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The teenage insurgents spend their days learning to make shoes and bookshelves, listening to religious leaders denounce the radical interpretation of Islam they learned as children.
But when they return to their cells at Kabul's juvenile rehabilitation center, the boys with wispy beards and cracking voices talk only of the holy war from which they were plucked and their plans to resume fighting for the Taliban.
As the Taliban presses its efforts to recruit teenage fighters, Afghan officials and their international backers have crafted a program to reintegrate the country's youngest insurgents into mainstream society. But that ambition is coming up against the intransigence of the teens, who say they would rather be on the battlefield.
"We'll fight against America for a thousand years if we have to," said Ali Ahmad, 17, sitting at a desk that has hearts and Koran verses scratched in the wood . . .
"They bring us here to change us," said Nane Asha, in his late teens. "But this is our way. We cannot be changed." . . .
The Taliban visited Asha's school when he was about 13, preaching the evils of American interlopers and the value of violent jihad. Asha approached the speaker after the sermon ended. "How can I join you?" he asked. . . .
Within a few weeks, Asha was enrolled in a six-month training course, learning how to fire a Kalashnikov and to connect a nest of wires and explosives that could take out a U.S. tank. He studied the material obsessively. . . .
Reintegration is at the heart of U.S. and Afghan government strategies to wind down the war, with schooling and employment being offered to coax fighters away from the insurgency.
Justin Cariker grabs a 7-foot-tall Palmer pigweed at his farm, bending the wrist-thick stem to reveal how it has overwhelmed the cotton plant beneath it. This is no ordinary weed: Over time it has developed resistance to Monsanto's best-selling herbicide, Roundup. Hundreds of such "superweeds" are rising defiantly across this corner of the Mississippi Delta. "We're not winning the battle," Cariker, owner of Maud Farms in Dundee, Miss., says as he looks at weeds that tower over his infested cotton field like spindly green scarecrows....as Bloomberg BusinessWeek did under the headline "Attack of the Superweeds," I have to believe that Monsanto's top brass starts to worry.
Comment: For a more in depth look at the 'Superweed' issue plaguing America's industrial agribusiness industry read the following articles:
US: 'Superweed' explosion threatens Monsanto heartlands
The Escalating Chemical War on Weeds
Monsanto's Superweeds Come Home to Roost: 11 Million U.S. Acres are Infested: