I also recall reading that the original Taliban gained in popularity back in their early days for putting an end to this kind of brutality.

Frankly, I could still call a 15-year old boy a young boy. Anyway.

I really hope my posts is not interpreted as lending any sort of respectability to the practice. Even if it were consensual, which is not conceivable, I’d still find it repellant to sexually prey upon children.

But to say that Arab and Persian poets (and let’s throw in the Greeks too) were talking about pre-pubescent boys is outright nonsense. I haven’t read Persian and Arabic poetry exhaustively, but I have read a lot of both in the original, and I think it’s up to you to come up with a single line that promotes the kind of “young boy” love you’re claiming is so prevalent. When they say “youth” they’re talking about what we call adolescents.

It’s also worth mentioning the culture of taunting other ethnicities in Afghanistan based on homosexual behavior; one could say that it’s one of the ways Pashtun and Tajik figure each other as different.

What I was saying, which I don’t want to lose track of, is that rape isn’t just used as a weapon in Afghanistan, and making reference to some “cultural tradition” in a way puts a patina of respectability on something that should never, ever happen.

I don’t doubt that the wars have created an environment in which this can become widespread and an appalling indicator of official corruption, but it isn’t quite so cut and dried: a lot of male aid workers have noted that Afghan men are flirty with them, and some enterprising journalists have actually catalogued the youth worshipping gay traditions within traditional Afghan society.

True, disgusting facts, but I wonder if we overdo the ‘cultural tradition’ aspect of this phenomenon when we use an exotic Persian name for something, when in fact this is the same kind of thing that happens the world over in conflict zones that are left to fester for decades.