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You have not buried any other mistakes in concrete, have you, per chance? Aussie Parliament did

Cangkir_salah_eja

You have not buried any other mistakes in concrete, have you, per chance? Aussie Parliament did :)

read here more via AP and Yahoo News

Australian officials wanted to get rid of some commemorative mugs that misspelled President Barack Obama's name. And boy, did they ever.
A Parliament House official told senators on Monday that 198 mugs were smashed and buried under wet concrete at a loading dock behind the building. Sen. John Faulkner called it a "mafia-style execution" for the mugs, which had an extra "r'' printed in Obama's first name.
The government made 200 of the mugs to commemorate the president's planned visit to Australia in 2010, which was later canceled. No mugs were created when the American president finally made it to Australia last year.
Only two of the mugs were ever sold from the Parliament House gift shop, including one to the journalist who reported that Obama's name had been misspelled.
"Due to the sensitivity associated with the mistake that was made with the president's name, the last thing we wanted was for the fragments to be found on a garbage tip somewhere," said Bronwyn Graham, the Parliament House official.
"I am not saying it was a bad idea. It is creative; I will give you that," Faulkner told Graham and her superior, David Kenny, who had authorized the disposal.
"You have not buried any other mistakes in concrete, have you Mr. Kenny, per chance?" Faulkner asked. Kenny said he had not.

Why Indonesia and Japan are pivotal in Asia

source : http://thailandtimes.asia/thailand-news/frictions-in-the-south-china-sea-chin...
 by Anis H. Bajrektarevic

On the eastern, ascendant flank of Eurasian continent, the Chinese vertigo economy is overheated and too-well integrated in the petrodollar system. Beijing, presently, cannot contemplate or afford to allocate any resources in a search for an alternative. (The Sino economy is low-wage- and labor intensive- centered. Chinese revenues are heavily dependent on exports and Chinese reserves are predominantly a mix of the USD and US Treasury bonds.) To sustain itself as a single socio-political and formidably performing economic entity, the People’s Republic requires more energy and less external dependency. Domestically, the demographic-migratory pressures are huge, regional demands are high, and expectations are brewing. Considering its best external energy dependency equalizer (and inner cohesion solidifier), China seems to be turning to its military upgrade rather than towards the resolute alternative energy/Green Tech investments – as it has no time, plan and resources to do both at once. Inattentive of a broader picture, Beijing (probably falsely) believes that lasting containment, especially in the South China Sea, is unbearable, and that – at the same time – fossil-fuels are available (e.g., in Africa and the Gulf), and even cheaper with the help of warships.
In effect, the forthcoming Chinese military buildup will only strengthen the existing and open up new bilateral security deals of neighboring countries, primarily with the US – as nowadays in Asia, none wants to be a passive downloader. Ultimately, it may create a politico-military isolation (and financial burden) for China that would just consequently justify and (politically and financially) cheapen the bolder American military presence in Asia-Pacific, especially in the South China Sea. It perfectly adds up to the intensified demonization of China in parts of influential Western media. Hence, the Chinese grab for fossil fuels or its military competition for naval control is not a challenge but rather a boost for the US Asia-Pacific – even an overall – posture. (Managing the contraction of its overseas projection and commitments – some would call it managing the decline of an empire – the US does not fail to note that nowadays half of the world’s merchant tonnage passes though the South China Sea. Therefore, the US will exploit any regional territorial dispute and other frictions to its own security benefit, including the costs sharing of its military presence by the local partners, as to maintain pivotal on the maritime edge of Asia that arches from the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean, Malacca and South China Sea up to the northwest–central Pacific.) A real challenge is always to optimize the (moral political and financial) costs in meeting the national strategic objectives. In this case, it would be a resolute turn of China towards green technology, coupled with the firm buildup of the Asian multilateralism. Without a grand rapprochement to the champions of multilateralism in Asia, which are Indonesia, India and Japan, there is no environment for China to seriously evolve and emerge as a formidable, lasting and trusted global leader warships.
Opting for either strategic choice will reverberate in the dynamic Asia–Pacific theatre. However, the messages are diametrical: An assertive military – alienates, new technology – attracts neighbors. Finally, armies conquer (and spend) while technology builds (and accumulates)! At this point, any eventual accelerated armament in the Asia-Pacific theatre would only strengthen the hydrocarbon status quo. With its present configuration, it is hard to imagine that anybody can outplay the US in the petro-security, petro-financial and petro-military global playground in the following few decades. Given the planetary petro-financial-tech-military causal constellations, this type of confrontation is so well mastered by and would further only benefit the US and the closest of its allies.
Within the OECD/IEA grouping, or closely; the G-8 (the states with resources, infrastructure, tradition of and know-how to advance the fundamental technological breakthroughs), it is only Japan that may seriously consider a Green/Renewable-tech U-turn. Tokyo’s external energy dependencies are stark and long-lasting. After the recent nuclear trauma, Japan will need a few years to (psychologically and economically) absorb the shock – but it will learn a lesson. For such a huge formidable economy and considerable demography, situated on a small land-mass which is repeatedly brutalized by devastating natural catastrophes (and dependent on yet another disruptive external influence – Arab oil), it might be that a decisive shift towards green energy is the only way to survive, revive, and eventually to emancipate.
An important part of the US–Japan security treaty is the US energy supply lines security guaranty given to (the post-WWII demilitarized) Tokyo. After the recent earthquake-tsunami-radiation armageddon, as well as witnessing the current Chinese military/naval noise, Japan will inevitably rethink and revisit its energy policy, as well as the composition of its primary energy mix.
Tokyo is well aware that the Asian geostrategic myopias are strong and lasting, as many Asian states are either locked up in their narrow regionalisms or/and entrenched in their economic egoisms. Finally, Japan is the only Asian country that has clearly learned from its own modern history, all about the limits of hard power projection and the strong repulsive forces that come in aftermath from the neighbors. Their own pre-modern and modern history does not offer a similar experience to other two Asian heavyweights, China and India. That indicates the Far East as a probable zone of the Green-tech excellence and a place of attraction for many Asians in the decade to come.

