Governments that Rape Children

More about yesterday's post about accusations from Afghans in Helmand Province that the Afghan National Police rape their children: For me, support for a government is going to be inversely-related to how much its agents tend to rape children. This seems to me to be a no-brainer.

If we've been in Afghanistan for 8 years and we haven't gotten around to solving the problem that its police force rapes children, then maybe supporters of that "mission" should give their heads a shake.

"Brian" at the Canada-Afghanistan blog says that lack of training, old uniforms and equipment and the absence of a computerized payroll system will solve the problem of corrupt, brutal "police" from the private armies of gangster warlords robbing farmers and raping their children to death. I believe the cluelessness of that response is self-evident. More coherently, Brian argued that Helmand Province has, up to this date, been relatively free of any NATO presence, and that now that Obama has made the province the centre of his expanded war, all sorts of good things are going to result.

This ignores the fact that the police are the thugs of the gangster warlord governor, one of the several warlords upon whom Karzai's government depends for its very survival. Also, the responses of the British and US-American officials to this problem don't appear to be particularly gripped by the enormity of the problem of people joining the insurgency to fight back against the child-raping police who are to return in the footsteps of the NATO forces once the Taliban has been cleared out:

The British and U.S. forces in Helmand province appear to be unprepared to deal with the popular anger over police abuses. The spokesman for the U.S. 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Captain William Pelletier, told IPS in e-mail that he had "no information about the allegations of misconduct" by police reported to British officers, despite the fact that the Marine brigade's headquarters in Helmand are right next to those of the British Task Force Helmand.

Pelletier had not responded as of Wednesday to an IPS query about popular allegations to U.S. officers of police abuses in the U.S. area of responsibility in Helmand.

The spokesman for the British Task Force Helmand, Lt. Col. Nick Richardson, asked in an interview with IPS about the grievances voiced by village elders to British officers, said, "We are aware of those."

He refused to specify what grievances against the police had been aired to the British, but said, "If there is any allegation, it will be dealt with by the appropriate authorities."

That meant the "the chain of command of the Afghan national police", Richardson explained.

This also ignores the fact that Canadian Forces personnel in Kandahar Province were complaining about the exact same thing and they were told to shut-up about it. Obviously, seeing children lying raped and murdered by the employees of the government you're killing and dying to protect is hard to keep quiet about and under pressure, stephen harper consented to a bullshit two-year long "investigation" to sweep the matter under the rug.

In other words, NATO will be as diligent at putting and end to this nastiness in Helmand as it has been in Kandahar, which is to say, not at all. Because, amazing as it might sound, stephen harper, John Manley, Paul Martin, Jean Chretien, bush II, all of them, Obama included, don't really give a shit about the people of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is to provide airbases from which the USA can project power in Central Asia. Full stop. Canada is there to suck up to the USA. Full stop.