Crossing the Wire

by Cardinalli, AnnaMaria

  Just within the time frame in which the soldier dates his service, it appears three children were separated from the general population and appear to have been given the opportunity for “a semi-normal existence learning to read and speak English,” as the soldier wrote. In a statement published on April 24, 2003, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson attempted to explain the uniqueness of the situation.

  They are in a secure environment free from the influences of older detainees…. They are receiving specialist mental health care, in recognition of the difficult circumstances that child combatants go through, and some basic education in terms of reading and writing. (48)

  Clearly, this statement indicates a rather complete and sensitive understanding of the children’s situation and needs, particularly regarding the “influences of older detainees” and the uniquely traumatizing circumstances of child combatants.

  Chillingly, however, it was these inmates who were released in January 2004. Even the outspoken anti-Guantanamo researcher Andy Worthington confirms that the segregated children were the ones released, noting, “The three juveniles released in January 2004 were held separately from the adult population and given some educational and recreational opportunities.” (49)

  The issue of children in Guantanamo does not end with the three detainees—a significant number of children have been held in Guantanamo since these first inmates whose presence was revealed. There are well-documented cases of underage Afghan prisoners being held inappropriately. It seems too, however, that there existed cases of these children being held by necessity. What was the real nature of that necessity?

  The Geneva Conventions and a number of internationally accepted agreements specify that children found participating in combat and detained must only face captivity in a case of extreme last resort. First off, my mind leaps to the circumstances that would lead a young Afghan boy to find himself in combat against US and coalition troops. My soldier’s story did a good job of bringing to mind the life of a boy owned by a powerful local commander whose views landed the child on the anti-coalition side of the conflict. If not this, what else might constitute a case of extreme last resort?

  Not every juvenile detainee will fit precisely the same abuse paradigm, but there is a thread of similarity in what brings young boys to the point of engaging in combat alongside the violent men who control them. Still, however, it almost seems as if the cruelty of a child soldier’s original circumstances does not come into account when a media and political outcry rages against the children’s separation from their families and homes. The wistful imagining of children longing for the day when they’ll see their families again seems to capture the horrific depth of our misunderstanding.

  Even Olara Otunnu, who as the UN Special Representative for the Rights of Children in War would be expected to offer a certain depth of insight on the topic, reacted to the Guantanamo issue with this unequivocal statement: ‘Whatever the circumstances, children should be reunited with their families.” (50) Whatever the circumstances? The world’s inability or unwillingness to see the situation of Afghan children in its true light seems to have made seemingly good intentions serve the worst ends!

  Still, there were those who saw. There were clearly good people along the chain who wanted to do the right thing by those first boy prisoners—as challenging and uncharted as it was to sort out what the right thing would entail. Ultimately, though, the U.S. did not take that difficult path. It appears that we bowed to media and political perception rather than what was truly right for the children involved.

  It leaves us to wonder and fear in how many other ways we might be doing this to various degrees, either willingly or unwittingly. I can only hope that as the reality of the scale of the abuse cycle that produces the young people whose hurt and damaged hearts serve the ends of terror in our world becomes apparent, we don’t shy from the hard choices and the hard work. As we learn the truth, we must be compelled to do the right thing.

  Afghanistan + 429

  Here we go again. Today I was faced with even more depth to the issue of child sexual exploitation in Afghanistan—this time because it actually involved American complicity and funding of the act! A reporter from the Washington Examiner called to interview me about a document found in the recent Wikileaks scandal. This evening, a west-coast talk radio show called to interview me about the same thing.

  I needed to tell them each that I am horrified by the Wikileaks phenomenon. While some information can admittedly be unnecessarily over-classified, other information is classified, for instance, to preserve the identities of brave people who take grave risks to protect innocent lives. I am shocked at the carelessness of anyone who would risk the second in order to reveal the first.

  Nevertheless, because of my research involving bacha bazi, they wanted to talk to me regarding a leaked revelation that DynCorp, the largest U.S. contractor in Afghanistan, had purchased the performance of a boy dancer. While I explained the social and cultural dynamic to the reporters—an opportunity for which I was again grateful in order to bring the human rights issue to further attention—I sincerely hoped that the purchase was out of cultural ignorance on the part of DynCorp. Given America’s previous lack of understanding regarding the practice, I couldn’t imagine how it could be otherwise.

  However, I hope that this had made evident the fact that ignorance on this subject is something that we simply cannot afford. I’ve realized something more since I last wrote. While the role of the commercial sexual exploitation of children may present a factor in the funding of terrorism, the threat that this abuse constitutes to the security of Afghanistan and the U.S. is even more wide-reaching.

