The Boys We Left Behind: The Heartbreaking Truth of Bacha Bazi in Afghanistan, and America’s Missed Opportunity

Every morning in Kabul, a 14-year-old boy named Abdul waved from behind a bakery window. Then one day he was gone — taken by a government official, the kind the United States was funding to fight its war. What happened to Abdul has a name: bacha bazi, or "boy play." It is centuries old, it is systematic, and for two decades while America had a hundred thousand troops on the ground, it was largely ignored. Boys between the ages of 10 and 18, taken from the poorest families, dressed, danced, and passed between warlords, police chiefs, and officials — many of them trained and bankrolled by American taxpayers. When U.S. soldiers tried to intervene, they were punished for it. The Taliban claim to have banned the practice. The State Department's own trafficking report says otherwise. I go inside a story that powerful people on every side of this war have preferred to leave in the dark. Support the showVisit holliesmckay.substack.com