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| Afghanistan | |||
| Taliban saved us from terrorizing police: Afghans | |||
| 2009-07-13 | |||
| [Al Arabiya Latest] As British troops moved into the village newly freed from Taliban control, they heard one message from the anxious locals: for God's sake do not bring back the Afghan police. American and British troops have launched a campaign to seize control of Helmand province, about half of which was in Taliban hands, and restore Afghan government institutions. As the troops advance, they are learning uncomfortable facts about their local allies: villagers say the government's police force was so brutal and corrupt that they welcomed the Taliban as liberators. "The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter. He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of "bachabazi," or sex with pre-pubescent boys.
"If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and rape them," he said. Unless the field was full of melons, of course... "You can go to any police base and you will see these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then let the child go." I've never quite been able to see the logic of that particular perversion. Why only boys? Pre-pubescent girls have backsides, too. I think it has something to do with the fact that the boys grow up to wear turbans and lug automatic weapons around and swear Dire Revenge™ and such. Girls just grow up to work in the fields and carry heavy loads and wear burkas. The Interior Ministry in Kabul said it would contact police commanders in the area before responding in detail.
Before the Taliban arrived, the police had come to his house with a powerful landlord he called a "tyrant," who put a rifle in his face, searched through his compound and demanded money. "If (the British) bring these people back, we can't live here. If they come back, I am sure they will burn everything," Rasul said. | |||
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 Sounds fishy to me. |
| Posted by: Richard of Oregon 2009-07-13 11:20 |
| #2 A big problem is that there is no "national sense", so police are just another tribe, muscling in the locals. That's how the locals see it, and worse, that is how the police see it. It is so entrenched that even the communist trick of training orphans to be national police had only marginal success, with the same problem in eastern Europe. The best bet would have been if right from the onset, the US had started training tens of thousands of urban children in western oriented boarding schools, with an eye to them becoming a future generation of political, military and police leaders. The twist would be not indoctrination, but persuasion that it is a better, more efficient way of doing things than tribalism. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2009-07-13 10:48 |
| #1 IIRC, this was a feature that got the taliban regime support in rural provinces. Wasn't the first major PR success of mullah omar hanging a couple local warlords who had been infighting over who would buttfark a young boy? |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2009-07-13 07:09 |