Bad news doesn't bring down Sox

　　

　　

　　AP Photo/Paul BeatySox catcher A.J. Pierzynski watches his three-run home run against the Royals in the eighth inning. For the second time this week, the White Sox simply brushed off potentially grim news as if they were swiping a gnat from their ever broadening shoulders.

　　With games like the Mark Buehrle- and A.J. Pierzynski-inspired 8-2 victory over the pesky Kansas City Royals, the White Sox just keep getting stronger. They have now won six consecutive games, 19 of their last 23, and 23 of their last 28.

　　When Jake Peavy went down with a serious injury Tuesday, the White Sox kept on winning. The most recent solid play came Friday shortly after a double-dose of information that could have left them reeling once again.

　　At about the same time Friday afternoon that Peavy confirmed that he would be lost for the year, the clubhouse television offered the news about Cliff Lee’s trade to the playoff-contending Texas Rangers.

　　Nobody was in mourning, including an upbeat Peavy, who said he will remain with the team for the remainder of the season while he recovers from surgery next week.

　　Even without Peavy, the White Sox aren’t afraid of Lee. In fact, bring him on, they say. “If we face Lee this season, that will be a good thing,” pitching coach Don Cooper said.

　　His point is that the White Sox don’t have any regular-season games remaining with the Rangers so the only way they could meet would be in the playoffs. Cooper’s staff will gladly take its chances at that point.

　　More good news from the Lee deal is that the Rangers still have seven games remaining with the third-place Minnesota Twins and five more against the first-place Detroit Tigers. The White Sox’ victory Friday kept them a half game behind the Tigers and put them three ahead of the Twins.

　　“With that lineup they have, they’re very dangerous,” Sox manager Ozzie Guillen said of the Rangers. “I think that’s going to help those guys and put them over the top in that division. I was glad because off the top, I thought it was New York and Minnesota [who would land Lee], and we still have to play against them. So I’m glad Texas got him.”

　　Nobody is as dangerous as the White Sox these days and pitching has been a big reason why. Since June 9, the White Sox are a baseball-best 23-5, posting a 2.38 ERA (66 earned runs/250 innings) over that stretch.

　　While John Danks’ two-hit shutout Thursday came against a struggling Angels offense, the eight innings of zeroes posted by Buehrle and Sergio Santos were against a Royals team that entered with the best team batting average in baseball at .283. The Royals also entered batting .313 with runners in scoring position over their last 13 games, going 10-3 over that span.

　　When Yuniesky Betancourt hit a two-run home run in the ninth inning off Jeff Marquez, it snapped the White Sox’s 17-inning scoreless streak.

　　Target practice

　　Six pitches into Friday’s game, the White Sox received a scare when Buehrle took a line drive from the Royals’ Scott Podsednik off his right wrist.

　　Buehrle said he was in serious pain for about a half inning with some of his fingers even going numb at one point.

　　He even yelled at his former teammate, but not because of the comebacker. He told Podsednik to steal second base already so he wouldn’t have to throw over to first base so much.

　　“It got me pretty good, but they didn’t even take X-rays after they looked at it,” Buehrle said. “It feels totally fine.”

　　He went on to beat the Royals for the first time in three tries this season and the 21st time in his career, second most to his 24 victories over the Twins.

　　Double dose

　　For just the third time in his career, Pierzynski hit two home runs in a game as he emerged from a dry spell with a vengeance. Pierzynski had just one hit in his last 17 at-bats before Friday’s game when he hit a solo shot against Bruce Chen in the fourth inning and three-run homer against Victor Marte in the eighth.

　　“A.J has been struggling for the last couple of weeks,” Guillen said. “Now he’s starting to swing the bat better.”

　　Quote of the day

　　“I kind of thought about [400], but I think it was a changeup and I top-spinned it a little more rather than hitting through it,” -- Andruw Jones, on his fly ball to deep left field in the eighth inning that kept him at 399 career home runs. He ended up tying a season-high with three hits after entering with two hits in his previous 23 at-bats.

