Man-love Thursdays

This is a problem:

The boy was no more than 12. He wore a wig, lipstick and perfume and was dressed in a flowing robe when an Afghan interpreter escorted him to the entrance of the Canadian base in remote Afghanistan.

It was June 2006 and it was one of Tyrel Braaten's first days at Forward Operating Base Wilson, about 30 kilometres outside Kandahar.

Braaten watched as the local interpreter, who worked for the Canadians, ushered the boy through the security checkpoint and led him inside a nearby building.

The bombardier was bewildered. He asked another interpreter standing next to him who the boy was. The interpreter shrugged that the boy was one of "the bitches."

"I said, `What do you mean?' and he made the motion with his hips, like you know," said Braaten, 24. "I remember saying, `Are we on Mars? Does this s--- go on all the time?'"

The native of Saskatchewan is the latest soldier to come forward alleging in detail how young Afghan boys during his tour in Afghanistan in 2006 were regularly sodomized by Afghan interpreters and soldiers working alongside Canadian soldiers.

For the past four months, the Canadian Forces' National Investigation Service, an arm's-length military investigatory body with the power to lay criminal charges, has been probing claims that Canadian commanding officers ignored the complaints of lower-ranking soldiers about the alleged rapes.

It's not a new problem:

No wonder Canadian soldiers come home confiding that killing Taliban insurgents isn't as stressful as knowing an innocent kid might be regularly raped by an Afghan cop inside a Canadian military base.

Man-boy homosexuality has flourished anew in the aftermath of Taliban zero-tolerance laws, albeit a selectively punished offence in that era. Warlords again parade cities with teenage boys known as an "ashna" by their side.

The strict social separation and severe consequences for premarital sex with women have given rise to the cultural wrinkle of men used for sexual recreation and women reserved for reproduction.

In fact, we can go back even further, to a Times article from 2002:

Now that Taliban rule is over in Mullah Omar's former southern stronghold, it is not only televisions, kites and razors which have begun to emerge.

Visible again, too, are men with their ashna, or beloveds: young boys they have groomed for sex.

Kandahar's Pashtuns have been notorious for their homosexuality for centuries, particularly their fondness for naive young boys. Before the Taliban arrived in 1994, the streets were filled with teenagers and their sugar daddies, flaunting their relationships.

Kandahar is called the homosexual capital of south Asia. Such is the Pashtun obsession with sodomy - locals tell you that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posterior - that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilising the Taliban.

In the summer of 1994, a few months before the Taliban took control of the city, two commanders confronted each other over a young boy whom they both wanted to sodomize.

In the ensuing fight civilians were killed. Omar's group freed the boy and appeals began flooding in for Omar to help in other disputes.

By November, Omar and his Taliban were Kandahar's new rulers. Despite the Taliban disdain for women, and the bizarre penchant of many for eyeliner, Omar immediately suppressed homosexuality.

...

This Pashtun tradition is even reflected in Pashtun poetry, odes written to the beauty and complexion of an ashna, but it is usually a terrible fate for the boys concerned. It is practiced at all levels of Pashtun society, but for the poorer men, having an ashna can raise his status.

"When a man sees a boy he likes - the age they like is 15 or 16 - they will approach him in the street and start talking to him, offering him tea," said Muhammad Shah, a shop owner. "Sometimes they go looking in the football stadium, or in the cinema" (which has yet to reopen).

"He then starts to give him presents, hashish, or a watch, a ring, or even a motorbike," Shah continued. "One of the most valued presents is a fighting pigeon, which can be worth up to $400. These boys are nearly always innocent, but such is the poverty here, they cannot refuse."

No, the problem of "Man-Love Thursdays," as it is sometimes called, is not a new one. What is fairly new, however, is the idea - the accusation - that Canadian troops are complicit in the rape of young boys, and that it happens on Canadian FOB's and other outposts.

That's a serious accusation, and it's being taken seriously by the CF - the decision to convene a Board of Inquiry (BOI) is not taken lightly:

“The Board of Inquiry will identify and interview all appropriate and available witnesses, and obtain all available relevant records and documentary evidence, consulting all pertinent legislation, regulations, orders, directives and instructions,” added BGen Nordick. “We will determine whether the allegations can be substantiated and whether such incidents were reported by the chain of command or other Canadian Forces networks, and the outcome.”