April 6 1992: Bosnia’s Lesson for Syrian Slaughter

by Christiane Amanpour

Twenty years ago, Suada Dilberovic and Olga Sucic were shot and killed in Sarajevo. They were the shots heard around the world and they started the Bosnian War.
I covered that war, and many colleagues are gathering in Sarajevo now to commemorate what took hundreds of thousands of lives, left so many more wounded, and created millions of refugees. This was the war that introduced us to the term "ethnic cleansing."
The dominant Balkan power at the time, Serbia wanted to keep Yugoslavia together, and failing that, to carve out ethnically pure areas in the breakaway states to create a Greater Serbia. It was a horrible fantasy that sought to destroy an ethnically mixed, intermarried community that had lived peacefully and progressively together in Bosnia.
 
This war was defining for the region, for the world and for those of us who covered it. We witnessed the heroic resistance of a population under siege and shelling and sniping for nearly four years. We learned the pain of watching men, women and children brutally slaughtered. These were the non-combatants, casually targeted in the crosshairs of the sniper's rifle, blown apart by mortar shells when they went to collect water, bread, fuel or even heading to school.
We learned the bitter cynicism of the international community that refused for some time to intervene, the United States and its allies finding every which way, and every tortured rhetorical device -- including refusing to use the word genocide -- to avoid getting off the sidelines.
I will never forget going to the funerals, one for a little girl called Almedina. Sarajevo had run short of everything even the letter "A" so Almedina's grave marker could not be spelled correctly. I will never forget the mothers and fathers who would try to brave the siege around Sarajevo airport, then try to make a dash to the other side where in one village they could buy or scrounge some fresh fruit or vegetables, anything to complement the meager rations and dried food the humanitarian airlift would bring. The night I was out there, a father managed to find a single apple for his child. For that he had risked his life.
On Friday more than 11,000 empty chairs will be arranged in silent poignant and powerful memory of Sarajevo's war dead. Along with the citizens of Sarajevo and other besieged Bosnian towns and villages, many of our colleagues were killed and wounded, including ABC's David Kaplan.
And who will ever forget the death camps, the skeletal prisoners who evoked the terrible crimes of World War II? But this was at the end of the 20th century. This was the satellite age. We were there and we reported the story day in and day out, week after week, month...year after year. This was the era of "never again" and it was happening again -- ethnic cleansing and genocide here in our own backyard, and on our watch. We fought back with all the power of our media. For me, Bosnia was where I learned about the truth. Horrified when the do-nothing crowd suggested I was taking sides, or losing my objectivity, I was forced to confront this charge, and examine our Golden Rule.
Here in Bosnia I determined that in the face of unspeakable crimes and the most serious violations of international humanitarian order, there is no moral equivalence, no blurring the line between victim and aggressor.
Objectivity means giving all sides a fair hearing. It does not mean drawing a false moral equivalence. In this case there is no one-hand-or-the other. And anyone who seeks to hide under that calumny is not just a liar, but an accessory, in this case to genocide.
I refused. It is the lesson of my lifetime.
As we all know, tens of thousands of deaths later including at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, the worst massacre in Europe since World War Two, the U.S. finally intervened with NATO allies, ended the war and launched the peace that holds to this day. No country, no crisis, is the same. Of course Syria is not Bosnia, nor is it Libya, but in Syria today a heavily armed military is besieging and slaughtering ordinary civilians and outgunned rebels too as the state tries to crush an uprising.
Just like in Bosnia, the Syrian rebels/opposition have been denied the right to self defense, for fear of "accelerating the conflict on the ground and making it worse." Just like in Bosnia when the U.S. and its allies said they could not intervene "because it's a civil war and all sides are equally guilty," (although that was not the case as there was a clear aggressor) in Syria today they say they "don't know who to help, who to arm, the opposition is fragmented."
The lesson of Bosnia is that our democratic and free world which seeks to uphold the highest values bestowed on humankind, could no longer watch as ordinary civilians were butchered. It's a lesson that took too long to implement, and the peace is not perfect, but at least the killing stopped.
@yahoonews on

The inside story about Facebook's moderating sweatshop

By Iain Hollingshead and Emma Barnett
March 12, 2012

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/the-inside-story-about-facebooks-moderating-sweatshop-20120305-1ue47.html#ixzz1oxnQrrQP
For most of us, our experience on Facebook is a benign - even banal - one. A status update about a colleague's commute. A friend request from someone we haven't seen for years (and hoped to avoid for several more). A picture of another friend's baby, barely distinguishable from the dozen posted the day before.
Some four billion pieces of content are shared every day by 845 million users. And while most are harmless, it has recently come to light that the site is brimming with paedophilia, pornography, racism and violence - all moderated by outsourced, poorly vetted workers in third world countries paid just $1 an hour.
In addition to the questionable morality of a company that is about to create 1000 millionaires paying such paltry sums, there are also significant privacy concerns for the rest of us. Although this invisible army of moderators receive basic training, they work from home, they do not appear to undergo criminal checks, and they have worrying access to users' personal details. In a month in which there has been an outcry over Google's privacy policies, can we expect a wider backlash over the extent to which we trust companies with our intimate information?