　　Looking ahead

　　Red-hot Gavin Floyd (4-7, 4.43 ERA) has been as good as anybody over his last six starts, going 2-1 with an American League-best 1.27 ERA over that stretch. He also has 37 strikeouts during that run. He is just 1-2 with a 6.16 ERA against the Royals, who he will face at home Saturday. He will be opposed by the Royals’ Brian Bannister

World Cup post-game: Spain 1, Paraguay 0

　　

　　

　　Spain's David Villa, left, celebrates with teammate Cesc Fabregas after he scores his side's only goal during their quarter-final against Paraguay in Johannesburg. (Jasper Juinen/Getty Images)

　　David Villa scored in the 83rd minute to lift Spain to its first-ever FIFA World Cup semifinal appearance after dispatching Paraguay 1-0 Saturday in Johannesburg.

　　To watch the match highlights, CLICK HERE. To watch the full game, CLICK HERE.

　　Main storyline

　　For a game with everything on the line, it was a dreary affair for much of the match.

　　Paraguay manager Gerardo Martino elected to make six changes to his starting 11 for this game, benching his three scoreless strikers (Roque Santa Cruz, Edgar Benitez and Lucas Barrios) and switching from his usual 4-3-3 formation to a more defensive 4-4-2 system in an attempt to stop the talented Spaniards.

　　The tactic worked for much of the game. Paraguay clogged their defensive third, containing Spain's skilled players like Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Xabi Alonso, giving them very little time on the ball to create scoring chances.

　　Spain finally broke through in the latter stages of the match, with Villa burying his fifth goal of the tournament to secure the victory.

　　Of course, the outcome could have been much different had Nelson Valdez's goal counted in the 41st minute (he was ruled offside). With the defensive game plan Martino's squad was employing, a one-goal lead might have held up.

　　For Spain, the quarter-final win was a positive step in shedding its label as "chokers" on the world stage. Though it's ranked No. 2 in the world, is the reigning European champion and has only lost three of its last 55 games, Spain still has that stigma of not winning soccer's biggest prize.

　　To get a chance at that elusive crown, it will have to get through Germany, the same team Spain defeated 1-0 to capture Euro 2008.

　　What this result means

　　Spain advances to the semifinals next Wednesday where it will meet Germany, 4-0 winners over Argentina in the other quarter-final earlier Saturday.

　　It's the first time La Roja have reached the semifinals of the World Cup (they finished fourth in 1950, when the title was decided by a four-team final).

　　The turning point

　　It was an uninspiring fixture until the 57th minute when, within a span of two minutes, both teams were awarded penalty shots.

　　First, on a Paraguayan corner kick, Spain defender Gerard Pique was yellow-carded for yanking down Oscar Cardozo with both hands. On the ensuing penalty kick by Cardozo, goalkeeper Iker Casillas dove the right way and made the save.

　　Just a minute later in the other end, Paraguayan fullback Antolin Alcaraz banged into David Villa in the penalty area and a spot kick was awarded. Xabi Alonso stepped up and clinically finished the penalty, but the referee ordered a re-kick because Spain's players entered the box before the ball was kicked.

　　On the re-do, Paraguay keeper Justo Villa stopped Alonso's strike, keeping the game locked 0-0.

　　From then on, the pace of the match picked up.

　　The winning goal

　　Iniesta worked his magic just outside the 18-yard box, dribbling through two Paraguayan defenders before passing the ball off with the outside of his foot to Pedro streaking down the right side. Pedro's strike rang off the right post, but Villa was there to gobble up the rebound, cracking a shot that went off both posts and in for his tournament-leading fifth goal of the World Cup.

　　Man of the match

　　Spain goalkeeper Casillas wasn't very busy in this match, but he came up big when he was called upon. In the 57th minute, he stopped a penalty shot by Oscar Cardozo and in the final minute of the game, he preserved the win for his team, stopping Roque Santa Cruz's point-blank shot.

Can Poland's new president deliver political stability?

 

 

　　

　　Mr Komorowski is expected to work closely with the government Bronislaw Komorowski's election as Polish president sets up a rare period of calm and cohesiveness on the country's political scene and will be welcomed in Berlin and Brussels.

　　In the tightest presidential contest in 15 years the results swung back and forth overnight between Mr Komorowski and his rival, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the identical twin of the late president, Lech, who was killed in a plane crash in Russia in April.

　　Mr Komorowski, 58, who has aristocratic roots and was interned for his opposition activities by the communist authorities in the 1980s, is widely regarded as a moderate.

　　He represents stability because he is the candidate of the governing Civic Platform Party.

　　He is expected to work closely with the government on its programme of free market reforms and closer engagement with the country's European Union partners and Russia.

