of a false accusation engineered by his enemies.)

Sergeant Martland, who received a Bronze Star for valor for his actions during a Taliban ambush, wrote in a letter to the Army this year that he and Mr. Quinn “felt that morally we could no longer stand by and allow our A.L.P. to commit atrocities,” referring to the Afghan Local Police.

The father of Lance Corporal Buckley believes the policy of looking away from sexual abuse was a factor in his son’s death, and he has filed a lawsuit to press the Marine Corps for more information about it.

Lance Corporal Buckley and two other Marines were killed in 2012 by one of a large entourage of boys living at their base with an Afghan police commander named Sarwar Jan.

Mr. Jan had long had a bad reputation; in 2010, two Marine officers managed to persuade the Afghan authorities to arrest him following a litany of abuses, including corruption, support for the Taliban and child abduction. But just two years later, the police commander was back with a different unit, working at Lance Corporal Buckley’s post, Forward Operating Base Delhi, in Helmand Province.

Lance Corporal Buckley had noticed that a large entourage of “tea boys” — domestic servants who are sometimes pressed into sexual slavery — had arrived with Mr. Jan and moved into the same barracks, one floor below the Marines. He told his father about it during his final call home.

Word of Mr. Jan’s new position also reached the Marine officers who had gotten him arrested in 2010. One of them, Maj. Jason Brezler, dashed out an email to Marine officers at F.O.B. Delhi, warning them about Mr. Jan and attaching a dossier about him.

The warning was never heeded. About two weeks later, one of the older boys with Mr. Jan — around 17 years old — grabbed a rifle and killed Lance Corporal Buckley and the other Marines.

Lance Corporal Buckley’s father still agonizes about whether the killing occurred because of the sexual abuse by an American ally. “As far as the young boys are concerned, the Marines are allowing it to happen and so they’re guilty by association,” Mr. Buckley said. “They don’t know our Marines are sick to their stomachs.”

The one American service member who was punished in the investigation that followed was Major Brezler, who had sent the email warning about Mr. Jan, his lawyers said. In one of Major Brezler’s hearings, Marine Corps lawyers warned that information about the police commander’s penchant for abusing boys might be classified. The Marine Corps has initiated proceedings to discharge Major Brezler.

Mr. Jan appears to have moved on, to a higher-ranking police command in the same province. In an interview, he denied keeping boys as sex slaves or having any relationship with the boy who killed the three Marines. “No, it’s all untrue,” Mr. Jan said. But people who know him say he still suffers from “a toothache problem,” a euphemism here for child sexual abuse.

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Imagine that you witnessed child sexual abuse while on the job, but your boss told you not to do anything to stop it. Now imagine that your boss was the United States government.

That’s exactly what happened to Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr.

In his last phone call, he told his father about what had been happening in Southern Afghanistan. He said he could hear Afghan police officers raping and sexually abusing boys 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., said his son told him before being shot and killed a the base.

“My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture,” he continued.

His son told him, before his death in 2012, that the police called their abuse “bacha bazi” which literally means “boy play.”

U.S. soldiers and Marines have been directly instructed by their commanding officers, and ultimately the U.S. government, not to intervene.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain said.

Quinn actually physically beat up an American-backed militia commander after he found out he was keeping a boy chained to his bed, using him as a sex slave.

“But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

The New York Times reports, that “the policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.”

The U.S. Army actually fired Captain Quinn for saving the child. He was relieved of his command and sent home from Afghanistan, basically forced to leave the military on his own once stateside.

Now, four years later, the Times reports that the military is also trying to forcibly retire Sgt. First Class Charles Martland. Martland is a Special Forces member who helped Captain Quinn free the child and beat up the commander.

“The Army contends that Martland and others should have looked the other way (a contention that I believe is nonsense),” Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican wrote to the Pentagon’s inspector general last week.

For their part, the U.S. Army says it cannot comment because of the Privacy Act.

The Times asked about the American military policy, to the spokesman for the American command in Afghanistan, Col. Brian Tribus.

Tribus wrote back in an email: “Generally, allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law.”

But what about when the Afghan police are the ones doing the abuse?

He continued, saying that that “there would be no express requirement that U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan report it.”

“The bigger picture was fighting the Taliban,” one anonymous former Marine lance corporal said to the Times. “It wasn’t to stop molestation.”

By the summer of 2011, Captain Quinn and Sergeant Martland, both Green Berets on their second tour in northern Kunduz Province, began to receive dire complaints about the Afghan Local Police units they were training and supporting.