  Ultimately, the real threat comes from the human experience of being terrorized which, once instituted, generally becomes bound to re-express itself unless the cycle can somehow be interrupted. Unfortunately, those with terrorist intent have capitalized on this cycle, so that the violence imparted to the children they abuse can be directed, not only to the next generation to experience the abuse, but to an identified outlet for violence—a Western enemy. Where this cycle of abuse has existed previously in Pashtun society—and perhaps even in the classical example of Greek society—it was used to create warriors out of boys.

  The practice imbued its victims with a simultaneous sense of violation and rage, combined with a complex reliance on the warrior clan of men into which they were initiated. Rather than turn on their clan, their source of security, they found an outlet for their rage in the violence of war. As long as terrorists have this tool so readily at their disposal on a large-scale societal level, it will continue to produce generations of warriors for their causes.

  Afghanistan + 440

  It’s actually taken this long, but I think I’ve finally truly settled back into real life and my real loves—the music career that brings me peace and is a prayer for peace in the world. Again I am the opera singer, the classical guitarist, the woman I was once so used to being. Oddly, only now I find myself a professor as well, and it’s been two weeks since I started teaching.

  Besides my Navy service as a Reserve Officer, I still feel a sense of further obligation to the military and federal community, so I agreed to teach when I was offered a position at American Military University in the Graduate Program of National Security and Intelligence Studies. My students are military members working on advanced degrees in their field. Most are doing so through the hardships of deployment. They have my utmost respect.

  I am assigned a class on Intelligence Collections. I’ve been trying to teach something about the history of various collection disciplines, the relevant literature, and a bit of analytical technique. Nobody cares. Nobody signed up to learn that. It’s become a losing battle.

  Today, a student finally presented the real issue with an offer I couldn’t refuse. “Dr. C., I promise. I’ll do all the work you assigned, if you finally just answer our questions: What did you really do in Afghanistan? Why? Show us what real ‘collection’ means.
And, I’m just too confounded to understand—what’s sex got to do with it?”

  I sat down to answer him. My goal was to answer my class, and perhaps to articulate the answer to my own self. I began the first few paragraphs of a lecture.

  Warlords and Goatherds:

  The Role of Culture in the War on Terror

  What was my job in Afghanistan? When I brief the capabilities and mission of HTT, I often put it this way: Other staff elements work to give the commander a perspective on the population. The purpose of HTT is to engage the population to such a degree that we are able to bring to the commander the perspective of the population. As a Social Scientist who was killed in Iraq said of the program, “At best, we try to represent the voice of the people in the commander’s ear.”

  Why is this important? While both great violence and great heroism goes on in Afghanistan and Iraq, a war like the one on terror cannot be won by killing the enemy. It is most certainly not won in trenches by two groups lobbing bullets and bombs at each other, with one group ultimately proving superior at some point—although this is still the picture of war that many people back home carry with them.

  For every one ideologically motivated insurgent we defeat with a bullet, two more will ultimately rise in his place if we do nothing to address the circumstances that made him somehow relevant or necessary to the people of his country, religion, and culture. For this reason, the way to victory begins with understanding the people themselves. The support of the people is what decides the winner in a counterinsurgency, and the war is one for hearts and minds.

  Their needs, beliefs, and circumstances are either addressed by the insurgents or by the US and international community. If we can understand the people well enough to do a better job, the insurgents lose their base of support and ultimately fade into irrelevancy. That, and only that, constitutes victory.

  I am not here to ignite discussion on foreign policy issues. Enough of that takes place on campuses already, and it belongs to the strategic realm of thinking. To answer your question, I can only bring you a taste of the tactical, operational, dusty boots-on-the-ground experience of integrating cultural perspective into the War on Terror, in the hope that it brings you a window on the people that you might not have had before.

  Yes, many of you know that my most important work had to do with the roots of extremist violence lying somewhere in a dark pattern of abuse. These discoveries too, especially these, the darkest findings of a culture, are perhaps the most necessary. Without knowing the hidden issues, the uncomfortable issues, even our best attempts to address superficial issues will be ineffective and lead only to endless engagement without any true or final positive outcome. The hard truths are the ones we can least afford to ignore.

  __________________________________________

  [46] Dated On September 20, 2010.

  [47] From a personal email with the author dated September 9, 2010. The same text was posted on an internet forum thread titled “Afghan Pedophilia Story” at the website mixedmartialarts.com on September 2, 2010.

  Afghanistan + 500

  (An Epilogue)

  Today is, perhaps, the day I have waited for, though I believe I yet wait for so much more. Media reports worldwide announced that Afghanistan will sign an agreement with the United Nations “to stop the recruitment of children into its police forces and ban the common practice of boys being used as sex slaves by police and military commanders.” This was not where it ended.

  “With the agreement on an action plan to combat the problem, the government will for the first time officially acknowledge the problem of child sex slaves,” the London Times reported. I found sudden tears. Finally. Finally, I thought, an official response.

