"Those sad, exploited children should be treated not as enemy combatants, but as the victims they are."

Considering the differences between adults and children are few (mostly in appearance.) I would say the same for ALL soldiers EVERYWHERE. 

"Neuroscience tells us their [children's] brains are still developing. They aren’t yet capable of adult reasoning or impulse control, and the desperate circumstances of their lives make them easy prey for militant groups seeking youth to convert to the cause."

"Adult" reasoning and impulse control? I know many adults who thoroughly lack reasoning and impulse control. Heck, with 5 bucks in my pocket even I can't restrain myself from buying an espresso.

Desperate circumstances don't just drive children to become victims in this manner.... all human beings are susceptible. Look at the increase in military recruitment in the US after 9/11.

Anyone taught (whether in boot camp or a madrassah) that killing is a means to solve a problem should be treated with respect and pity. They are the creation of society and society owes it to them and itself to unlearn the inclination to kill.

Very well-written, Una. I'll link this to my Facebook page and pass it around to those who might be interested. This, as with all stories of child exploitation, is heartbreaking to the extreme, yet it is something far beyond the most horrific nightmare when babies are strapped to bombs.

Too bad, the article glosses over the role of Islam and its Quran, that can be understood even by a child where it says to expand the territory ruled by horrible Sharia by force and kill those who resist, with infidels promised Hell by Allah, and jihadists promised paradise, no age limit.  It's sad that Westerners are still history ignoramuses about Islam when it's easy now to learn the key facts fast accurate and free online with the Historyscoper at http://go.to/islamhistory

This is just horrible and so wrong!

Islam is not to blame for the acts of fundamentalists who do terrible things in the name of their god any more than Christianity is to blame for the fundamentalists who do terrible things in the name of their god. The history of Islam is no worse than the history of Christianity either, yet, on the balance, Islam, disregarding the horrid fundamentalists on both sides, has more built-in protections for women, children, the poor, and other religions, and historically, has had more periods of social peace and equanimity than Christian societies ever had. But, this issue of child exploitation is not an indictment of Islam, but of those who are exploiting the children. It would serve us far better if society-wrecking fundamentalists stopped trying to hi-jack every single issue to their own horrid self-serving purposes.

This is truly terrible, but it is leaving out a very large amount of child soldiers sponsored by the Northern Alliance, Karzai and paid with U.S. tax dollars.  The solution is not war.  Read the other side from an Afghan woman who has not made her living paid with American dollars.

Malalai Joya is one of Afghanistan's leading democracy activists. In 2005, she became the youngest person ever elected to the Afghan parliament. She was suspended in 2007 for her denunciation of warlords and their cronies in government. She has just written her memoir, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Woman Who Dared to Speak Out (Scribner, 2009).

Perhaps everyone would be interested in reading the text of a speech recently delivered by Malalai Joya. It's posted on The Mantle here: http://www.mantlethought.org/content/voice-crying-afghanistan

Dawn,

I did mention the child soldiers of the Northern Alliance. I mentioned them in my second paragraph. However, they have been demobilized and the Taliban's child soldiers are only growing in number.

"The solution is not war."

What is the solution? Afghanistan was not at peace when we invaded. We joined a conflict in Afghanistan, we didn't start one. The war in Afghanistan must end, but the immediate withdrawl of foreign forces will not accomplish that.

As for Malalai Joya, I believe she is a courageous woman and her expulsion for the parliament was a sad day for democratisation in Afghanistan. Joya is, however, just one woman, one voice. She does not speak for all Afghans, or all Afghan women, nor is she the only Afghan woman in political life.

Afghan women's organizations, by and large, support the presence of international forces. They abhor the deaths of civilians, as well they should, but RAWA's position is something of an outlier among civil society organizations. That Malalai Joya is used as a stand-in for all Afghan women is unfair to her, and to the many other activists whose opinions we should be weighing as our government makes decisions about how to go forward in Afghanistan.

How is Wazhma Frogh's opinion less valid than Joya's?

Una wrote: "Afghanistan was not at peace when we invaded. We joined a conflict in Afghanistan, we didn't start one."

Una: I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to take issue with you here. Depicting the USA as a gallant knight in shining armor innocently entering a conflict "we didn't start" simply is wrong. Dawn is quite right to mention US tax dollars (mis)spent in Afghanistan, though she would have done well to move her reference back to 1979, when then President Jimmy Carter signed documents funding the CIA's covert support of anti-Soviet factions months _before_ the Soviets actually invaded (thereby increasing the likelihood that they would invade). These were the Mujahideen: trained, equipped, and directly funded by the US CIA, under leadership of (among others) a Saudi "prince" from a wealthy family with very close personal and business ties to both the Saudi royal family and the Bush family — a man named Osama bin Laden. The US plan to lead the Soviets into their "Viet Nam" was a late cold war political strategy that worked as intended, to bleed the Soviets of resources and spirit in a protracted conflict, eventually contributing to the downfall of the USSR.

