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Afghan police said they rescued a convoy of 41 children, some aged as young as six, from being smuggled over the border to Pakistan and trained as suicide bombers.

The children were stopped in a convoy of cars driven by four Afghan men in the mountainous eastern province of Kunar, police and interior ministry officials said. They said their parents had been fooled into believing they were sending their children to religious schools across the border, but were instead being sent to be trained to attack Afghan and international forces.

“They were bringing these children in the name of education, but they were not being sent to schools,” a police official in the province said, “They were being sent to be suicide bombers”.

The children were to be taken to a madrassah at Shamshato, close to Peshawar, which officials said was a recruiting ground for militants belonging to Hizb-i-Islami, one of Afghanistan’s main insurgent factions…

Several said they were from the violent Pech and Korengal valleys and had lost their fathers in clashes between American troops and insurgents, or in Nato airstrikes. They told reporters that with their fathers gone, their families could not afford to look after them so they were being sent to private madrassahs where they would receive free food and clothes…

Seddiq Seddiqi, spokesman for the interior ministry, said: “It was obvious what was happening with these boys. They were being taken across the border, without any paperwork or documentation, to Pakistan where there are lots of these madrassahs. They train these children and then they send them back to carry out attacks.”

The shame, the crime of stealing the youth, the lives of these children rests solely on the heads of the base criminals leading the Taliban theocracy. They are as guilty as any thug who steals and kills children for profit.

Using schools, clothing and food for the poor as an instrument to brainwash children is nothing new – in many cultures. Doing so to turn them into murderers is reprehensible.

Afghan military already selling heavy weapons to Taliban

Afghan soldiers are selling their weapons and vehicles to the Taliban, sharing intelligence and even signing covert ceasefire agreements with the insurgent group as they prepare for the withdrawal of Nato forces…

Despite Britain and its western allies having spent billions on training and equipping Afghanistan’s security forces, they are freely co-operating with the Taliban and in some cases, ceding territory without a fight or even joining forces with their opponents…

According to the Nato study, Taliban fighters believe they have overcome the American troop surge, that victory and their return to power is “inevitable” and that they can easily subdue President Hamid Karzai’s forces once they take charge of security in 2014.

It also says that after trying by turns to threaten or cajole Pakistan away from its covert support for the Taliban, the Pakistani government remains “intimately involved” with the insurgent group. Taliban prisoners also claim the country’s ISI intelligence agency is “thoroughly aware of Taliban activities and the whereabouts of all senior Taliban personnel”.

In a further setback yesterday, the Afghan Taliban said that no peace negotiation process had been agreed with the international community, “particularly the Americans”. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement that prior to any negotiations, confidence building measures must be completed…Har!

A bazaar in Miranshah, capital of North Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal region, was “increasingly inundated with rifles, pistols and heavy weapons which have been sold by Afghan security forces.”

“The vehicles and weapons were once only acquired on the battlefield. They are now regularly sold or donated by the Afghan security forces,” the report concluded…

Yes, NATO officers, highly-placed Brits, American PR flacks all deny the likelihood of any of these really happening. Of course, all three categories of Blimp have only just progressed from trench warfare to helicopters in the past couple of decades.

Two of the rescued children
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Police in the Pakistani city of Karachi have rescued 54 students from the basement of an Islamic seminary, or madrassa, where they said they were kept in chains by clerics, beaten and barely fed.

Police raided the Zakariya madrassa late on Monday on the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial hub. They were now investigating whether it had any links to violent militant groups, which often recruit from hardline religious schools. Most victims had signs of severe torture, and had developed wounds from the chains, police said. The main cleric of the madrassa escaped during the raid.

“Those 50 boys who were kept in such an environment like animals,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told journalists…

“I was there for 30 days and I did not seen the sky or the sun even once,” Zainullah Khan, 21, told Reuters at a police station where the students were questioned and then released to their relatives. “I was whipped with a rubber belt and forced to beg for food…”

Many people are too poor to afford non-religious schools or feel state institutions are inadequate so they send their children to madrassas, where they memorize the Koran, learn Arabic and study the traditions of Islam.

Many madrassas offer free boarding and lodging. Some of the more extreme schools churn out fighters and suicide bombers for militant groups like the Taliban or al Qaeda.

Not exactly the newest ploy in the world for a religion to gather loyal recruits.

Religious schools in many countries are run as recruiting tools, as centers for rehabilitation, for free and later for profit. People who are poor enough, ignorant and/or illiterate, foolish enough to believe in a religion-based free lunch get what they pay for.

Fed up with the price of gas? We feel your pain. Depending on what state you live in, gas is likely to be found for somewhere between three and four dollars per gallon – and make no mistake, that figure is enough to amount to a sizable chunk of the average American’s monthly paycheck.