Last month, 21-year-old Amine Derkaoui gave an interview to Gawker, an American media outlet. Derkaoui had spent three weeks working in Morocco for oDesk, one of the outsourcing companies used by Facebook. His job, for which he claimed he was paid around $1 an hour, involved moderating photos and posts flagged as unsuitable by other users.
"It must be the worst salary paid by Facebook," he told us. "And the job itself was very upsetting - no one likes to see a human cut into pieces every day."
Derkaoui is not exaggerating. An articulate man, he described images of animal abuse, butchered bodies and videos of fights. Other moderators, mainly young, well-educated people working in Asia, Africa and Central America, have similar stories. "Paedophilia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides, etc," said one. "I left [because] I value my sanity." Another compared it to working in a sewer. "All the sh-- of the world flows towards you and you have to clean it up," he said.
Who, one wonders, apart from the desperate, the unstable and the unsavoury, would be attracted to doing such an awful job in the first place?
Of course, not all of the unsuitable material on the site is so graphic. Facebook operates a fascinatingly strict set of guidelines determining what should be deleted. Pictures of naked private parts, drugs (apart from marijuana) and sexual activity (apart from foreplay) are all banned. Male nipples are OK, but naked breastfeeding is not. Photographs of bodily fluids (except semen) are allowed, but not if a human being is also shown. Photoshopped images are fine, but not if they show someone in a negative light.
Once something is reported by a user, the moderator sitting at his computer in Morocco or Mexico has three options: delete it; ignore it; or escalate it, which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California (who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities). Moderators are told always to escalate specific threats - "I'm going to stab Lisa H at the frat party" is given as the charming example - but not generic, unlikely ones, such as "I'm going to blow up the planet on New Year's Eve."
It is, of course, to Facebook's credit that they are attempting to balance their mission "to make the world more open and connected" with a willingness to remove traces of the darker side of human nature. The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard bedroom is richer and more populated than many countries. These moderators are their police.
Neither is Facebook alone in outsourcing unpleasant work. Adam Levin, the US-based chief executive of Criterion Capital Partners and the owner of British social network Bebo, says that the process is "rampant" across Silicon Valley.
"We do it at Bebo," he says. "Facebook has so much content flowing into its system every day that it needs hundreds of people moderating all the images and posts which are flagged. That type of workforce is best outsourced for speed, scale and cost."
A spokesman for Twitter said that they have an internal moderation team, but refused to answer a question about outsourcing. Similarly, a Google spokesperson would not say how Google+, the search giant's new social network, will be moderated. Neither Facebook nor oDesk were willing to comment on anything to do with outsourcing or moderation.
Levin, however, estimates that Facebook indirectly employs between 800 to 1000 moderators via oDesk and others - nearly a third of its more handsomely remunerated full-time staff. Graham Cluley, of the internet security firm Sophos, calls Silicon Valley's outsourcing culture its "poorly kept dirty secret".
The biggest worry for the rest of us, however, is that the moderation process isn't nearly secretive enough. According to Derkaoui, there are no security measures on a moderator's computer to stop them uploading obscene material themselves. Despite coming into daily contact with such material, he was never subjected to a criminal record check. Where, then, is the oversight body for these underpaid global police? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Facebook itself is guarding them, according to a previous statement to which we were referred. "These contractors are subject to rigorous quality controls and we have implemented several layers of safeguards to protect the data of those using our service," it read. "No user information beyond the content in question and the source of the report is shared. All decisions made by contractors are subject to extensive audits."
And yet in the images due for moderation seen by us, the name of anyone "tagged" in an offending post - as well as the user who uploaded it - could be clearly discerned. A Facebook spokesman said that these names are shared with the moderators to put the content in context - a context sufficient for Derkaoui to claim that he had as much information as "looking at a friend's Facebook page".
He admits to having subsequently looked up more information online about the people he had been moderating. Cluley is worried that Facebook users could be blackmailed by disgruntled moderators - or even see pictures originally intended for a small circle of friends pasted all over the web.
Shamoon Siddiqui, chief executive of Develop.io, an American app-building firm that employs people in the developing world for a more generous $7 to $10 an hour, agrees that better security measures are needed. "It isn't wrong for Facebook to have an Indian office," he says. "But it is wrong for it to use an arbitrary marketplace with random people it doesn't know in that country. This will have to change."
In Britain, for example, all web moderators have to undergo an enhanced CRB check. eModeration, whose clients range from HSBC to The X-Factor, pays £10 an hour and never lets its staff spend too long on the gritty stuff. They wouldn't go near the Facebook account. The job, says Tamara Littleton, its chief executive, is too big, the moderating too reactive, and they couldn't compete on cost with the likes of oDesk.
So, if no one can undercut the likes of oDesk, could they not be undermined instead? If Mr Zuckerberg will not dig deeper into his $17.5 billion pockets to pay the street-sweepers of Facebook properly, maybe he could be persuaded by a little moral outrage?
Levin disagrees. "Perhaps a minute percentage of users will stop using Facebook when they hear about this," he says. "But the more digital our society becomes, the less people value their privacy."
Perhaps. But maybe disgruntled commuters, old schoolfriends and new mothers will think twice before sharing intimate information with their "friends" - only to find that two minutes later it's being viewed by an under-vetted, unfulfilled person on a dollar an hour in an internet cafe in Marrakech.
The Daily Telegraph, London

