World Affairs Brief, November 20, 2009 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World. Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief.

SODOM IN AFGHANISTAN

Patrick Cockburn, a British correspondent for the UK Independent has unearthed another ugly bombshell implicating the British government covering up for Afghan soldiers who sexually abuse and sodomize detainees in Afghanistan. “One reason Afghan villagers prefer to deal with the Taliban rather than the government security forces is that the latter have a habit of seizing their sons at checkpoints and sodomizing them… But the fact that male rape is common practice in the Afghan armed forces has, unfortunately, a great deal to do with the fate of British soldiers.

“There was a horrified reaction across Britain last week when a 25- year-old policeman called Gulbuddin working in a police station in the Nad Ali district of Helmand killed five British soldiers when he opened fire with a machine gun on them. But the reason he did so, according to Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times, citing two Afghans who knew Gulbuddin, was that he had been brutally beaten, sodomized and sexually molested by a senior Afghan officer.” In fact, British officers witnessed it and failed to stop it.

In other news of the war, it appears the US is using the same bribery tactics in Afghanistan that they used in Iraq, enhancing our able to claim victory when there is none. The Nation Magazine’s investigative correspondent Aram Roston, reports that US military contractors charged with assisting US forces in Afghanistan are actually funding the groups killing American soldiers. Roston describes a protection racket similar to that of the mafia, in which contractors pay the Taliban ‘protection money’ not to attack them.

“In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes… It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban… US officials estimate that as much as ten percent of taxpayer money doled out to private contractors ends up in insurgents’ hands. By a quick accounting, this amounts to tens of millions of dollars.” US officials do this through contractors to hide the spending from taxpayers.