The United States government actively tried to ignore the practice – an open secret in military and diplomatic circles. However, as it was withdrawing from the country, the State Department belatedly released a report admitting that, for nearly 20 years of occupation, there existed, “a government pattern of sexual slavery on government compounds.” U.S.-trained and funded authorities, it noted, “continued to arrest, detain, penalize, and abuse many trafficking victims, including punishing sex trafficking victims for ‘moral crimes’ and sexually assaulting victims who attempted to report trafficking crimes to law enforcement officials.” NGOs who helped the children, the report noted, advised them not to go to the police, as they were often the ones responsible for enslaving them in the first place.

Bacha bazi was primarily practiced by high-status individuals put in power by U.S. occupation forces – police, military, teachers, and government officials. Many of these people lived with their boys on U.S. compounds. This meant that, in practice, the U.S. taxpayer was subsidizing the widespread rape of children, one of the many reasons that American personnel were so unpopular with the local population, and why the U.S.-installed government fell within days of the 2021 military pullout. As Harp stated:

“The whole time that the U.S. was in Afghanistan, they were working with, protecting, funding, and arming guys who were systematically raping little boys, keeping them in chains on U.S. military bases – chained children on U.S. bases who were raped on a nightly basis! What can we even make of this? I struggle to wrap my mind around not only the evil of it, but how little anybody ever said about it.”