First, they were told, one of the militia commanders raped a 14- or 15-year-old girl whom he had spotted working in the fields. Captain Quinn informed the provincial police chief, who soon levied punishment. “He got one day in jail, and then she was forced to marry him,” Mr. Quinn said.

When he asked a superior officer what more he could do, he was told that he had done well to bring it up with local officials but that there was nothing else to be done. “We’re being praised for doing the right thing, and a guy just got away with raping a 14-year-old girl,” Mr. Quinn said.

Over time, village elders began to grow increasingly angry at the abusive behavior of the U.S.-backed Afghan police.

In September 2011, an Afghan woman, visibly bruised, showed up at an American base with her son, who was limping. One of the Afghan police commanders in the area, Abdul Rahman, had abducted the boy and forced him to become a sex slave, chained to his bed, the woman explained. When she sought her son’s return, she herself was beaten. Her son had eventually been released, but she was afraid it would happen again, she told the Americans on the base.

She explained that because “her son was such a good-looking kid, he was a status symbol” coveted by local commanders, recalled Mr. Quinn, who did not speak to the woman directly but was told about her visit when he returned to the base from a mission later that day.

That’s when Captain Quinn called Abdul Rahman to confront him about the rape. The police commander admitted everything but said it was not a big deal.

Quinn said, “you are held to a higher standard if you are working with U.S. forces, and people expect more of you,” but the police commander just laughed.

“I picked him up and threw him onto the ground,” Quinn recalled. That’s when Sergeant Martland joined. “I did this to make sure the message was understood that if he went back to the boy, that it was not going to be tolerated.”

Sergeant Martland wrote in a letter that he and Mr. Quinn “felt that morally we could no longer stand by and allow [the U.S.-backed, Afghan police] to commit atrocities.”

Now, the father of Lance Corporal Buckley is filing a lawsuit because he believes the policy of looking away from sexual abuse actually was a factor in his son’s being killed. He is suing for the release of information regarding the circumstances of his son’s killing.

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Again and again, American soldiers discovered that their Afghan counterparts were sexually abusing boys, sometimes on American military bases. But after reporting the crimes, they were told by their superiors to ignore them or punished for taking matters into their own hands.

In more than 1,000 comments posted on the article, “U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies,” readers’ outrage was directed at the perpetrators — in some cases, critical allies who kept boys chained to beds — and at the American officers who instructed subordinates to ignore what they saw.

A Question of Culture
“Our ‘allies’? Let the Taliban have them on their plate. I’m sick of propping up sick regimes or tolerating cultures mired in their perversions,” Stephen Holland, a reader from Nevada City, Calif., wrote in reaction to the abuse, which some see as an endemic part of Afghan culture.

U.S. Outrage and Resignation Over Afghans’ Rape of Boys SEPT. 21, 2015

U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan AlliesSEPT. 20, 2015
“Abuse of children is simply wrong and evil. There can be no excuse for tolerating it or refusing to try and stop it,” a reader from Cincinnati wrote. “However, I fail to see how such criminal acts against young boys by a few corrupt men reflects the wider culture. There are many good and decent people in Afghanistan who deplore ‘bacha bazi’ practices.” (“Bacha bazi” is an Afghan term that means “boy play.”)

“Bacha bazi is a terrible practice that has been going on in Afghanistan forever,” a Facebook user named Aparna Bhaskar wrote. “While it may be culturally acceptable to some, I highly doubt the young victims and their families think that part of the culture is something to be proud about.”

The idea that cultural sensitivity was the only thing stopping American troops from intervening struck some readers as absurd.

“Cultural relativity is completely bogus,” wrote another reader, identified as EB. “Some things are just wrong — and some cultures are just inferior.”

“Amazing. The one time our military decides to be culturally sensitive, it involves pedophilia,” Mark P. Kessinger, a reader from New York, wrote. “What I would like to know is who decided on this policy, how high up in the Pentagon it went, whether anyone in the civilian command of the administration was aware of it, and if so, why didn’t they order the policy changed. This is just horrific and shameful — Abu Ghraib-level shameful!”

Praise for U.S. Service Members

Other readers celebrated the American soldiers and Marines who lost jobs and, in one case, died after they became aware of sexual abuse and tried to stop it. Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain, was relieved of his command after beating up a United States-backed militia leader who kept a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. Four years later, the Army is trying to force Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, who helped Captain Quinn beat up the militia leader, to retire.

Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. was killed in 2012 by one of the “tea boys” who stayed on base with an Afghan police commander named Sarwar Jan. Other Americans had previously accused the commander of abuse, but he lived with his retinue of boys in the same barracks as Marines.