You Have the Watches, We Have the Time

10 Years of Afghan War: How the Taliban Go On - The Daily Beast
Holed up at a mud-brick house in eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous Paktika province, 28-year-old Mujahid Rahman says he can’t remember how long he’s been battling the Americans. Seven or eight years is his best guess. The past three years have been particularly tough, the Taliban subcommander says. He tells of being held prisoner by the Americans at Bagram Airfield from early 2009 to August 2010, and then enduring an even grimmer month and a half at an interrogation center run by the Kabul government’s intelligence agency. He speaks of comrades who have been killed, disabled, or captured, and how he and his small band of fighters were driven away from their home base in neighboring Ghazni province. He sounds worn out, on the verge of giving up.

But he stiffens when a Newsweek reporter asks if the Taliban should strike a deal with the Americans and the Kabul government. “No!” he practically shouts. The fight will continue until the Americans are defeated, he insists, no matter how long it takes and what the sacrifices. He recalls a prison guard at Bagram who was gleefully preparing to return home to America. The soldier gave Rahman a bottle of juice as a farewell gift and asked how long the Afghan expected to remain behind bars, and what he hoped to do afterward. “Time in jail and time in the jihad mean nothing to us,” Rahman claims to have told the American. “Your watch’s battery will run down, and its hands will stop. But our time in the struggle will never end. We will win.”

His words continue to haunt us. We’ve covered the war in Afghanistan from the start, and we’ve always been fascinated by the contrast between the two sides’ attitudes toward the conflict. It’s summed up in an expression often attributed to a captured Taliban fighter: “You have the watches. We have the time.” The insurgents seem utterly confident that both God and time are on their side. Everything else is irrelevant detail: the anniversaries, deadlines, and timelines, and all the economic, financial, and political constraints that occupy the waking hours of U.S. policymakers. The insurgents show no interest in numbers or statistics or schedules; they focus only on the victory they’re sure will someday be theirs.

When Mullah Mohammed Omar and his religious students launched their battle against the country’s brutal and rapacious mujahedin warlords in 1994, they didn’t set a target date for the capture of Kabul; they just started fighting. Later they would recall their surprise at how quickly they took the capital, after just two years of fighting; they had assumed the war would take far longer. Five years later, when America attacked, they were no less surprised by how fast their Islamic emirate collapsed. But they set about rebuilding their shattered movement, still with no set time frame. “We never have calendars, watches, or calculators like the Americans do,” says a former Taliban government minister who is now a leading member of the insurgency’s propaganda cell. “From the Taliban point of view, time has not even started yet.”