At that time, while we were still popularly seen as supportive friends against the Soviets, rather than leave them no one but fundamentalist Muslims to move in to educate (and indoctrinate) the young and provide some semblance of social structure, our best next move would have been to set up decent health care, education, housing and farm programs. Instead, we left them in a state of outright anarchy: we left those poor, devastated Afghan people we had used as pawns in our own "Great Game" to the ravages of a lawless, wrecked country without any structure or protections what-so-ever, and at the mercy of warlords, and then the Taliban (formed mainly from the scattered and still armed remnants of the Mujahideen) who were initially welcome as protectors against the warlords. THEN  _WE_ — the people of the United States of America — returned with our misguided military invasion, to rain down upon the Afghan people still more bombs, devastation, and daily terror.

Supporting the establishment of viable communities with education, health care, farming and housing are _still_ the only good reason we could have for being in that country at all. Otherwise, all the money we could throw at that long suffering nation in the form of soldiers occupying the streets, bombs through bedroom ceilings, and bullets creating yet more innocent, collateral human damage, can only serve to feed the continued horrific injustice perpetrated in our name, the resultant growing hatred of the US among Afghans, and the continued strengthening of fundamentalist Islam in that country.

"We have seen the terrorists and they are us!" Until we can account for, and rectify the essential discontinuity between our stated intentions and the reality of our past and present involvement in Afghanistan, we will have no moral authority to "save" anyone — not even the children strapped to bombs.

Read the following excerpt, then continue reading at the URL, below:

The CIA's anticommunist jihad

President Jimmy Carter immediately declared that the invasion jeopardized vital U.S. interests, because the Persian Gulf area was "now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan. But the Carter administration's public outrage at Russian intervention in Afghanistan was doubly duplicitous. Not only was it used as an excuse for a program of increased military expenditure that had in fact already begun, but the U.S. had in fact been aiding the mujahideen for at least the previous six months, with precisely the hope of provoking a Soviet response. Former CIA director Robert Gates later admitted in his memoirs that aid to the rebels began in June 1979. In a candid 1998 interview, Zbigniew Brezinski, Carter's national security adviser, confirmed that U.S. aid to the rebels began before the invasion:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan [in] December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.... We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would….

(this sordid tale continues…)

Yours, William Newman

Here is the URL again to the above excerpt: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Afghanistan/Afghanistan_CIA_Taliban.html

— Wm. Newman

I don't believe anyone suggested that Afghanistan was at peace with the Taliban, Una. The Taliban were chopping off hands and executing anyone they didn't like with the casualness of taking out the daily trash. By the time they were powerful enough to truly flex their fundamentalist muscle they had already shown their true colors to the Afghan people, who were living on eggshells waiting for the midnight knock that would take a family member away never to be seen again. I have not seen anyone credibly defending the Taliban, nor -- after they began to assert greater control of society — insinuating they represented any kind of peace, stability, or moral authority. When they first appeared the Taliban seemed to offer stability and order only by contrast to the warlord-inflicted nightmare of chaos that the USA left them with after our cynical Great Game machinations which precipitated the Soviet invasion that resulted in the war that cost those poor, used people so much death and destruction.

And, yes, the area of the world now known as Afghanistan has been a thoroughfare for invaders since at least the time of Alexander the Great. Yes, the Mongol invaders slew everyone in their path, driving the hardiest people to inhabit the most inaccessible mountain recesses. Yes again, the Anglo wars started with the British — past masters of the Great Game — who came and never really went away. The Brits were back calling the shots when the area was carved up to create India and Pakistan, slicing the western border of Pakistan right through the middle of ancient tribal lands, giving members of the same family different nationalities with the mere stroke of a pen. This guaranteed an indelible link between the two nations in the shared blood and cultures of western Pakistanis and eastern Afghans, reaching well into members of the Pakistan military, secret service, and elsewhere throughout both societies. To add insult to so many other injuries, their coastal lands were taken away leaving Afghanistan a landlocked nation. The USSR had been making and breaking promises of non-agression as they nibbled away at the northern boarder regions throughout the entire history of their relations. And, it wasn't until a little over 100 years ago that the last famously fierce tribes in the Hindu Kush mountains succumbed to the merciless and deadly indoctrination of Islam from the west. To bring a strange kind of prophetic fulfillment to the endless cycles of invasion and mass slaughter over the ages, it's interesting to reflect on the possibility that some people of the Hindu Kush are most likely actual decedents of Alexander's tens-of-thousands-odd troops and attached others who remained there after his death (DNA testing is underway).