Views on the War

For some readers, the article reflected their own views of the Afghan war. They saw it as an indictment of American failures or Afghan ingratitude.

“So our tax dollars basically PAID for sex with children. Let’s stop lying to ourselves!!” wrote a commenter, Motherlodebeth, from Calaveras County, Calif. “We have been spending billions of dollars yearly for over 12 years to be hired security for a vile, corrupt government. And as such, we do as they say and pay them to tell us what to do.”

“We put our soldiers at risk by sending them to Afghanistan because we are self-righteous enough to intervene with the Taliban but look the other way at sexual abuse with allies,” Melissa Troche wrote on Facebook. “This is what is twisted and sick about our military system. U.S. citizens should be sick and irate over this. Our soldiers are in danger by our so-called allies. Why, dear God, are they there!”

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American soldiers are being punished for blowing the whistle on the systematic rape and enslavement of young boys at the hands of brutal Afghan Muslim military officials.

Honorable men in uniform risked their careers and lives to stop the abuse. Yet, the White House — which was busy tweeting about its new feminism-pandering “It’s On Us” campaign against an alleged college rape crisis based on debunked statistics — is AWOL on the actual pedophilia epidemic known as “bacha bazi.” On Thursday, Obama administration flacks went out of their way to downplay Afghan child rape as “abhorrent,” but “fundamentally” a local “law enforcement matter.”

This is the price the innocents pay for blind multiculturalism.

A New York Times report on the Afghan Muslim practice this week garnered attention and outrage on Capitol Hill — and prompted a river of denials from Obama Defense Department brass, who insisted our troops were not ordered to look the other way.

But the subjugation and sexual assault of these children — and their victimization by Afghan military personnel working alongside our troops — is not new.

Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi’s wrenching documentary on “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan” aired in London and the U.S. in 2010. The United Nations has known and done nothing as Taliban warlords and Afghan police groomed, sodomized and sexually trafficked generations of young boys. The U.S. State Department acknowledged last year that “there were reports security officials and those connected to the ANP (Afghan National Police) raped children with impunity.”

In February, I reported on the case of Maj. Jason Brezler. He’s still fighting for his reputation and his military career after warning colleagues of an insider attack on an American base in the Helmand province.

Refresher: The highly decorated Marine reserve civil affairs officer had sent a classified document through his personal email account to fellow Marines at Forward Operating Base Delhi in 2012. The correspondence, which came in response to a FOB Delhi Marine’s request for information, involved the shady history of Taliban-tied Afghan police chief and accused drug lord and child molester Sarwar Jan.

Jan had been suspected of coordinating Taliban operations, selling Afghan police uniforms to our enemies and raping at least nine boys on base. A few weeks after Brezler’s warning, which went unheeded, one of Jan’s teenage “tea boys” went on a shooting spree at FOB Delhi. Marine Staff Sgt. Cody Rhode was shot five times, but survived. Three others died of gunshot wounds: Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson, Cpl. Richard Rivera and Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley. Buckley’s relatives filed suit against the government last fall over what they believe has been a coordinated and illegal attempt to suppress details of the insider attack.

Meanwhile, Brezler is forced to watch Hillary Clinton get away with massive email security violations, while he’s railroaded for using a personal Yahoo account to try to protect his fellow Marines.

In a separate case, the Army this month denied an appeal by decorated Green Beret Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, who was discharged in 2011 after physically confronting an Afghan police commander accused of kidnapping, chaining and raping a local village boy, beating his mother, and laughing about it when questioned. Another soldier who joined Martland in the confrontation, Cpt. Daniel Quinn, was reprimanded and left the Army.

Asked whether the president had taken steps to review his military’s treatment of these whistleblowers, White House spokesman apathetically shrugged: “Not that I’m aware of.”

Ho-hum.

A White House that wants to spend billions to stop “climate change” in the name of saving all the children of the planet can’t bother to stop the violent sexual assaults of boys held hostage right under our noses by our warmly embraced “allies” in the Afghan military.

A White House that splashed social media with pleas to “Bring Back Our Girls” after Boko Haram jihadists in Nigeria kidnapped 300 girls and women has nothing to say about the legions of boys forced into prostitution and pedophilia rings witnessed by U.S. troops.

A White House bent on whitewashing away radical Islam’s sins against Christians, Jews, gays, apostates, cartoonists, genitally mutilated women and child brides would rather celebrate “diversity” than lift a finger to protect the victims of political correctness run amok.

