Taliban Child Soldiers Lose Everything But Their Innocence

Kids growing up in Northwest Pakistan have a tough life. The mountains are gorgeous but dry. Farmland must be vigorously irrigated. Many families are laborers, at the whim of the local producers' sales, and so have little money to provide for children.

Parents, meanwhile, are glad to hear a religious organization is offering free food and moral education, so they send their boys to boarding school. Where they learn how to kill.

After seeing this colorful look inside one of the Taliban's boarding schools in Pakistan by Arwa Damon with CNN in Pakistan, I've been touched by the fact that it is not only my conservative relatives, neighbors, and FOX news commentators who fail to distinguish between the noble, tolerant Islam and extremism in south Asia. It is an even more tragic dilemma for Pakistanis themselves.

Damon interviews Pakistani military officials who are protectors of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and even they are shocked and saddened to see what the Taliban was teaching boarding school boys in the process of indoctrinating them for military service.

Sadly, as during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the making of America, the Ottoman Empire, and today's global jihad, wealthy families are seeing their kids leaving to lead ideological movements radically critical of their own, and poor families are losing their kids to the armies of these movements simply because they cannot afford other options.

My colleague Amarah Niazi, an anthrolopogy Ph.D. candidate from Pakistan, wrote a sharp reflection on this dilemma. In her editorial, "An Anthropology of Terror," she clarifies many of the details the Western press fails to explain about how Pakistanis confront the following dilemma: being committed Muslims, and yet divided on the Taliban.

Photo: Moonlit Gate, Mosque, Lahore, Pakistan, Michael Foley Photography.