The Weekly Screed (#570)

You go, girl! And we’ll all go with you!
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — The latest out of Afghanistan is that the Taliban insurgents are willing, tentatively, to consider broaching the notion of possibly someday thinking hypothetically about preliminary overtures toward distant-future conditional peace negotiations with the United States and Afghan president Hamid Karzai (although they still insist that the U.S. is the great Satan and Karzai is, in the words of one noted mullah, a “giant dromedary turd”).

If I were the U.S. State Department, I’d take this hint and run with it. Lock the Taliban in a room with Karzai and his warlord pals, wish ‘em all good luck and hightail it back to Fort Hood with every troop, tank, truck and trailer in Bagram, Shindand, Kabul, Kandahar, Camp Dwyer, Camp Leatherneck and FOB Delaram. And don’t look back. And if they should all cut one another’s throats and set the whole godforsaken country afire, leaving the scorched earth littered with crispy corpses as far as the eye can see, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of barbarians.

Except for Sahar Gul. We should get her out of there before her fellow Afghans do her any more harm.

Sahar Gul was in the news the day before the teaser about negotiating peace with the Taliban. Sahar Gul should be the poster girl for George W. Bush’s harebrained neocon state-building misadventure in Afghanistan. The epitaph on the poster should read: “You Can’t Build a Democracy on a Giant Dromedary Turd.”

This is demonstrated by what happened to Sahar Gul.

A year ago, Sahar Gul was 14. Her parents dowried her way to another family, so their 30-year-old son, a so-called “soldier” named Ghulam Sakhi, could marry her.

Fourteen? She was a high school freshman, for God’s sake!

What the hell are we doing trying to help a so-called nation where a 30-year-old man’s idea of getting married is asking his mom to BUY him a ninth-grader? Who are these people and what the hell is wrong with them?

But there’s more. Shortly after her “wedding” to Ghulam the pedophile, Sahar got her “honeymoon.” Her in-laws ordered her to the streets, to work as a prostitute to make them a few bucks (probably to earn back what they paid for her).

Fourteen years old!

We’re sending our children 7,000 miles to be killed in the name of people who take their own children and sell them to strangers, who turn them into whores?

What the hell is wrong with us?

But here’s the good part: Sahar Gul, 14 years old, imprisoned by her in-laws and told to sell her body for their beer money, said, “No.”

So, they tortured her.

For five months.

They locked her in a basement toilet — which was her only source of drinking water. They starved her. They beat her with a rod. They yanked out her fingernails. They mangled her nose and ears with a pliers.

And they told her — kid, you could stop all this misery. Just hit the streets, wiggle your ass, flash your hooters and sell fellatio to strange, dirty men behind dumpsters. And bring back the money!

OK, let’s pause here, and review. For nine years, we’ve been in Afghanistan. Helping the Afghans. Training them. Preparing them for democracy? Modernizing? Meanwhile, Afghanistan, apparently, remains a lawless hole-in-the-wall where men are so hard up for a little action that they would pay for sex with a little girl who’s missing her fingernails. And she’s covered with welts? And her nose and ears are grotesquely swollen? And she smells like she’s been living five months in a toilet?

We’re fighting for such people? We’re dying for them? We’re pumping billions of dollars into their economy?

Which they spend on blowjobs from mutilated children?

Where have we gone wrong?

Final chapter: After Sahar Gul was rescued, by the mother who’d sold her off to the In-Laws from Hell, the governor of Baghlan, where this travesty took place, insisted that Sahar’s abuse was “inhuman” and “un-Islamic.”

Inhuman, yes, but un-Islamic? Gov, there had to be at least one seriously Islamic guy involved in the sale of Sahar Gul, age 14, into sexual slavery. She was, after all, married — in a Muslim ceremony by an Islamic cleric — to Ghulam, the Humbert Humbert of Baghlan. In most cultures, the officiating priest would take a look at the little girl in the veil, and then peek at the six-foot, hairy, grown-up deviate bridegroom licking his chops and kneading his crotch, and then check out the front pew, where Hairy Deviate’s sadist mom is slapping her palm with a three-foot length of rebar and Hairy Deviate, Sr. is working up an erection by inflicting pain on himself with a needle-nose pliers, and this man of God — in most cultures — would entertain second thoughts about saying, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

What happened to Sahar Gul might have been un-Islamic. I hope to Mohammed that it was. But there were a whole bunch of Islamic people, parents, clerics, neighbors, friends and provincial governors who stood by and let it happen. Made it happen.

And if some American GI or member of the State Department had stumbled upon the scene of Sahar Gul’s abduction and enslavement, and questioned the propriety of selling little children to middle-aged men, so they could be re-sold to middle-aged men — over and over and over again — we all know what the explanation would be.

“Hey, it’s an Afghan thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

Well, I don’t understand. And thank God for that.

But I do understand that Sahar Gul deserves better — deserves consideration as Woman of the Year — because she said, “No,” and stood by her refusal for five months.

When we pack up and escape this Afghan toilet where we’ve been locked for nine years, we should not leave Sahar Gul behind. We should bring her with us.

And put her back in junior high, where she belongs!