General John Campbell, commander of coalition troops in Afghanistan, has responded to a shocking New York Times article which claimed that the U.S. military in Afghanistan had a policy of ignoring reports of Afghan allies sexually abusing children. According to Campbell, “I personally have served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and am absolutely confident that no such theater policy has ever existed here, and certainly, no such policy has existed throughout my tenure as commander.”
I am sure that General Campbell is telling the truth in a narrow sense. I very much doubt there has been any formal theater-wide policy to ignore evidence of pederasty among Afghan security forces, just as I’m sure there has not any formal theater-wide policy to ignore evidence of gross corruption or other abuses by Afghan security forces. No American in a senior position would be stupid enough to put such views in writing.
Nevertheless, I also believe, based on my numerous trips to Afghanistan dating back to 2008, that U.S. military units have long had an informal policy of ignoring a lot of misconduct on the part of the Afghans — mainly corruption, but also including, in some instances, sexual abuses, coercive interrogations, and other human-rights violations. There has long been a widespread tendency to excuse misconduct on the grounds that it’s “Afghan good enough” — meaning that we cannot impose our standards of conduct on Afghans or transform their society into a copy of ours.
This is not altogether crazy. Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest places, with cultural traditions, religion, and history very different from ours. We should not expect that its people will act and think like Americans. Nor should we aim for this standard. As long as practices are genuinely culturally acceptable in Afghanistan — e.g., forcing women in rural areas to wear burqas — we should not tinker with them.
The problem is that a lot of the conduct that Americans have tolerated — or, in the case of corruption, positively enabled — is not culturally acceptable. Ordinary Afghans themselves complain about the terrible levels of corruption and abuse they have suffered from American-backed officials since 2001. They complain too of the forcible sexual enslaving of their boys by pedophiles in uniform. Such practices are not innocuous expression of indigenous culture. Aside from the great harm they do to individual victims, they are doing great harm to the anti-Taliban cause because governmental misconduct drives ordinary people into the arms of the insurgents. Indeed, the Taliban first arose in the 1990s as a protest movement after mujahideen commanders were determined to be guilty of raping boys.
That does not mean that the U.S. can or should mount a military campaign to lock up all pederasts or all corrupt and abusive officials in general. But it does mean that when U.S. soldiers have compelling evidence of misconduct occurring under their noses, they should do something about it and not just look the other way.
I imagine General Campbell, like his predecessors, would agree with that. But I’m not so sure that message has gotten out to every American unit that has served in Afghanistan over the past 14 years. Too many on them have operated on a “wink-and-a-nod” policy of overlooking misconduct on the part of anyone who they think will help them kill the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That is a short-sighted approach that temporarily fosters better relations with local allies, but that undermines long-term hopes of defeating the Taliban.