  The article announcing the agreement referred to my work as that of a “Pentagon consultant,” who wrote “a report on Pashtun sexuality prepared for British and American troops in 2009.” My work was part of this—a tiny part perhaps—but one that eventually helped make the situation impossible to ignore or deny.

  I learned that even General Stanley McCrystal had been made aware of my findings, along with “NATO officials” unnamed. General McCrystal, it seems, was the first to take some action or offer high-level acknowledgement by issuing “an order in 2010 warning troops to be on the lookout for under-age recruits.”

  Though I knew my report had been widely distributed, until today, I never really knew if it resulted in any actual military or humanitarian impact on the ground back in Helmand and Kandahar. How high “up the chain” was my report ever read, I wondered, and did any resulting official action flow back down?

  If my report went to the State Department, was there any effective diplomatic outcry that could come from there? If the report went to international NATO forces, did they seek action? Despite the media attention, it had seemed to me that the answer regarding any real impact was no.

  Now there was something, at least something, that acknowledged the issue on a global scale. I’m not stupid, however. I understand that this is a signature on a bit of paper—a gesture and a hopeful promise. It can be nothing more.

  I know better than most that the rule of Afghan law still lacks firm bearing or authority in the wild tribal lands of the south, fiercely though we all struggle to make it so. That struggle is resulting in some success. With the fighting we’ve endured and the lives we’ve lost and damaged, we’ve made safety in these regions—governance under Afghan rule rather than the reign of extremists and Taliban hold-outs—a real possibility.

  We’ve made it, just almost, a place where laws banning the sexual slavery of children could be enforced and upheld. As I write, though, we are considering withdrawing our forces from what seems an endless war. It all feels like a gut-wrenching farce, the lives of brave fighters and good, kind Afghans, and innocent tortured children somehow the butt of the joke.

  Is there a solution? It’s extremely difficult to say how we might combat the dynamic of abuse, both for the sake of the human rights of children and for the sake of our own security. We can’t forget, of course, that their security is also ours.

  The first obvious issue is the fact that this cycle of abuse is generational. It therefore requires generational involvement if an intervention in the cycle is going to take place. At least one generation of children must grow up experiencing unviolated safety.

  It would be ideal if these children knew continued caring contact with parents of both genders, so that women are not alien to boys nor men alien to girls. These children would then grow to adulthood lacking the compulsion to pass on any shattering hurt they had experienced. In the span of a single generation, the cycle of violence and terror can be broken.

  How, then, might the safety of a generation be ensured? A significant part of the equation is the consistent enforcement of law and order by an effective force (not yet the Afghan Police and Army, who are currently the primary sex abusers cited by the U.N.). While the Taliban imposed its repressive laws with sheer unmitigated brutality, the post-Taliban Afghan justice system is not yet mature enough to enforce its own laws, especially in the most rural areas where abuses can be prevalent.

  Next, the economic concerns that motivate families to sell children into sexual slavery must be addressed. However, I experienced firsthand the difficulty of motivating many citizens of southern Afghanistan to take personal charge of their income and the sustainment of their own families and communities. The Afghan government, most certainly, is not in the position to remedy the economic troubles of each individual village, and international forces and aid organizations cannot solve this problem long-term without the cooperation and participation of the Afghan people. Somehow, an attitudinal shift from the current and prevalent expectation of government dependence back to the ancient Pashtun ideals of personal strength, rugged independence, and individual responsibility to the community must be accomplished.

  In addition, the safety of a generation must be ensured not only from widespread rape, but from the volatile
external circumstances and strife that breed violence like rape. Still today, children grow up in villages where Taliban fighters come in the night leaving threatening letters, or arrive in the day and carry out their ghastly threats for all to see. Without a working security force, the Afghan villagers who sided with us and with the future of their country—who believed in a world where extremist violence had no place—will be the first to suffer the horrific retaliation of Taliban hold-outs, and their dream of peace will die with them. The lands will become again a breeding ground, quite literally, exclusively for terrorism.

  Security, then, remains a necessity for the “ideal” generation to flourish. Again, however, this cannot yet possibly be accomplished by the Afghan Army or Police, the reality of whose functioning I came to understand so vividly while deployed. These forces will be capable, but not until they are spared the damage that currently renders them either addicts or abusers. Until, that is, a generation has passed.

  The solution of seeing to the safety of an “ideal” generation is perhaps untenable, but it seems the only resolution to the cyclical violence bred by sexual abuse. The difficulty of solving the problem can be matched only by the danger of leaving it unsolved. The London Times included this photo with its announcement of UN intervention. For all the writing I’ve done, the image leaves nothing more.

  Widely circulated unattributed image.

  A PARTING WORD

  While I remain continually troubled for the children of Afghanistan, I cling to the memory of the gypsies’ laughter, and its promise of hope. The hope I bear for the fate of Afghanistan remains integrally linked to my wishes for the safety of my own country and that of the world. May we find a solution.