　　In Poland the presidency is a largely ceremonial role, but the president can block legislation through the power of veto, something Lech Kaczynski used regularly.

　　"This will be a more stable, predictable cohesive period for the country, one we have never had before," Pawel Swieboda, head of the demosEUROPA think-tank, told the BBC.

　　"He will be a supportive president with the government in the driver's seat and he being more of a helping hand. He will focus on representative functions, social dialogue and discussing future challenges," he said.

　　Without the presidential veto as an excuse the government will now be under pressure to present a clear plan to tackle the budget deficit, structural reforms and reduce bureaucracy in business.

　　"It will force Civic Platform to come out with its own set of ideas. They will have no excuses and will have to start acting.

　　"It will be a very different period to anything we've seen so far and an opportunity for long-term planning," Mr Swieboda said.

　　However, with parliamentary elections looming in just over a year, Poland's cautious Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, may be reluctant to damage his government's chances of being re-elected, something no other administration has achieved since communism ended in 1989.

　　Attitude change

　　Those elections will feature the 61-year-old Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

　　He may not be president but his remarkable result provides a platform for his socially conservative and state interventionist opposition Law and Justice Party to challenge for power.

　　Bearing in mind that Poles voted Mr Kaczynski, a combative former prime minister out of office three years ago, his result crowned a superbly-fought campaign.

　　"I think he ran a smart campaign. He has moved to the centre ground and combined newly-found moderate views with assertiveness which appeals to people," Mr Swieboda said.

　　When you offer a twist of social inclusiveness in domestic policy, it's an appealing message," he added.

　　

　　Jaroslaw Kaczynski revitalised his image in the election campaign Mr Kaczynski was also helped by the sympathy Poles felt for the families of the victims of April's plane crash.

　　Before the tragedy, Jaroslaw Kaczynski was regularly voted one of the country's least-trusted politicians.

　　His divisive and antagonistic stance as prime minister, during which he seemed bent on leading what some described as a witch-hunt against former communist officials, was still fresh in people's memories.

　　Mr Kaczynski's political views are shaped largely by his belief that the communists merely swapped political power for economic influence during the negotiated transition to democracy.

　　During the campaign he dropped the anti-communist slogans and even called the former party chief, Edward Gierek, a patriot.

　　He also changed his attitude towards Poland's neighbours and old foes, Russia and Germany.

　　Together with his brother, he once irritated German officials with a proposal that the EU take into account Poland's six million World War II victims when allocating voting rights.

　　During the campaign he made positive noises about Germany and recorded a moving broadcast to Russians for their help in assisting the families of the plane crash.

　　His repeated insistence, however, that Poland take over the crash investigation did imply criticism of Russia's handling of the affair.

　　He has clearly benefited from his more moderate approach and will probably not want to be seen as being a largely destructive force in the run-up to next year's ballot.

　　The other winner from these elections has been the former communists, now re-branded as social democrats.

　　Voted out of office five years ago following numerous sleaze scandals, the left-wing's young personable leader, Grzegorz Napieralski, won a reasonable third place in the first round, signalling a return to influence.

Working to Help a Haven for Afghan Women Blossom

 

　　

　　KABUL, Afghanistan — There was in the city an old garden, and in that garden there were trees, and under the trees there were women.

　　And there were no scarves on the heads of the women who sat under the trees in the old Kabul Women’s Garden.

　　That was all something remarkable once upon a time, as it is even now. Screened from male scrutiny by the leafy canopies of almond or apricot trees, women could go outside as they pleased, dare to wriggle naked toes in fountain water or just gossip without the veil.

　　Now this oasis of freedom for women, surrounded by the misogynist desert of the capital city, is undergoing a rebirth.

　　As with so much happening today in Afghanistan, the midwives are foreigners, the gestation is troubled and the parents are hopeful.

　　Some say this fabled eight-acre enclosure in the Shahrara neighborhood of Kabul goes back to the days of Babur the Conqueror, in the 1500s. More reliably it is dated to the 1940s or ’50s, when King Zahir Shah was said to have bequeathed it to the state.

　　Karima Salik tells the story of the Kabul Women’s Garden she remembers as a girl in the 1970s, a halcyon age for Afghanistan and its women, before the present 32 years of unbroken war began.

　　“The trees covered everything,” she recalled. “There was laughter and chatter and music.”

