It was the most maddening statement I heard in Afghanistan and I heard it plenty.

“This is our culture.”

The burqas are hideous: This is our culture.

Old men are marrying little girls: This is our culture.

Women aren’t allowed to step outside the family compound without a male chaperone: This is our culture.

Torturing detainees is a crime: This is our culture.

Sharia law is cruel: This is our culture.

Accepting the social and moral dictums of a society so alien to my own was always a struggle. The Afghan way may have endured for millennia but even in a land that time forgot, some cultural practices could indeed be viewed as black and white in their inherent wrongness. But we were discouraged from ever saying so, from passing judgment, lest we be accused of cultural chauvinism.

But I never thought I’d see the Canadian military duck behind a trope of cultural sensitivity to rationalize abuse and exploitation.

It’s right there: Paragraph 1.20 of the executive summary from a board of inquiry report into the mishandling of allegations that Afghan boys and young men were sexually abused by Afghan soldiers, under the nose of Canadian military personnel.

Man Love Thursday the phenomenon was called and everybody knew what was happening. It was overt. Anyone who says different now is lying.

On Man Love Thursday, just ahead of prayer Fridays, these boys and youths would come out of the woodwork, fingernails painted red, kohl around their eyes, lipstick on their kissers. In a country where homosexuality — pederasty as it’s called there by legal terminology — and cross-dressing are crimes subject to long prison sentences under the Afghan penal code and far worse, including death, under Sharia law, the presence of these individuals was far from abnormal, certainly in the vicinity of Afghan national security forces. Army units, primarily, included those sharing Canadian forward operating bases.

They were catamites, these youths. And I question whether even those of adult age were consensual participants as opposed to coerced into providing sexual pleasure for troops out of poverty and community rejection.

The redacted board of inquiry report, released this week, claims “definitions and perceptions’’ by Canadian Forces members of Man Love Thursday “were largely formed on rumour and innuendo based on preconceived notions. At best, the term ‘Man Love Thursday’ is culturally insensitive, as it reflects a very poor and often inaccurate perception of Afghan culture. At worst it is a derogatory term that encourages cultural intolerance and bias and appears to condone illegal sex with minors.”

This is precisely the attitude — overweening culture sensitivity — that allowed abuse and sexual assault to occur in and around outposts under Canadian command: Don’t look, don’t tell. Don’t get involved. Don’t condemn.

Canadian military commanders — right to the very top echelons of decision-making — fell into the same trap by standing down, raising no objections, over the mistreatment of detainees: Not our lookout, captives are turned over to Afghan authorities, no agreement exists nor infrastructure available for holding prisoners in Canadian-run facilities, or ensuring oversight so that torture wouldn’t be used.

We were wrong then. And we were wrong by turning a blind eye to sexual abuse of boys by Afghan soldiers and interpreters.

It’s taken, disgracefully, a full decade for the military to acknowledge its mishandling of these human rights violations — though the report concludes that at no time during Canada’s deployment to Afghanistan did commanders order their troops to ignore suspected abuse. In fact — and with subsequent breakdowns in communication all over the place — the military only sat up and took notice after a 2008 Star story by then-correspondent Rick Westhead.

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There are all sorts of reasons, excuses, for why no action was taken until it was far too late — Canada’s 12-year military mission in Afghanistan ended in 2014. But the rationalizations are lame and the principles which drove disengagement odious.

Nothing in Afghan tradition tolerates sexual exploitation of boys — though, sadly, sexual exploitation of girls, giving them away as pre-pubescent children in marriage for instance, is very much part of the Afghan social fabric, despite being expressly illegal.

The report claims Man Love Thursday — which I would characterize too often as “Boy Love” — was most prevalent in combat provinces far from Kabul where a weak central government had minimal reach. That’s not the main reason these violations occurred. It happened because Man Love/Boy Love was a feature of the Afghan military and coercion of the vulnerable tolerated.

“This term refers to the regular gathering of men on the Thursday evening before the Islamic holy day,” the report says of Man Love Thursday. “Perceptions of what this term means varied from Thursday being a tradition that can best be described as the Afghan equivalent of happy hour, to a belief that there was widespread homosexual activity among ANSF personnel. More disturbingly, a minority of CF soldiers believed ‘Man Love Thursday’ included regular sexual assault of minors. Despite almost universal usage, the term was never challenged in pre-deployment cultural training or by the CF chain of command.”

Further, even when this information was given to field commanders — who surely would have seen it for themselves — it was uncertain “whether sex with a minor is considered to be a serious crime in the current (Rules of Engagement) and Use of Force manual definitions.”

Seriously? What about duty to protect under the United Nations charter?

While homosexuality is a crime in Afghanistan, Canadian troops would certainly not be expected to intervene in sex between consenting adults. They should have intervened immediately, however, when suspicion arose that minors were being exploited to the extent that young boys (and girls) sometimes required medical treatment.

It is fairly obvious why Afghan men — soldiers — would engage in sexual practices forbidden by their culture and their religion. In a society which permits no casual interchange between unrelated males and females, women/girls are untouchable and unapproachable, though prostitution exists in Afghanistan as everywhere else. The urge to satisfy normal sexual needs would traditionally be met by early arranged marriage. But marriage is a costly business in Afghanistan and most young men can’t afford it. If they had any way to make a decent income, they wouldn’t be in the army in the first place.

Sex with men within a barracks culture is at least tacitly accepted. But complying by capitulating — looking away, living with it — when minors are being hurt, or when adult males are being preyed upon, out of some misdirected sense of cultural tact, a hands-off laissez-faire, is indefensible.

It was a terrible wrong that the Canadian military can’t begin to undo because they were privy to it and did nothing. That shame is ours.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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