Protest over punishment of soldiers
Pair accused Afghan commander of child rape, politician says.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (RAlpine) is demanding that the Army overturn the punishment meted out to two Special Forces soldiers after they confronted an Afghan police commander who they said kept a young boy as a “sex slave.”
Hunter, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Marine officer, has criticized the treatment of Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland and Capt. Danny Quinn after an angry confrontation with an Afghan police commander.
Martland says he hit the commander after finding out the Afghan had repeatedly raped an 11-year-old boy and beaten the child’s mother, Hunter said in letters to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and the Defense Department’s inspector general, Jon Rymer. Martland concedes his conduct was wrong, Hunter said in the letters.
Martland is being forced out of the Army, effective Nov. 1, after 11 years. Quinn lost his command and resigned.
“To intervene was a moral decision,” Hunter wrote to Carter, “and Martland and his Special Forces team felt they had no choice but to respond.”
Carter has not answered Hunter’s letter, a spokesman for the congressman said.
But an Army colonel this week was quoted by the Daily Beast news website saying of Martland and Quinn, “They put their team’s life at risk by doing what they did, by risking catastrophic loss of rapport” with local Afghan officials.
Hunter responded in the Daily Beast: “To say that you’ve got to be nice to the child rapist because otherwise the other child rapists might not like you is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard — totally insane and wrong.”
A recent story in the New York Times asserted that U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan have been ordered to ignore instances of children being molested by adults. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan said that no such order exists.
The practice of men sexually abusing young boys is known as “bacha bazi,” which translates to “boy play,” the paper said.