Yes, yes, yes, and still again, yes, Una, all these bad things happened and granted, until relatively recently, they were perpetrated by nations and peoples other than the USA and Americans. But, really, if a highway is built through a wild forest and the animals become roadkill, do you blame the animals? Do you actually blame these tough and fiercely independent people for falling victim to the various mighty armies that have tracked through their homes, burning, murdering, raping and, more recently, strapping bombs to children? Certainly you wouldn't blame Afghan children for allowing the Taliban to use them as bomb delivery units? If a nation is left ravaged and powerless, without a shred of functioning government, no protection at all, and when each and every foreign power that comes through viciously uses them for its own cynical, self-serving ends, what can you expect of its simple people? I mean, all we did was to give them funds, old Soviet arms (we couldn't give them ours as it was a covert operation), military training, organize their leadership, and supply intelligence. It was mainly the unbelievably courageous Afghans who fought and died by the thousands to defend their homes, and eventually defeated the vast Soviet military. Can you ask for more? Actually, the welfare of the many tribes we foreigners thoughtlessly clump together and call "Afghan" has very rarely been in their own hands; they've simply been keeping afloat, wading through the blood of the ages like treading water.

Finally, I must drive home this point before I sleep tonight: If other nations torture people or make them disappear off the streets, are we justified in doing the very same? (We do.) If Great Britain and the USSR (and others) indulge in a Great Game of geopolitics, does it behoove us to join in the fray, undermining sovereign nations' democratically elected governments, assassinating popular leaders, using their people as fodder for our own cynical ends, throwing their men into deadly wars not of their making, putting their women and children in harm's way to be raped, maimed and murdered? (We — the USA — have been actively doing this at least throughout the last century.) Is the USA innocently serving its own national security by propping up and protecting the Saudi Royalty's rule (and Bush family business interests, among others) — as undemocratic as that regime is, as draconian as their laws are, as top-centered as they keep the nation's wealth, and as impoverished the poor? What does it mean that Osama -- a favored son of a royally favored obscenely wealthy Saudi family -- becomes US Public Enemy #1, and the majority of assumed suspected high-jackers on 9-11 are Saudi, and the bin Ladin family not only get a free pass out of the USA (when no other flights are allowed to leave), but no Saudis ever are called to account and never even questioned? Why, indeed, did the UK throw so many mutually incompatible tribes together and call it Iraq, then give power to a relatively small minority religiously at odds with Iran's majority, then use Iraq as a cudgel in a bloody war against Iran? Why did the USA conspire with the tiny Kingdom of Kuwait to slant drill for oil across it's boarder into Iraq's sovereign territory, quietly indicating to our own Iraqi puppet dictator, Saddam Hussein, that we would not interfere if he protected his national interests and just happened to invade Kuwait? Oh, he was surprised when we started screaming bloody murder, but he knew the Game, and he understood the bait & switch double-cross — just a tad to late to save his own bloody hide. The UK-led creation of Israel was intended as a strategic wedge to be driven into the heart of Islam and the Middle East. Churchill compared the Palestinians to "dogs in a stable" saying his own conscious was clear in displacing them. The "nation" of Israel, which before had existed only in biblical fable, exists today and is able to rain terror with impunity down upon the Palestinians and Lebanese and threaten Iran only because it is heavily armed, obscenely funded, and uncompromisingly protected by the mighty USA. The USA long ago took the Great Game baton from the UK and has wielded it without mercy in Latin America, Africa, SE Asia and elsewhere, and our attention has been focused like a laser once again on the Middle East for some time. We could go on virtually ad infinitum recounting Anglo nations' manipulations of Iran, Algeria, Lebanon, Eastern Europe, and many elsewheres, but I think you have already gotten the bigger picture or have lost interest, so I'll bring this to a close.

This Great Game has its deepest roots in time-out-of-mind movements of, and conflicts between, ancient tribal people, and it grew to fruition as tribes became nations ruled by inbred, obsessive, vain and brutal elite royal classes and the powerful monied houses that funded them and spurred them on to colonial conquest, including acquisition and hoarding of evermore resources, bloody subjugation of indigenous populations, and the claiming of endless tracks of territories. They finally become truly global and omnipresent as the royals and the monied have, for the most part, merged completely and donned business suits. Now, where this merger has taken place, we call them multinational corporations, central banks, the IMF, GATT, investment houses, political parties, moguls, and so on. They are vain, power-mad, obsessive, cold-blooded people playing out their crazy Game on the chessboard of nations. Afghanistan is simply another strategic pawn in all this, the Taliban are a pawns in all this, Al Qaeda are pawns in all this, the children strapped to bombs are pawns in all this; you, I, the American people, and the people of every nation on Earth are pawns in all this.

