Following America’s departure from Afghanistan in 2021, it is now endemic again. As many as 50 per cent of the men in Pashtun tribal areas of the south are now thought to practise this paedophilic abuse. Despite the Taliban’s outward scorn for Bacha bazi, a 2024 US State Department report found ‘a pattern of employing or recruiting child soldiers and pattern of sexual slavery’ by the group, who were also ‘in some cases perpetrators’. I have heard several stories in recent years of Western journalists stumbling upon boys being raped in compound bathrooms, or local authorities suddenly refusing to engage when the subject is raised. The practice is irretrievably linked to power. Survivors have reported an ‘overwhelming understanding that Bacha bazi is committed by the powerful, including community leaders, and, in previous years, military commanders, police, and government officials’, according to a 2024 US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report. In 2024, the EU Agency for Asylum claimed: ‘Afghan security forces, in particular the Afghan Local Police, reportedly recruited boys specifically to use them for Bacha bazi in every province of the country.’ In the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan, many children, desperate for money and employment, hang around truck stops, waiting for lifts to nearby cities where they hope to find work. Instead, they are often taken advantage of by truck drivers who exploit their vulnerability to use them as sex slaves. In a 2010 Frontline documentary on Bacha bazi made by PBS, Afghan reporter Najibullah Quraishi followed a man named Dastager, a former member of the Northern Alliance resistance forces that fought against the Soviets – and one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan’s Takhar province. Asked what he looked for when selecting a boy, Dastager was confident in his tastes. ‘[He] should be attractive, good for dancing,’ he said. ‘Around 12 or 13, and good-looking. I tell their parents that I will train them.’