The insurgents are believed to be running low on ammo and supplies., Guillermo Cervera

Oct. 7 marks the 10th anniversary of America’s war in Afghanistan, the longest in U.S. history. On that date in 2001, American bombs began raining down on the Taliban’s forces, decimating their ranks. Thousands of Omar’s men were killed and wounded; stunned survivors of the massive explosions could only stagger around aimlessly, some bleeding from the nose and ears. The Taliban seemed finished. And yet a decade later the United States is still fighting a war that has taken the lives of nearly 1,800 U.S. troops and now costs more than $9 billion a month, according to the Congressional Research Service. Many Americans have grown fed up with the seemingly endless carnage and expense. President Obama has set a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of most, if not all U.S. forces, but that’s not fast enough for a lot of Americans.

In fact, at least four of the Republican presidential candidates have urged a quicker pullout. “My hunch is the American people want to be out of there as quickly as we can get it done,” former Utah governor Jon Huntsman said on a TV talk show earlier this year. Opinion polls suggest he’s right. For the GOP candidates, the tantalizing question is whether they can find a way to subscribe to that view without laying themselves open to the charge of being weak on national security. It’s clear that America’s Afghanistan commitment will be an issue on Election Day 2012.

By then the White House desperately wants to show real progress in Afghanistan. This past June, when then–defense secretary Robert Gates made his farewell tour of U.S. bases in Afghanistan, he repeatedly told the troops that he expected positive strides there by the end of the year—and sure enough, the Taliban have been largely expelled from their longtime stomping grounds in the south and east—even from their birthplace, Kandahar. But those impressive gains have been mostly ignored in favor of headline-grabbing insurgent strikes in Kabul: the Mumbai-style rampage at Kabul’s Inter-Continental Hotel in June, the 20-hour siege outside the U.S. Embassy on Sept. 13, the suicide-bomb assassination of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani by a supposed Taliban peace envoy on Sept. 20.

And while Americans argue about whether Afghanistan is worth the effort, the Taliban are fighting for their homes. Some have been making war ever since the creation of the Taliban in 1994, and at least a few are veterans of the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, back in the 1980s. Now they’re taking encouragement from the onset of the U.S. military drawdown. “We have not warmed up yet, but the enemy is already leaving,” gloats Mullah Abdul Jabar, a Taliban subcommander from Helmand province. That rush to the exits is not good, according to Seth Jones, a RAND Corporation specialist on the Afghan war. In an analysis of Obama’s withdrawal timetable published this past May, he warned: “As Winston Churchill observed over a century ago during the British struggles in the Northwest Frontier, time in this area is measured in decades, not months or years. It’s a concept that doesn’t always come easy to Westerners.”

No senior commanders of any consequence have switched sides or given up the fight.

As tenacious as the Taliban may be, they still have serious weaknesses. For one thing, they’re almost totally dependent on their safe havens in Pakistan, where their leaders live openly. Pakistan is also the Afghan insurgents’ chief portal for cash, supplies, munitions, and explosives, without which the Taliban would be hard-pressed to survive. And yet Pakistani authorities seem unwilling to interfere with Taliban leaders or their operations. In fact, senior American officials say the Pakistanis are pouring resources into the Haqqani network, a Taliban-allied group of Afghan insurgents who are believed to have played major roles in the Rabbani assassination and the attacks on the Inter-Continental and the U.S. Embassy. (The Pakistanis vehemently deny any such collusion.)

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has repeatedly given Pakistan what amounts to an ultimatum. “The message they need to know is: we’re going to do everything we can to defend our forces,” Panetta told reporters two days after the embassy siege. “I’m not going to talk about how we’re going to respond. I’ll just let you know that we’re not going to allow these types of attacks to go on.” The CIA already has paramilitaries leading local forces inside Pakistan’s tribal areas, but so far their targets have been limited to Al Qaeda commanders. Will their mission now expand to target the Haqqanis? Or will the administration nerve itself to send regular troops over the border? One U.S. official with vast experience of Afghanistan tells Newsweek he thinks it’s “more than evens” that the U.S. could send troops over the border by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, America’s forces try to intercept Taliban recruits, funds, weapons, and explosives as they pour in from Pakistan. U.S. and Afghan patrols on the border keep discovering and destroying massive caches of explosives—often a ton or more—waiting to be moved deeper into Afghanistan and used in the IEDs, truck bombs, and car bombs that cause most coalition casualties these days. Only 40 pounds or so are needed for an IED that can destroy an armored vehicle. “We found 300 percent more caches this past winter than the previous winter,” says Australian Maj. Gen. Michael G. Krause, a senior coalition planner in Kabul. “Already we believe the enemy is running short of ammunition and supplies.” A senior U.S. intelligence officer agrees. “We can hear commanders squawking about the lack of ammo and supplies,” he says. “We hope the tension will break down the sense that they can wait us out.”