The good news is that, for a growing number of networked, spirited, good, humane, common people of the world, the emperors now are increasingly being seen in broad daylight without their subtly-woven false clothing of civilized humanity. A new game is afoot.

O _ o

Una: There's no need to leave my 2 long posts up on your blog. Feel free to take them down whenever you like, or as soon as you get your site controls working. I have the originals and later will post them elsewhere in a more appropriate context.

Take care, and good luck with your project.

— Wm.

Even in an supposed enlightened society, any sort of recruitment of consenting adults during an economic recession to form a voluntary army has suspect motives and lethal ramifications.

Desperate people, whether adults or children cannot make reasonable choices ... Reasonable choices cannot be made without humane alternatives and available options ...

What's the difference between the deprived, depraved conditions of a refugee camp to an 13 year old Afghan boy and a public housing project to an 18 year old African American boy who cannot find job training, full-time employment or a living wage.

Is the litmus test the age of majority, a righteous motive or the social level of desperation?

The Afghan boy likely has a more self-sanctionable motive to blow up enemies than a mercenary soldier. In both cases innocent people are likely to be wounded and die from the flying shrapnel and body parts. Why knit-pick the ethics of the thing?

The notion of a war on terror is a fraudulent misperception.;. war is terror!

The evidence continues to mount: foreign militaries are doing more harm than good in Afghanistan. Upon ceasing our military hostilities, now costing lives on all sides and unspeakable suffering especially upon the most vulnerable, our only authentic and morally defensible role in that land is supporting the reformation and growth of viable communities with aid: emergency medical and ongoing health for children and women especially; education for children and women especially; food emergency assistance and ongoing farm support; rebuilding of housing and clean water wells.

If our intention had been for the greater good of Afghans when going into the war against the USSR, we would have done this as soon as the Soviets were defeated. If we had done this then, the USA would now have powerful moral credibility and diplomatic weight among the local tribes, neighboring Pakistan and, for the most part, all muslim communities in the region. However, it may already be too late to go back to that golden scenario and we must at least reverse course and get on the right track of doing no harm.

— William Newman

An update from OXFAM via Truthdig; URL and excerpt:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091115_afghanistan_not_in_our_name/

The widow: ‘The war continues because of outsiders’

Muslima, a widow from Kabul

“I lost my husband in a suicide attack. He was killed when he was riding a motorcycle. We had moved to Peshawar, in Pakistan, where we lived in poverty. We came back to our country when we thought it was safe. Now I am a widow and my children are fatherless.

“When the fighting increased during the civil war, we migrated to near Jalalabad. We spent three years living in tents. Then we spent another two years in the main city and things were very hard. Then we had to move again, to Pakistan, before coming here.

“Now the war continues because of outsiders who don’t let us live in peace. We spend day and night in fear. We are always afraid that there will be an explosion. We wonder, will our children come home from school? Mostly poor people’s rights have been violated. Poverty is extreme in Afghanistan. My own children have been deprived of the right to education. We are in need of food. There are no jobs for our young generation. There is no life for them. If people are jobless, they will commit crimes like kidnapping, killing. They become suicide bombers, and destroy our country.”

The farmer: ‘It is worse under Karzai’

Mohammed Azizi, veterinarian and farmer from Parwan

“Year by year, the security situation has become worse and suicide attacks have spread. We have suffered for a very long time. We have very bad memories from the Taliban period. I still can’t understand why they hated us. They called themselves Muslims, but they burnt our homes.

“I know a person that loaded his donkey with food. The Taliban asked him what he was carrying. He explained that he had brought food for his children. But these cruel people threw fuel on the donkey and burnt him alive along with the food.

“When the American war against the Taliban took place, we were optimistic. We thought that Allah was bringing us light after darkness. Now, during the time of Karzai we know that the security situation has got worse instead of better. The government should not focus on building their own wealth. It should think of reconstructing our country.”

The housewife: ‘Please stop the war’

Fatima, a housewife from Kabul

“I lost my youngest son to a rocket attack. He was 18 years old. Our house was looted and destroyed in the war. We had to leave with just some clothes. We went to Kandahar and settled in Nasaji City.

“All people suffer during war but women and children suffer the most. When the Taliban came, all of the schools were closed for women. Nobody could leave their homes to work. We went to Pakistan until we were convinced that our country was secure enough to return.

“Nowadays, suicide bombers are scaring people. People can’t go anywhere without the fear that something bad will happen. but if we want peace we have to discuss this with our people – including the Taliban and mujahadeen, they are our Muslim brothers.

“My message to the international community is: stop the war. We are tired of war. We do not want brothers killing brothers any more.”