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With the looming withdrawal of NATO troops and a persistent insurgent threat, Afghanistan is in a precarious position. Innumerable tragedies have beleaguered rural Afghans throughout the past decades of conflict — perpetual violence, oppression of women, and crushing poverty have all contributed to the Hobbesian nature of life in the Afghan countryside.

While the Afghan government has been able to address some of these issues since the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, archaic social traditions and deep-seated gender norms have kept much of rural Afghanistan in a medieval state of purgatory. Perhaps the most deplorable tragedy, one that has actually grown more rampant since 2001, is the practice of bacha bazi — sexual companionship between powerful men and their adolescent boy conscripts.

This phenomenon presents a system of gender reversal in Afghanistan.  Whereas rural Pashtun culture remains largely misogynistic and male-dominated due to deeply-ingrained Islamic values, teenage boys have become the objects of lustful attraction and romance for some of the most powerful men in the Afghan countryside.

Demeaning and damaging, the widespread subculture of pedophilia in Afghanistan constitutes one of the most egregious ongoing violations of human rights in the world. The adolescent boys who are groomed for sexual relationships with older men are bought — or, in some instances, kidnapped — from their families and thrust into a world which strips them of their masculine identity. These boys are often made to dress as females, wear makeup, and dance for parties of men. They are expected to engage in sexual acts with much older suitors, often remaining a man’s or group’s sexual underling for a protracted period.

Evolution of Bacha Bazi

Occurring frequently across southern and eastern Afghanistan’s rural Pashtun belt and with ethnic Tajiks in the northern Afghan countryside, bacha bazi has become a shockingly common practice. Afghanistan’s mujahideen warlords, who fought off the Soviet invasion and instigated a civil war in the 1980s, regularly engaged in acts of pedophilia. Keeping one or more “chai boys,” as these male conscripts are called, for personal servitude and sexual pleasure became a symbol of power and social status.

The Taliban had a deep aversion towards bacha bazi, outlawing the practice when they instituted strict nationwide sharia law. According to some accounts, including the hallmark Times of London article “Kandahar Comes out of the Closet” in 2002, one of the original provocations for the Taliban’s rise to power in the early 1990s was their outrage over pedophilia.  Once they came to power, bacha bazi became taboo, and the men who still engaged in the practice did so in secret.

When the former mujahideen commanders ascended to power in 2001 after the Taliban’s ouster, they brought with them a rekindled culture of bacha bazi. Today, many of these empowered warlords serve in important positions, as governors, line ministers, police chiefs, and military commanders.

Since its post-2001 revival, bacha bazi has evolved, and its practice varies across Afghanistan. According to military experts I talked to in Afghanistan, the lawlessness that followed the deposing of the Taliban’s in rural Pashtunistan and northern Afghanistan gave rise to violent expressions of pedophilia. Boys were raped, kidnapped, and trafficked as sexual predators regained their positions of regional power. As rule of law mechanisms and general order returned to the Afghan countryside, bacha bazi became a normalized, structured practice in many areas.

Many “chai boys” are now semi-formal apprentices to their powerful male companions.  Military officials have observed that Afghan families with an abundance of children are often keen to provide a son to a warlord or government official – with full knowledge of the sexual ramifications – in order to gain familial prestige and monetary compensation.  Whereas bacha bazi is now largely consensual and non-violent, its evolution into an institutionalized practice within rural Pashtun and Tajik society is deeply disturbing.

Pedophilia and Islam

The fact that bacha bazi, which has normalized sodomy and child abuse in rural Afghan society, developed within a deeply fundamentalist Islamic region of the world is mystifying. According to a 2009 Human Terrain Team study titled “Pashtun Sexuality,” Pashtun social norms dictate that bacha bazi is not un-Islamic or homosexual at all — if the man does not love the boy, the sexual act is not reprehensible, and is far more ethical than defiling a woman.

Sheltered by their pastoral setting and unable to speak Arabic — the language of all Islamic texts — many Afghans allow social customs to trump religious values, including those Quranic verses eschewing homosexuality and promiscuity. Warlords who have exploited Islam for political or personal means have also promulgated tolerance for bacha bazi. The mujahideen commanders are a perfect example of this — they fought communism in the name of jihad and mobilized thousands of men by promoting Islam, while sexually abusing boys and remaining relatively secular themselves.

Tragic Consequences

The rampant pedophilia has a number of far-reaching detrimental consequences on Afghanistan’s development into a functional nation. The first — and most obvious — consequence of bacha bazi is the irreparable abuse inflicted on its thousands of victims.