But the Taliban insist it’s the Americans who will quit first. “When a U.S. soldier arrives here, he starts his stopwatch, counting every second, minute, and hour until he gets home,” says the former government minister. Unlike American soldiers, young Taliban have few home comforts to miss, he says. “Our young fighters are having an ideal life with a motorbike, an AK-47, an RPG, long hair, and a holy cause to fight for,” he says. “They are not thinking of time and consequences, only of the endless fight for victory.” He says that if the young fighters measure time, it’s only by the length of their hair: “It takes about a year for their hair to grow one-half-meter long.”

The incessant boasts about their endurance may sound like propaganda, but when challenged on that score, the fighters have a compelling answer: despite all the deaths and injuries, the long stretches in prison, the lack of funds, food, and medical care, and their spartan existences far from their loved ones, relatively few Taliban have ever defected. No senior commanders of any consequence have switched sides or given up the fight, and only a few thousand low-level fighters have joined the Kabul government’s amnesty and reintegration programs. “If the Taliban were worried about the length of the war and how much longer they can sacrifice, there would have been big defections already,” says the former minister. “That just hasn’t happened. And we still get all the new recruits we need.”

Thanks to the insurgency’s dauntingly high casualty and capture rates, those youngsters are the Taliban’s lifeblood. Most of them know nothing of recent history and have no interest in the past or future, according to the older hands. “Sixty percent of our fighters are too young to remember Sept. 11 or the Taliban’s collapse,” says a senior Taliban operative known as Zabibullah. “They only know that there are invaders and their puppets occupying our land, and that they must be defeated no matter how long it takes.” That attitude is what keeps the insurgency going, he adds: if the Taliban worried about how long the struggle will take and the odds against them, the insurgency would have collapsed years ago. “The U.S. never believed we could survive for long against B-52s, drones, SEAL commando raids, and an endless supply of dollars thrown at us by the richest nation on earth,” he says. “If we ever thought about the odds and time frames, we would be finished.”

Jabar is another insurgent who looks at first glance like a beaten man. The 26-year-old Taliban subcommander is encamped in a village near the Pakistani border, where he’s being treated for migraines and a left hand that is partially paralyzed and missing three fingers. That doesn’t keep him and his seven fighters from engaging in firefights with U.S. and Afghan forces. “Only Allah knows how many times we have ambushed and attacked the enemy over the past few years,” he says. “I can only remember a dozen of them.” He joined the Taliban as soon as he could grow a beard, he says, and he recalls being present as a new recruit at a speech by the brutal senior commander Mullah Dadullah Akhund shortly before he was killed in 2007. “There is no time limit in winning this war,” declared Dadullah, who had lost his left leg fighting the Soviets in the 1980s.

Jabar says he hasn’t seen his wife and three children since February 2010, when U.S. Marines drove him and his men out of Marja, his home district. Occasionally he phones home, but he knows he’s taking a chance: the call might give away his position and bring down a Special Forces raid or a drone strike. On the phone to his eldest son, Jabar says that if he dies in combat he hopes the boy will grow up to take his place in the Taliban’s ranks. “I’m sure we’ll still be fighting when my son becomes a man,” Jabar says. “He’ll be proud to take my place.” The boy is about 6 years old.

With John Barry in Washington

via ScribeFire
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