The Enemy of My Enemy
well here we all are, 20 years and a trillion dollars later–did we smoke em out?



So, did we all just spend the past twenty years watching the American-led military industrial cult waste a trillion dollars waging a false war on terror against one of the poorest and most illiterate nations on earth? Did I not distinctly hear Dubya, all those years ago, say he was gonna defeat the Taliban? And didn’t we all just watch Trump and Pompeo essentially hand Afghanistan back to the Taliban, in early 2020? So, am I getting this straight—did we spend a trillion dollars over a period of twenty years, send our boys over there to lose their lives, get their legs blown off or worse, and sustain raging cases of PTSD that will plague them the rest of their lives, only to hand the country back to the entity we went to war to defeat?
The human cost on the surface seems unforgiveable—3,500 western coalition soldiers died, and 45,000 Afghan Security Forces died. In the past 10 years alone the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan cost over 110,000 Afghan civilians their lives. Not to mention those who survived and live with the debilitating effects of trauma, often refractory and unmitigated. When you dig deeper it becomes criminal—this was a war crime and a crime against humanity. All the while, the western ruling elite pretended they had waged their war to empower the women of Afghanistan. Yeah, you deranged imperial clowns, because definitely the way to make a woman’s life easier is to kill her husband, son, uncles, father, grandfather and/or to watch while depraved men kidnap her son and sell him into sex slavery in the service of warlords and other elite men.
A Culture of Rampant Pedophile Corrupted the Ghani Regime
Yes, you read that correctly—the practise of Bacha Bazi, banned by the Taliban who made it punishable by death, flourished under western occupation. The corruption so widespread, that the Minister of Border Security and Tribal Affairs in the Ghani regime was once a CIA-backed warlord known to have had Bachas, ie boy sex slaves. A culture of rampant pedophilia had infiltrated the police and security forces, corrupting the crucial institutions of the ruling establishment and casting the rulers so far from the people of Afghanistan itself as to make any talk of stability or freedom meaningless noise. While the world fixated on Afghan girls and women to the point of fetishising them their literacy rate only rose 3% in 20 years—84% of Afghan women remain illiterate. What’s worst, boys remained invisible, and therefore a perfect fresh target for prey. The west gave pedos a pass and even put them in power whilst claiming its intervening purpose as promoting stability. You don’t promote stability or nation building by letting pederasts/pedos run the establishment, FYI.
His father is dead, so it’s okay said one pedophile in a film clip I have seen during my research this week. In another film clip from the mid 70s, I noticed the groups of older men with one or two boys, and have seen pictures from Central Asia dated early 1900s showing the same scene, groups of grown men and then one boy, their Bacha. The boys are knowing as dancing boys, though you are naive if you believe that dancing in this case isn’t a euphemism for sex—young beautiful boys dressing up in female cloths to dance for powerful older men who then pass them around to sodomise them, that’s Bacha Bazi. The boys are not okay and we need to talk about this. You can’t address or eliminate violence against women or in any way empower women while you are allowing their sons to be trafficked into sex slavery, that’s just ridiculous. Generally speaking, I think we need to talk about what’s happening to boys and men in places where misogyny has reached epidemic proportions.
Think about the Bachas for a moment. What do you think happens to a young boy who is snatched from his mother, repeated sexually abused to the point of having physical intestinal dysfunction, frequently physically abused and then discarded when he grows a beard, ie sexually matures? He grows into a troubled man. Some have no choice but to continue dancing, and by dancing I mean more than just dancing. Traumatised boys will more likely grow into violent men easily radicalised than boys who have no childhood trauma. Poor education, illiteracy and grave abuse will conspire to create an angry and disadvantaged young man. What an opportunity for the Taliban, which actually emerged in response to corruption and debauchery such as Bacha Bazi. In fact, what’s complicated the west’s attempts to ignore what are essentially crimes against humanity and possibly even genocide (forcibly removing the children of one group and transferring them to another group is a definition of genocide and child trafficking seems to meet this criterion), was the fact that the Taliban had begun to use Bacha Bazi victims as honey traps. The west was happy to let Afghan boys be sodomised to the point of physical mutilation because cultural relativity, oh but when it affected the integrity of their western mission, suddenly then these boys mattered? Phhhhhffffft.
The West Gave Pedos a Pass
How derangedly sociopathic and narcissistic—how imperial. The story of Bacha Bazi deeply disturbs and requires a comprehensive and rigourous examination, the deeper I get in my research the more dots I connect. I marvel at how children are not even human to us, how we so easily justify child exploitation and abuse and how facilely we diminish and overlook it out of self interest. I marvel at how children are pawns to adults, even parents, and how despite their importance as our human future, they remain largely invisible to us.
Having spent the past week pouring through US military reports and think tank pieces and investigative journalistic pieces that essentially detail the way in which the western military management instructed its soldiers to ignore the sexual abuse of young boys and justified ignoring child sexual abuse, having read about accounts of soldiers who were ordered to ignore the screams of the boys being sodomised nearby, including the solider dismissed for reacting violently toward an abuser and trying to stop the abuse, having read the stories of some Bacha Bazi victims—I can tell you I found the recent photos of the western soldiers holding Afghan babies a repugnant piece of propaganda. The west, America in particular, has no moral compass and no moral foundation upon which to base anymore claims of spreading democracy and freedom throughout the developing world or anywhere. Unelected powerful and narcissistic men with fiduciary interests in military campaigns and raging neocon ideological hard-ons have been making decisions that impact millions around the world. The military industrial complex has become the unwieldy cult Eisenhower warned it would become.
Enemy of My Enemy Bites America in the Ass
Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west.
