Afghanistan's dirty little secret

Several Blaze readers have sent this story to me.  The author, Joel Brinkley is a journalism professor at Standford. He won a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.  That's to say he is likely not given to wild overstatement.

The revelations here are disturbing. Brinkley looks at a pattern of pedophilia in Afghan communities. It has a name -- bacha baz.  That means "boy player." It is the accepted relationship between an "older man with a boy lover."  Brinkley says in some tribes half the members are proudly bacha baz.

This practice is apparently most common in members of the Pashtun tribe in the south of Afghanistan.

The Pashtun are Afghanistan's most important tribe. For centuries, the nation's leaders have been Pashtun.

President Hamid Karzai is Pashtun, from a village near Kandahar, and he has six brothers. So the natural question arises: Has anyone in the Karzai family been bacha baz? Two Afghans with close connections to the Karzai family told me they know that at least one family member and perhaps two were bacha baz. Afraid of retribution, both declined to be identified and would not be more specific for publication.

As for Karzai, an American who worked in and around his palace in an official capacity for many months told me that homosexual behavior "was rampant" among "soldiers and guys on the security detail. They talked about boys all the time."

The full account may not be the most pleasant topic to ponder. Do it anyway.