Child Suicide Bombers

This article (via Nourishing Obscurity) on Afghan suicide bombers is truly horrifying. The use of child recruits is particularly savage:

In an incident that caused tears of fury among villagers, a six-year-old street urchin approached an Afghan security checkpoint and claimed that he had been cornered by the Taliban and fitted with a suicide-bomber vest. They had told him to walk up to a US patrol and press a button on the vest that would "spray flowers". Fortunately, the quick-thinking boy instead asked for help, and the vest was removed.

Read the whole thing as the blog cliche goes. The Taliban unlike the Iraqi terror groups appears unable to recruit bombers who aren't drug addicts, children, dupes or lunatics, which does at least mean that their bombers are of minimal competence. Still the combination of ignorance and desperation that the Taliban requires does mean that this looks like a situation where an aggressive hearts and mind campaign to warn the population of the Taliban's tactics could reap enormous benefits.