Western troops fighting the Taliban during the past two decades reported how senior Afghan allies have tried to conceal how widespread Bacha bazi was. Following the death of American marine Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr in 2021, his father, Gregory Sr revealed that his son told him that from his bunk in southern Afghanistan he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the military base. ‘At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,’ the marine’s father recalled his son telling him. ‘My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their “culture”,’ he told the New York Times. At the same time, the Taliban was recruiting hundreds of child prostitutes to work on military bases where Afghans were working for the Americans – then murdering the soldiers who abused them. Pimped to the Taliban by local tribes, the young boys infiltrated bases to work as dancers and prostitutes. Once inside they poisoned or shot their abusers, or drugged the guards and opened the gates to Taliban fighters lying in wait. Dozens of soldiers and policemen were killed this way over a period of several months in 2016: in the southern province of Urozgan, these honeytrap attacks were so effective that hundreds of policemen and officers were sacked. ‘The Taliban have figured out the biggest weakness of the police and sent about 100 beardless boys to penetrate checkpoints and poison and kill policemen,’ Ghulam Sakhi Rogh Lewani, Urozgan’s former police chief, said at the time. In February 2018, Afghanistan finally introduced a new penal code that contained specific provisions to punish those involved in Bacha bazi. But since America’s botched withdrawal under Joe Biden four years ago, it is pervasive again. In part, it’s a symptom of the broader lawlessness that now exists in the country. Like so many other barbaric practices, the sexual exploitation and slavery of these boys has become a perverse status symbol for many Afghan leaders. Tight gender segregation in Afghan society and lack of contact with women has contributed to the spread of Bacha bazi. After the Taliban’s takeover, they gave the impression they would be more progressive – promising to uphold the rights of girls – within the limits of Islamic law of course. What followed this was quite the opposite: a litany of the most sadistic and brainless anti-women persecution. Last year, the Taliban passed a law that gave the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Ministry – the Taliban’s morality police – sweeping powers to enforce a stringent code of conduct for Afghan citizens and curtail the rights of women. This same law also banned the practice of Bacha bazi. And yet young boys today continue to be abused – a problem exacerbated by the unavailability of women under the Taliban’s oppressive regime. Much of this insanity stems from the particularly hardline stance of the Taliban’s Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada. Akhundzada is a man who stays out of the public eye. Few photos of him exist, and his public output is limited to the odd audio recording. He was an Islamic judge of the Sharia courts under the 1996-2001 Taliban government where one can only imagine the type of legislative savagery he would have meted out pretty much every day. He opposes most forms of female education, favours much tighter media control and is said to hanker after a return to the Taliban’s halcyon days under Osama bin Laden’s colleague and the group’s founder, Mullah Omar. When I recently asked an Afghan expert why Akhundzada was so extreme, even to the point where he has repeatedly clashed with less fanatical Taliban leaders in Kabul, I was told: ‘Because he’s a warlord who lives in a cave.’ This is where we are almost 25 years on from the invasion of Afghanistan. With trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of killed and wounded. We may have left the country, but our legacy remains, not least among sexually abused boys of Afghanistan, who we have abandoned to this relentless and unforgivable barbarism.