The Board of Inquiry will determine whether the incident, and the Canadian Forces response to it, resulted in changes to any applicable orders or directions, whether any similar incidents were reported since 2006 and if the response was adequate, having regard to all circumstances.

Upon completion of the work being conducted by the Board of Inquiry, a report will be forwarded to the Chief of the Land Staff. The findings, results and recommendations will be made public, subject to the limitations on the release of information imposed by the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act.

The Board of Inquiry is expected to be completed in the spring of 2009.

Of course, not everyone is impressed with the BOI.

A discussion thread at the indispensable Army.ca was started back in June of this year by Tony Prudori of Milnews.ca. I laid out my feelings on the matter there:

I've followed this thread with great interest, and must compliment many of those who have posted excellent arguments here. Like all of you, I read of the rape of a young boy, and was deeply affected by it. I have a young son myself, and cannot help empathizing - for more than a day, I literally couldn't keep my mind away from the horror I felt at this heinous abuse. One of my greatest motivations to join the CF nearly 20yrs ago was the desire to protect others, and I can clearly see how not being able to do that in every situation could be psychologically debilitating for soldiers so strongly motivated and conditioned to protect the weak. It's important - not only for the Afghans, but for the Canadians as well - that our assistance be conditional upon certain standards of behaviour; our blood and treasure is being spent to make improvements to that country, not to uphold the status quo.

Having said that, I think a couple of points need to be made about where this thread has gone.

First, it's easy to point to one extreme - say, the witness of a rape - and say "that's wrong, you should stop it." Absolutely. And it's easy to point to another - say, sending girls to school - and say "that's good, we need to keep doing that." Absolutely, as well.

But the grey area in between is where we all live, and none more so than those actually walking the dusty tracks of Kandahar. I hesitate to speak for Vern, but it seems to me that that's what she was trying to point out: the extremes are easy to deal with, but the closer we get to the middle ground, looking for where to draw the line, the more difficult the task becomes.

Hence the discussion about how old a boy can be before his participation can truly be judged consensual. We can all agree that 8 or 10 would be too young, and we can probably all agree that 25 would be old enough. But if we're to enforce a standard, we need to decide which we're going to use, and that involves picking a line somewhere in the middle - a line that not all will agree upon. And if we're going to enforce it for boys, should we not also logically enforce it for girls as well?

When Amir Attaran was suggesting Canada operate a jail in conjunction with the Afghan gov't, I wrote the following:

It's a fantastic idea.

But here's the kicker: there are a million fantastic ideas to move Afghan society forward, and we simply can't do all of them.

Does it make more sense to spend money on rehabilitating irrigation canals for Afghan food crops so a village can feed itself, or to spend that money on a prison so that incarcerated Taliban fighters get three squares a day? Should we be more concerned with providing a Village Medical Outreach to a hamlet that hasn't seen a real doctor in a decade or more, or with providing basic electrical service to a town, or with stocking a hospital's maternity ward with supplies and equipment, or with training children how to avoid land-mines, or with teaching police how to conduct a decent checkpoint or investigation, or with digging a well and providing a clean water supply to a collection of families without one now, or with building a school where the future of Afghanistan learns to read and add, or with providing a secure pay system for essential workers like doctors and teachers to help curb graft and corruption, or should we really be most concerned with heating a jail in the winter?

That was a run-on sentence, because the list of projects we could undertake would make for a run-on mission if we let it.

At this point, we can't fix everything. We need to focus our efforts on a limited spread of achievable goals. Protecting detainees better than we do is certainly achievable if we want it to be - but what other goals will be sacrificed to make it so?

Right now, this mission is about choices for Canada. It's about the difficult process of triage for an entire nation. Civilized countries are meticulous about human rights, even those of detainees. Has Afghanistan progressed to the point where this is the highest priority?

Obviously, the rape of young boys isn't the same as having a Taliban thug sleep in a drafty prison cell, as far as priorities are concerned. But the conflict of principles holds true in both cases: "Never pass a fault" versus "Don't let the 'perfect' be the enemy of the 'good.'"

The idea of sacrificing one small boy in order to save a relationship with an ANP unit is personally abhorrent to me. But our soldiers "pass a fault" every single day - in the way women are treated, in the way corruption is a daily fact of life, in the way drugs are a staple of the economy, and on and on. They do it because they can't fix everything at once.

