Sex Slaves and Slave Labor
Apparently, child abduction is on the rise in Afghanistan, with the children abducted being sold either as slave labor or as sex slaves.
A senior Afghan intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, told the Associated Press that people from Pakistan "with pockets full of cash" often travelled to remote areas of Afghanistan. They promised poor people "good religious education and divine enlightenment for their children," he said.
Boys were then smuggled across the border to religious schools in tribal regions of Pakistan, where they were "brainwashed, mentally, physically and sexually abused... thus becoming a weapon of Pakistan's intelligence and religious parties," he said.
I'm not one of those who is going to point to this and say things about how America's mission in Afghanistan failed or how we've forgotten all about the country. Both of those statements are bald-faced lies.
What does concern me, though, is that Afghanistan is still under our care and protection. As with Iraq, until a stable government is set up that can care for and protect its own, we do have obligations on a moral and a pragmatic level to provide care for the country.
Slavery of any kind can't be tolerated in Afghanistan, and stories like these underscore just how far we have to go until our mission is complete. That isn't to say that we haven't already taken great strides, or even to take away from the idea that both the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are better off now than they were a year ago--but to acknowledge the distance we still have to go.
Read the story.
Posted by zombyboy at September 25, 2003 02:54 PM
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A few sanity checks here:
Okay, 50 were rescued. Is there any idea what percentage of the total that represents?
And the quote from Amrudah Selah presents an entirely different picture. Rather than abductions, he seems to describe parents selling their children for hopes of getting their children a better life. He also describes, in the past tense, a fairly long process, and one which seems to explain the origins of the Taleban. Hardly sex/labor slaves.
Of course, slavery is wrong, and despite all the castigation of the United States on the pretext of slavery that had been abolished more than 100 years ago, slavery exists now in many parts of Africa and Eastern Europe. Heck, the abduction of women for forced marriage is on the rise in rural China, although that isn't technically slavery.
This article really gives no indication of how bad the problem really is. 50 kids is no small number, no. But is that 50% of the kids taken in the last year? 10%? .005%? How does it compare to the numbers of teen runaways in the US who are forced into virtual slavery in the prostitution trade?
I'm not disagreeing with your stance at all. I just want more hard evidence to really understand the nature and extent of the problem.