　　For the past three years, Ms. Salik has managed the garden, which is now in the midst of a $500,000 face-lift supported by the United States Agency for International Development and CARE International. Most of the money pays laborers who are landscaping, planting trees, rebuilding footpaths and raising the walls still higher. Women on construction projects are almost unheard of in Afghanistan, but the United States Agency for International Development program requires that at least 25 percent of the work force be female. Here they are 50 percent of it.

　　Ms. Salik’s childhood witnessed one of the most liberated periods for women in Afghan history, when the communist government took over in 1978 and enforced equality, banned the burqa and mandated education for girls.

　　The revolt of the mujahedeen, led by conservative, rural warlords, wiped that all out in a few years’ time.

　　People desperate for fuel felled the garden’s trees for firewood. Militiamen held cockfights within the walls. Women dared not go near the place.

　　In the Taliban era, the city was more peaceful but women were confined to their homes. The northeast end of the garden was appropriated by the mosque next door. A warlord who came over to the Taliban was rewarded with the southwest corner for a construction project. The rest, renamed the Springtime Garden, became a public dump.

　　When Ms. Salik and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs took over three years ago, “We hauled 45 truckloads of trash out.”

　　Now male police officers outside the tall steel gates open them only for women, or for male children if they are under 9. Inside the gates are those rarest of public employees: female police officers, two of them. They are reinforced by five female intelligence officers, whose main job is to look for suicide bombers who might hide explosives under the capaciousness of the burqa.

　　Mostly the burqas come off once inside the gate, and there are dressing rooms where many of the women change into normal clothes, putting on makeup and high heels.

　　Then, unheard-of things happen here. The women themselves have raised funds for a tiny mosque, with religious instruction given by a woman — one of only a handful of such places in a city where at least 1.5 million female Muslims live.

　　A consortium of European Union aid groups built a spacious gym, and women in tights take fitness classes there or play badminton. The Italians started the Always Spring Restaurant, featuring something else unknown in Kabul, female pizza chefs.

　　Between the compound’s outer and inner walls, a shopping arcade of little, female-run businesses grew up, many of them financed with microgrants: hairdressing, embroidery, children’s clothing, ladies lingerie.

　　There are other such businesses in Kabul, but none are run by women, to whom the busy bazaars are off limits not by law but by hard custom.

　　Some come here for opportunity, many for refuge of one sort or another. Fairly often, women who have run away from abusive husbands, or from fathers who threaten to commit a so-called honor killing, wind up here, and the staff members find them a place in one of the city’s secret women’s shelters.

　　Arezo Ghafori, 22, has a talent for hairdressing and a family of eight for whom she is the sole breadwinner, but the men in the family refused to allow her to work, even if they starved, until she started a salon inside the garden.

　　Leila Husseini, Afghanistan’s 25-year-old Asian tae kwon do champion in the women’s under-95-pound class, came here to train and also to lead courses for other women.

　　All of this did not happen without a fight. Ms. Salik called in the police over the mosque’s encroachment, and the mullah led a noisy demonstration of male neighbors in protest. “I used religious arguments against him,” she said, “and pointed out it was a sin to use stolen land for prayers.”

　　They compromised on a new wall, but the mullah, Abdul Rahim, is still seething. He says that a police officer was caught inside the garden in an improper assignation with a woman, but that the incident was hushed up.

　　“I don’t care what the hell they do,” he said. “But inside the garden they get all dressed up and do their makeup and they have other intentions.”

　　A politically well-connected former warlord named Amanullah Guzar had gained control of the Taliban warlord’s old building site, and a 13-story building began rising there, overlooking their walls and, worse, providing vantage points into the gym’s windows. Construction workers leered and jeered, and Ms. Salik went to court to stop the building, which she claims is actually on land belonging to the garden.

　　“Women need to have privacy here or it does not work,” she said.

　　Efforts to reach Mr. Guzar for comment were unsuccessful.

　　“It is women against men,” she said afterward, uncharacteristically discouraged. “Our action will never succeed.”

　　A few weeks later, she was hopeful again. She had found powerful allies who promised to intercede. In the meantime, work on the building was suspended and the aerobics classes resumed.

　　The face-lift is due to finish July 5. Every 40 days a new crew of female laborers is brought in, giving new people an opportunity to earn money and learn skills.

　　Some are jobless poor, like Zehia and Hassina, two 19-year-olds pushing wheelbarrows, who had baseball caps on over their headscarves and black veils across their faces — more out of shame than modesty.