A new Pentagon report obtained by The Wall Street Journal suggests that American motorists should consider themselves lucky to have such affordable fuel: U.S. military operations stationed in Afghanistan are paying a lot more than that… up to $400 per gallon of fuel delivered to troops on the ground – 100 times what we are asked to shell out. Yikes.

The astronomical cost of fuel is due in part to how it must be delivered: by parachute. Huge military cargo planes operated by the Air Force fly to a remote drop zone and send dozens of pallets to the ground, containing items like food, water and, of course, fuel.

There’s more bad news. Due to the dangers of setting up ground-based supply convoys, the military fully expects that air-drops will be increasingly necessary in the coming months and years. And that means our military’s fuel bill is only going to get more and more expensive.

We could probably buy one-gallon containers of gasoline in western China and have them delivered by taxicab for less.

Cookware taken in evidence

Police have arrested a woman in Pakistan on suspicion of murdering her husband, chopping his body to pieces and boiling it in a bid to get rid of the evidence.

Zainab Bibi, 42, allegedly told authorities she killed her husband Ahmad Abbas because he tried to sexually assault her 17-year-old daughter from another marriage.

She told police she sedated her husband by mixing sleeping pills in his tea and strangled him with rope before dismembering him.

Police say they discovered her plot after neighbours complained about a bad smell coming from her home.

The alarm was raised by Bibi’s landlord, Behzad, who lives on the ground floor of the two-storey Green Town house. He was so upset by the bad cooking smells coming from upstairs that he went up to complain.

Police claim that he found Bibi at the stove, cooking a korma with flesh from her husband’s arm and leg – because she believed it was the only way to practically dispose of his body…

“It occurred to me that if I cooked the body in parts with spices and aromatic ingredients that would curb the stench.’

But she insisted she had no plans to eat the resulting dish, or to feed it to others, adding: ‘I had a plan to do away with the cooked stuff by throwing it in a gutter. I would say to people that it had spoiled…’

The rest of Mr Abbas’s body was found in an aluminium trunk on the premise.

You never know when you might need to add extra ingredients to balance out a recipe.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

India has “never been closer” to wiping out polio, India’s health minister has declared as he marked World Polio Day.

There have been no new cases for more than nine months, making it the longest polio-free period since the global eradication campaign was launched. The only case reported this year was in the state of West Bengal in January. There were 39 cases reported over a similar period in 2010.

India is one of only four countries in the world where polio is still endemic. The virus is also prevalent in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

The overall trend in India is so positive that its vaccination programme is being discussed as one other countries might learn from.

Pakistan is a particular concern. It has seen 118 new cases so far this year concentrated in poor, insecure areas: Karachi, Baluchistan and the tribal areas close to the border with Afghanistan.

The two countries routinely re-infect each other. Afghanistan has seen 40 new cases this year. The continuing violence there also makes it hard to reach vulnerable children. Nigeria too has seen a surge in cases this year which have undermined recent gains…

Some communities simply do not trust the people who administer the vaccine and fear it could hurt their children… But they trust their priests.

The health ministry reported that no cases were reported from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh for 18 months…

Uttar Pradesh has been one of the worst-affected regions in the world’s fight against polio with hundreds of cases reported until a few years ago. Of the 549 polio cases in India in 2008, 297 were in Uttar Pradesh.

It is especially heartwarming for a grayhead like me to witness this victory. I grew up in a time when polio threatened all societies. Beaches and pools were often closed in summer because of the threat of contagion. All of us knew someone in every neighborhood who died or was left paralyzed by the disease.

I experienced each stage of vaccine development from early days of the first vaccinations, needle sticks and terrified children as kids always are over needles – on through to oral vaccines. The relief experienced by my parents, all parents in the factory town I grew up in. The minority of superstitious nutballs who kept their kids from safety were looked at as fools who fortunately only constituted a danger to themselves – and unfortunately to their own children.

Yes, there are parts of Kashmir that look just like my neck of the prairie
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A much-despised law that suspends basic rights and shields security forces from prosecution in the disputed province of Kashmir will be lifted in some areas in the next few days.

Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, said in a speech to police officers that the situation in many areas of Kashmir had become peaceful enough to warrant removing the law, which is known as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

Human rights activists have long argued that the act, which gives government security forces wide latitude in areas where insurgents operate, has led to widespread abuses. The discovery of thousands of unidentified bodies in mass graves in the region this summer seemed to underscore the impunity the law allowed.

Security officers cannot be prosecuted for acts committed while on duty in areas covered by the act without permission from the Home Ministry, and such permission has almost never been granted, even in cases where rape and murder were alleged.

The law was put in place in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir in 1990, when the state was in the grip of insurgents — partly fueled by Pakistan — who sought to wrest it free of India…The insurgency petered out in the late 1990s, and the past few years have been largely free from armed struggle. But the act has remained in force and was a crucial catalyst for unarmed protests that have swelled in Kashmir almost every summer in recent years. Last year more than 100 people died in protests, most of them killed by security officers who fired into rock-throwing crowds.

But this summer was largely tranquil, and the state government has been slowly reducing the visibility of its security presence in the region, removing heavily armored bunkers and taking machine-gun-toting security officers off the streets.

Like many activists around the world who support the range of struggle from national liberation movements in earlier days, pro-democracy movements, nowadays – I sincerely hope the Indian government can make it past sectarian insurgencies to support full-blown democracy in a region long in the search for its own voice in governing.

This could be a start.

We sit down to talk, the smile goes away!
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Islamabad — An unusually powerful American delegation arrived here on Thursday to deliver the starkest warning yet to Pakistan, according to a senior American official: that the United States would act unilaterally if necessary to attack extremist groups that use the country as a haven to kill Americans…

“This is a time for clarity,” Mrs. Clinton declared in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she met President Hamid Karzai before leaving for Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. “No one should be in any way mistaken about allowing this to continue without paying a very big price.”

“There’s no place to go any longer,” Mrs. Clinton added, referring to Pakistan’s leaders, whom the administration has accused of equivocating by supporting the Afghan insurgency…

Before the meeting, which took place at the residence of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, a senior administration official said that the delegation would make it clear that if the Pakistanis did not act against insurgents like the Haqqani network, then the United States would have to.

The Haqqani network uses Pakistan’s tribal areas as a base and has become the most potent part of the insurgency in Afghanistan. Before stepping down last month, Adm. Mike Mullen, General Dempsey’s predecessor, called the Haqqanis “a veritable arm” of Pakistan’s intelligence service…

Pakistan’s response remains to be seen…

RTFA. I understand they are between a rock and a hard place. It is – to a certain extent – a problem of their own making. The habit of funneling virtually all foreign aid through Pakistan’s military who dole it out to their bandit buddies as freely as they do to political hacks – ain’t any way to build and maintain democratic and progressive leadership of a nation still climbing out of the Stone Age they agreed to with the departure of the Brits at the end of colonial days.

If they don’t try, if they fail to take a stand for the advancement of the whole of Pakistan’s population while rejecting the sectarian bandits from fear of confrontation – US largesse and tribute must be cut off. Simple enough. Easy enough. Lose the Cold War mentality.

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat…

What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become today’s news. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military drones have become a routine part of the arsenal. In Pakistan, according to American officials, strikes from Predators and Reapers operated by the C.I.A. have killed more than 2,000 militants; the number of civilian casualties is hotly debated. In Yemen last month, an American citizen was, for the first time, the intended target of a drone strike, as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda propagandist and plotter, was killed along with a second American, Samir Khan.

If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.

“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley…“The copycatting is what I worry about most…”

Last December, a surveillance drone crashed in an El Paso neighborhood; it had been launched, it turned out, by the Mexican police across the border. Even Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, has deployed drones, an Iranian design capable of carrying munitions and diving into a target, says P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, whose 2009 book “Wired for War” is a primer on robotic combat…

“I think of where the airplane was at the start of World War I: at first it was unarmed and limited to a handful of countries,” Mr. Singer says. “Then it was armed and everywhere. That is the path we’re on.”

Radio-controlled model airplanes – nowadays – aren’t a whole boatload away from capabilities of our military drones. They may be limited to smaller, lighter payloads. That doesn’t limit the inventiveness of terrorists who design underwear bombs. And no more reliance on suicide volunteers who may get nervous when the time comes to go BOOM!

But, Uncle Sugar presumes that only American genius can design these death-goodies. Just as our government thinks we’re above international law on torture, financing breakaway provinces, freedom fighters headquartered in foreign yacht clubs – our arrogance usually comes back to bite us on the butt.

Pakistani police guarding the bin Laden compound
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The doctor who is suspected of helping the CIA target Osama bin Laden will be charged with treason…

“A case of conspiracy against the state of Pakistan and high treason is made” against Dr. Shakeel Afridi, the information ministry said, summarizing a commission’s investigation into the death of the al Qaeda leader.

Afridi is accused of helping the CIA use a vaccination campaign to try to collect DNA samples from people who lived in bin Laden’s compound.

The United States “has repeatedly asked” for the release of the Pakistani doctor, a U.S. official said Thursday. The official declined to comment further on the treason charges…

“This was one very small piece of a very large intelligence effort to determine that bin Laden was located at the compound,” a senior U.S. official told CNN over the summer.”People need to put this into some perspective,” the official added. “The vaccination campaign was part of the hunt for the world’s top terrorist, and nothing else. If the United States hadn’t shown this kind of creativity, people would be scratching their heads asking why it hadn’t used all the tools at its disposal to find bin Laden.”

Pakistan demonstrates once again what passes for priorities and standards in that nation.

While the Obama administration trots out the usual diplomatic smoke-and-mirrors to maintain some sort of relationship with a corrupt government the fact remains that they can be trusted as far as I can throw the Aiwan-e-Sadr uphill into a heavy wind left-handed.