Because it is so common, a significant percentage of the country’s male population bears the deep psychological scars of sexual abuse from childhood.  Some estimates say that as many as 50 percent of the men in the Pashtun tribal areas of southern Afghanistan take boy lovers, making it clear that pedophilia is a pervasive issue affecting entire rural communities. Many of the prominent Pashtun men who currently engage in bacha bazi were likely abused as children; in turn, many of today’s adolescent victims will likely become powerful warlords or government-affiliated leaders with boy lovers of their own, perpetuating the cycle of abuse.

A second corrupting, and perhaps surprising, consequence of bacha bazi is its negative impact on women’s rights in Afghanistan. It has become a commonly accepted notion among Afghanistan’s latent homosexual male population that “women are for children, and boys are for pleasure.” Passed down through many generations and spurred by the vicious cycle created by the pedophile-victim relationship, many Afghan men have lost their attraction towards the opposite gender. Although social and religious customs still heavily dictate that all men must marry one or more women and have children, these marriages are often devoid of love and affection, and are treated as practical, mandated arrangements.

While the Afghan environment has grown more conducive to improving women’s social statuses, the continued normalization of bacha bazi will perpetuate the traditional view of women as second-class citizens — household fixtures meant for child-rearing and menial labor, and undeserving of male attraction and affection.

The third unfortunate consequence of bacha bazi is its detrimental bearing on the perpetual state of conflict in Afghanistan, especially in the southern Pashtun-dominated countryside. Because pedophilia and sodomy were, and remain, a main point of contention between the Islamist Taliban and traditional Pashtun warlords, the widespread nature of bacha bazi likely continues to fuel the Taliban’s desire to reassert sharia law. The adolescent victims are vulnerable to Taliban intimidation and may be used to infiltrate the Afghan government and security forces.

The resurgence of bacha bazi since the Taliban’s defeat and the significant percentage of government, police, and military officials engaged in the practice has put the United States and its NATO allies in a precarious position. By empowering these sexual predators, the coalition built a government around a “lesser evil,” promoting often-corrupt pedophiles in lieu of the extremist, al Qaeda-linked Taliban. Going forward, the strong Western moral aversion to pedophilia will likely erode the willingness of NATO and international philanthropic agencies to continue their support for Afghanistan’s development in the post-transition period. As Joel Brinkley, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, asked: “So, why are American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud pedophiles, certainly more per capita than any other place on Earth?”

Looking Forward

Despite the grave nature of the child abuse committed across Afghanistan, this tragic phenomenon has received relatively little global attention. It has been highlighted mainly in sporadic news articles and one Afghan-produced documentary, while other Afghan issues such as women’s rights and poverty are center stage.

From a human rights perspective, the pervasive culture of pedophilia deserves substantial international consideration due to its detrimental effects — the immediate and noticeable effects on the young victims, as well as the roadblocks it creates towards achieving gender equality and peace.

The only way to tackle both bacha bazi and gender inequality is to modernize Afghanistan’s rule of law system. Afghan officials have been scrutinized in multiple reports by the United Nations’ Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict for their failure to protect children’s rights. Although Afghan officials formally agreed to outlaw these practices in response to U.N. criticism in 2011, the government’s ability and willingness to internally enforce laws protecting children has been non-existent.

If a future Afghan government can achieve a balance between the Taliban, who strictly enforced anti-pedophilia laws but harshly oppressed women, and the current administration, which has put an end to the hard-line Islamic subjugation of women but has allowed bacha bazi to reach shocking levels, Afghanistan’s dismal human rights record may improve.

An additional strategy for combating bacha bazi is to attack the issue from an ethno-cultural standpoint. Identifying key tribal elders and other local powerbrokers who share the West’s revulsion towards such widespread pedophilia is the first step in achieving lasting progress.  As is true with women’s rights, understanding Afghanistan’s complex social terrain and bridging its cultural differences is necessary to safeguard the rights of adolescent boys.

The Afghan government’s acknowledgement of bacha bazi and subsequent outreach into rural Pashtun communities, where the legitimacy of the government is often eclipsed by the power of warlords and tribal elders, will also be critical. The most important breakthrough, of course, will come when the Afghan government, police, and military rid themselves of all pedophiles. If the central government can ensure its representatives at the local level will cease their engagement in bacha bazi, the social norms are bound to change as well.

Eliminating this truly damaging practice will finally occur when a pedophile-free Afghan government is able to more closely connect the country’s urban centers to its rural countryside. Only then will a progressive social code be established. And if this evolved social code can incorporate the tenets of Islam with social justice and effectively marginalize the archaic and abusive aspects of Pashtun and Tajik warlord culture, there is hope for Afghanistan yet.

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