With all due respect to Tess, whose feelings on the matter are obviously noble and heartfelt, the argument here isn't whether raping a child is wrong - nobody's arguing it's right. The argument is about how best to make lasting changes to the social landscape in Afghanistan, to bring it into the world community so that both we and Afghans are safer and more prosperous. Because the whole western intervention is a collection of compromises, of priorities, of not letting the 'perfect' be the enemy of the 'good.'

None of us could stand by and listen or watch while a child was abused. But it's much easier for each of us to decide what we would do individually if the situation were right in front of us than it is to decide how, as a nation, we're to deal with such a problem systemically, as but one facet of an already overcomplicated mission.

No easy answers...

Army.ca stalwart Vern makes some interesting points here, and here, which are worth a read.

Rick Westhead is the TorStar reporter driving this story. I have some problems with the way he's put it out there, although not with the core issue: Canadians should not be complicit in this activity.

The first problem I have is with today's piece entitled "World court inquiry sought in Afghan rapes." Who exactly is seeking that ICC inquiry?

The International Criminal Court should probe allegations some Canadian officers serving in Afghanistan told subordinates to look the other way when Afghan soldiers and local interpreters sodomized young boys, says one of Canada's leading human-rights lawyers.

University of British Columbia international law and politics expert Michael Byers, who was among a group of academics who sought to have former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet detained as a war criminal, said he plans to ask the ICC to begin its own inquiry into the charges.

Rick is hardly alone in the practice, but like the rest of the Canadian mainstream media, he needs to start describing Dr. Byers a bit more accurately. I first spoke about Byers' strong NDP ties a year and a half ago, and have continued to be amazed ever since that his politics are considered irrelevant on such a politically-charged issue. The man ran for the NDP - a party that consistently opposes the U.N. and NATO mandated Canadian mission in Afghanistan - in Vancouver Centre in the last federal election! If he'd won that election, would they still be describing him as nothing more than a "leading human-rights lawyer" or "international law and politics expert," or would they have moved on to "NDP Member of Parliament"?

It's relevant. It's especially relevant because Byers is known to have counselled NDP Defence Critic Dawn Black, and she's the one who asked for the MPCC to be called in to investigate. I'm not saying it was wrong of her to do so, I'm just saying it's wrong of Westhead and the Star not to make their readers aware of the connection.

Here are a couple other points I'd ask Rick and his readers to consider in all this...

At what point does 'complicity' start? Is the CF tainted if soldiers know about this practice second-hand, but do nothing to investigate it? Or if they're at a Police Sub-Station - an Afghan installation, not a Canadian one - and hear things in another room? Or is it just if they see something on their own base, and do nothing about it?

And what about the girls? You know, the ones Vern talks about at the links I've highlighted above, who are forced into underage arranged marriages. For that matter, what constitutes 'underage' - for boys or girls? Again, read Vern's comments. I ask this, not to condone the reprehensible act of sodomizing young boys, but to remind readers that it's far easier to condemn the obviously heinous act than it is to define the borders of what we can tolerate and what we can't once we reach the far larger grey area between 'obviously heinous' and 'relatively benign'.

For example, is a nineteen year-old boy taken 'voluntarily' as an ashna a problem? Seventeen? Fifteen? Thirteen? And how do you define 'voluntarily' in the first place? Just because someone's driven by hunger and fear to 'volunteer' to be used sexually for money doesn't mean that it's right, does it? The line can get blurry pretty quickly...

Lastly, let's say those like Byers and Black who oppose the mission altogether use this piece as a rallying cry, and force public opinion so far in their direction that Canadian troops are pulled out of Afghanistan altogether.

What happens to those boys then?

(And Rick, if you're reading this, don't tell me as a journalist you can't think of the consequences of your reporting: the Mellissa Fung saga put the lie to that defence once and for all.)

My bottom line: if abuse like this is happening on Canadian FOB's, with Canadian troops turning a blind eye, then it needs to stop. I'm told that the OMLT's and POMLT's are already advising the ANSF that they mentor that regardless of cultural traditions, it's unprofessional conduct from a force whose raison d'etre is the protection of Afghan citizens.

By all means, let's make sure the CF is stopping the abuse where and when it can. But if you're looking to condemn the entire Afghan mission because of these accusations, remember there's still a big baby in that bathwater you're about to toss down the drain. Don't stop fixing anything just because you can't fix everything at once.