By now most of us have seen that old magazine cover of Osama Bin Laden, founder of Al-Qaeda, an organization initially started to recruit resistance fighters in Afghanistan to defeat the Soviets. The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend—that’s American foreign policy in a nutshell, along with Defeat Communism at All Cost—a favourite working rationale the CIA has used to destroy countries when it deposed a regime the local people chose to install a corrupt dictator of its own choice. Preserve western hegemony at all cost. We all remember how well this went for America—9/11 is seared into the memory of all who were alive at that time. We all have seen the photos of those who perpetrated 9/11, none among them Afghans.
A classified memo written by Hilary Clinton acknowledges that Saudi Arabia funds more Sunni Islamist extremism and terrorism than any other country. Yet the west has normalised the KSA (not to mention ignoring Khashoggi’s brutal murder on foreign soil) and ignored the terror it subversively promotes because this serves American interests and so it’s of no concern. And yet the Afghans paid a heavy price for 9/11, like many Muslims have in Asia and MENA region—was the war on terror really just a war against muslims? What did the Taliban form in response to—remember that extremism is a response to suffering. Did the American-led imperial cult create the terrorists it waged war to eradicate through it’s own foolish Machiavellian games of geopolitical chess? Question: Are any of the living American presidents truly good men when they have all contributed to the creation of this enormous war crime and crime against humanity? Answer: No. Can we all agree the enemy of my enemy was and is an asinine strategy?
The Propaganda Machine
Tell a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth, said Goebbels. I recently read about how Twitter has partnered with AP and Reuters, both of whom have worked with MI6 and the CIA to propagate political agendas, in develop social media censorship standards under the guise of preventing misinformation or preserving credibility. The western mainstream media has essentially become a propaganda arm of government, powerful lobby groups, and the military industrial cult.
Having spent the past four years, since the Liberal government rammed Bill C-16 (Gender Self ID) through parliament, watching the media lie about the rights conflicts Gender Self ID has caused in the west wherever governments have legislated it, I have had a chance to observe the propaganda machine at work, and see most journalists and their editors as mediocre pawns in a giant propaganda endeavour. I have learned one need not have intelligence underneath an articulate facade. Rapists identifying as women and demanding the government house them in female prison, where they have raped and even impregnated female inmates—this has deliberately gone unnoticed and government funded misinformation specialists, under the umbrella of antihate, have launched a smear campaign targeting feminists organisations fighting for the constitutional and human rights of female people. The lies go unchecked and unchallenged.
If the media can so facilely lie to me about the rights conflict created by Gender Self ID laws when laws to protect female people are already in place then, why can’t it lie to me about the War on Terror, specifically the western intervention into and occupation of Afghanistan? The answer is, it can and it is. Donald Trump and his fake-news mantra did have a point and that’s why it stuck with many people. Fortunately social media provides us with the opportunity for independent media and to connect with people on the ground who have no geopolitical agenda and only want to share the truth.
Independent Media
For example, listen to Sangar and Ahmed-Waleed of the Afghan Eye talk about how America and Canada created the conditions that led to the ridiculous mob scenes we have seen at Kabul airport. When you create a bogus visa document and email it to people in one of the poorest and most war torn countries in which a regime has fallen, you are stupid if you don’t anticipate a mob showing up at the airport with the hope that a bogus document will get them onto a flight to America, where they will automatically get citizenship and have a brand new fabulous life—such is the perception of the west in the poorest parts of the developing world. Spent some time listening to Sangar and Ahmed-Waleed analyse the events unfolding in Afghanistan since the Ghani regime fell and the intrepid western-backed president fled to the UAE with a stash of millions he stole from the coffers—the Afghan Eye has a number of videos. You will find the Yvonne Ridley interview particularly interesting.
Follow this chap on Twitter, who is providing stellar information about what is actually happening in Afghanistan. Take with a grain of salt anything CNN and other similar media outlets say. When Clarissa Ward can stand in front of a crowd of jubilant Afghan men shouting the takbeer—Allahu Akbar—and casually say they’re chanting death to America now, you know you cannot trust that source. Allahu Akbar means God is Great. She didn’t even try to hide the fact that she was lying!! I have watched incredulously over the past few years as the media and particularly ideologically captured journos have lied, have become lazier and bolder in their lies. When someone has deliberately lied to you, common sense dictates you no longer trust that source. I trust few source because I have watched them lie outright.
Accountability and Truth
Accountability and truth go hand in hand—peace, freedom, and stability require both. Truth has been assaulted and without truth democracy doesn’t exist. You cannot freely choose anything when you’re being lied to, when lies become truth and truth becomes hateful. Has complacency cultivated apathy? Has abundance and materialism put us to sleep? Did we forget how to think for ourselves? In some ways I feel as though the tide has begun to shift to reveal the purveyors of bullsh1t for who they are, to reveal those who are articulate and lack intelligence and therefore exist relevantly only as propaganda tools of geopolitical agenda-setters. We were lied to by people who promised to govern and protect us and defend the constitution. Repeatedly. We are being lied to by people whose job it is to report facts.
It’s time for a reckoning—for the forgotten, voiceless, invisible people. Because the voices we have heard regarding Afghanistan have all been elite voices, those with the resources, literacy, and social capital to even make themselves heard and who speak for and promote their own elite self interest. It’s time for a reckoning for the boys whom adults have exploited and other adults have failed to protect.
My research and work on Bacha Bazi continues because I cannot look away now—I have outlined a book and begun the task of research and writing. If you want to learn more, to get a sense of the issue you can visit my lengthy ongoing Twitter thread here. I am just me, an independent writer and thinker who can illustrate devoted to truth and accountability, if you appreciate my work and want to support my Bacha Bazi research and writing you can do so by sharing this post and/or by donating. The illustration of Malcolm X is my original illustration.