　　“We are like men here,” Zehia said. “It is an embarrassment for educated girls like us to work like this.”

　　Both are English-speaking high school graduates who have rejected all offers of marriage, hoping to get into a university.

　　“What would I do with a husband, especially an uneducated husband?” Zehia asked. “A job is much better.”

　　In a broad sense, the success of the Kabul Women’s Garden is an admission of failure. Women simply cannot go to other parks in Kabul unless chaperoned by male relatives, and often not even then; most parks, like most public spaces, are overwhelmingly male.

　　“You can’t change people’s ideas overnight,” Ms. Salik said. “So we need to address the immediate needs.”

　　Ms. Salik has other projects in mind for the Kabul Women’s Garden.

　　There is an unused parking lot beside the garden where women could learn how to drive, something almost unheard of here — not because it is illegal, just because it is not done.

　　Most of all, Ms. Salik would like to see a program that would take women on brief trips to other countries, perhaps for job training, but really, she said, just to see how women live in lands where there are no women’s gardens.

Obama’s Twist of BP’s Arm Stirs Debate on Common Tactic

　　

　　WASHINGTON — First there was General Motors, whose chief executive was summarily dismissed by the White House shortly before the government became the company’s majority shareholder. Chrysler was forced into a merger. At the banks that received government bailouts, executive pay was curbed; at insurance companies seeking to jack up premiums, scathing criticism led to rollbacks.

　　But President Obama’s successful move to force BP to establish a $20 billion compensation fund that the company will have no voice in allocating — just a down payment, the president insisted — may have been the most vivid example of what he recently called his determination to step in and do “what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.”

　　With that display of raw arm-twisting, Mr. Obama reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach. It is an argument that has come to define Mr. Obama’s first 18 months in office, and one that Mr. Obama clearly hopes to make a central issue in November’s midterm elections.

　　To Mr. Obama, this is all about rebalancing the books after two decades in which multinationals sometimes acted like mini-states beyond government reach, abetted by a faith in markets that, as Mr. Obama put it at Carnegie Mellon University a few weeks ago, “gutted regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight.” When Representative Joe L. Barton, the Texas Republican, opened hearings Thursday about the gulf oil gusher by accusing Mr. Obama of an unconstitutional “shakedown” of BP to create a “slush fund,” he was giving voice to an alternative narrative, a bubbling certainty in corporate suites that Mr. Obama, whenever faced with crisis that involves private-sector players, reveals himself to be viscerally antibusiness.

　　The reality, not surprisingly, is more complex.

　　Mr. Obama clearly sees his presidency as far more than a bully pulpit — he has cast himself as a last line of defense against market excesses that take many different forms. “In the past, corporate America was not only at the table, they owned the table and the chairs around it,” Mr. Obama’s combative chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in an interview Thursday. “Obama doesn’t start off confrontational, but he will be confrontational if there is resistance to the notion that there are other equities.”

　　But at the same moment, as his critics on the left have pointed out, Mr. Obama has been warding off calls for far more stringent regulations of the banks, hoping to win at least a modicum of business support — and to defuse the notion that he is at war with American-style capitalism.

　　Each of his confrontations with corporate executives had its own rationale. G.M. had become so uncompetitive, Mr. Obama argued, that its imminent collapse was threatening the jobs of millions of workers; the only way to save the company from its own worst instincts was to become its temporary owner and bring new blood into the boardroom. (It will take years to determine if that worked, but on Thursday, though it was overshadowed by the grilling of BP’s chief executive on Capitol Hill, G.M. announced it was forgoing its usual summer shutdown of most of its plants so it could meet renewed demand.)

　　The Wall Street executives who needed the government to prop them up, but still thought their services were worth millions a year, were cast by Mr. Obama as a shameless privileged class. Toyota was described as seeking profits over safety; Wellpoint, the insurance giant, was castigated for seeking to insulate itself from the new health care legislation by taking actions that the law will soon prohibit.

　　Against that backdrop, forcing BP to take a $20 billion bath — even before the inevitable lawsuits are filed — seemed an easy decision. Mr. Obama had no legal basis for the demand, but concluded he did not need one. “He had a power other presidents have used — you call it jawboning,” Mr. Emanuel said.

