Green Beret Who Beat Up Afghan Officer for Raping Boy Can Stay in Army
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Version 0 of 1. A decorated United States Army sergeant who hit an American-backed Afghan commander for raping a boy will be allowed to remain in the military, a spokesman said Friday. Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, a member of the Special Forces, had helped to beat up the Afghan militia commander, Abdul Rahman, in 2011 after he abducted a boy and kept him chained to his bed as a sex slave. Sergeant Martland later told Army officials that he and a Special Forces captain, Dan Quinn, “felt that morally we could no longer stand by” and allow the Afghan local police “to commit atrocities.” After the episode, Captain Quinn was relieved of his command; he withdrew from Afghanistan and later left the military. But Sergeant Martland was put under an Army-wide review program that trims the number of its noncommissioned officers when their military records show performance or conduct that is “inconsistent” with standards. An initial decision to forcibly discharge him by Nov. 1, 2015, was delayed; in March 2016, the Army said it had postponed the discharge decision again, until May 1, to allow time for Sergeant Martland to appeal. The delays were denounced by lawmakers, who called on the Pentagon to fully reinstate Sergeant Martland, who had been on his second deployment with the Green Berets in Afghanistan and had received a Bronze Star for his actions during a Taliban ambush. In a statement on Friday, Lt. Col. Jerry Pionk, an Army spokesman, said the Army Board for Correction of Military Records had modified a part of Sergeant Martland’s evaluation reports and had removed him from the review program’s list. The move “will allow him to remain in the Army,” Colonel Pionk said. The beating and its effect on the two men’s Army careers brought scrutiny to a policy of instructing American soldiers and Marines not to intervene in cases of child sex abuse by their Afghan allies. In an article in The New York Times last year, the spokesman for the American command in Afghanistan, Col. Brian Tribus, said of the United States’ military policy, “Generally, allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law.” He added that “there would be no express requirement that U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan report it.” An exception, he said, is when rape is being used as a weapon of war. |