　　The question is whether the cumulative effects of these actions create an impression that, over the long run, may make it harder to persuade both American and foreign corporations to cooperate with Mr. Obama’s program to reinvest and reinvigorate the American economy.

　　“He’s walking a very fine line here,” said Jeffrey Garten, a professor of trade and international finance at the Yale School of Management and a former top official in the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department. “He is taking each case on the merits as he sees it, but he runs the risk of sowing a level of mistrust about all big companies. And it’s those companies — not small businesses — that he will need to invest and innovate for the kind of recovery he wants.”

　　Mr. Obama is betting that Republicans are also walking a fine line. That became evident Thursday as Republican leaders distanced themselves from Representative Barton’s outburst, which included the charge that Mr. Obama was acting illegally by applying “some sort of political pressure that in my words amounts to a shakedown.”

　　Mr. Obama’s aides clearly relished the idea of a Texas Republican dependent on donors from the energy industry who was actually apologizing to BP. As a political strategy, they appear to be adapting the course taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who seized on a mood of distrust when, in the closing days of the 1936 campaign, he said: ”I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.” When the applause subsided, he added: “I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”

　　It is in the “master” role, however, that Mr. Obama and his advisers know he is on dangerous ground. He has responded to his critics by making the case that every time American business predicted ruin from government intervention — that “Social Security would lead to socialism, and that Medicare was a government takeover” — American capitalism survived.

　　It did. But just as Mr. Obama’s fortunes last year depended on a G.M. turnaround, his fortunes this year depend on demonstrating that the health care legislation that he pushed through both reduces costs for the consumers and saves taxpayers money.

　　And his fortunes over the next two years depend, in part, on showing that he can both turn off the spigot of oil in the gulf and turn on the spigot of aid — out of the coffers of BP’s shareholders. Along the way, he will have to avoid painting with such a broad brush that foreign and domestic investors come to view the United States as a too risky place to do business, a country where big mistakes can lead to vilification and, perhaps, bankruptcy.

Children Carry Guns for a U.S. Ally, Somalia

　　

　　

　　MOGADISHU, Somalia — Awil Salah Osman prowls the streets of this shattered city, looking like so many other boys, with ripped-up clothes, thin limbs and eyes eager for attention and affection.

　　But Awil is different in two notable ways: he is shouldering a fully automatic, fully loaded Kalashnikov assault rifle; and he is working for a military that is substantially armed and financed by the United States.

　　“You!” he shouts at a driver trying to sneak past his checkpoint, his cherubic face turning violently angry.

　　“You know what I’m doing here!” He shakes his gun menacingly. “Stop your car!”

　　The driver halts immediately. In Somalia, lives are lost quickly, and few want to take their chances with a moody 12-year-old.

　　It is well known that Somalia’s radical Islamist insurgents are plucking children off soccer fields and turning them into fighters. But Awil is not a rebel. He is working for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, a critical piece of the American counterterrorism strategy in the Horn of Africa.

　　According to Somali human rights groups and United Nations officials, the Somali government, which relies on assistance from the West to survive, is fielding hundreds of children or more on the front lines, some as young as 9.

　　Child soldiers are deployed across the globe, but according to the United Nations, the Somali government is among the “most persistent violators” of sending children into war, finding itself on a list with notorious rebel groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army.

　　Somali government officials concede that they have not done the proper vetting. Officials also revealed that the United States government was helping pay their soldiers, an arrangement American officials confirmed, raising the possibility that the wages for some of these child combatants may have come from American taxpayers.

　　United Nations officials say they have offered the Somali government specific plans to demobilize the children. But Somalia’s leaders, struggling for years to withstand the insurgents’ advances, have been paralyzed by bitter infighting and are so far unresponsive.

　　Several American officials also said that they were concerned about the use of child soldiers and that they were pushing their Somali counterparts to be more careful. But when asked how the American government could guarantee that American money was not being used to arm children, one of the officials said, “I don’t have a good answer for that.”

　　According to Unicef, only two countries have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the use of soldiers younger than 15: the United States and Somalia.

　　Many human rights groups find this unacceptable, and President Obama himself, when this issue was raised during his campaign, did not disagree.

　　“It is embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless land,” he said.

　　All across this lawless land, smooth, hairless faces peek out from behind enormous guns. In blown-out buildings, children chamber bullets twice the size of their fingers. In neighborhoods by the sea, they run checkpoints and face down four-by-four trucks, though they can barely see over the hood.

　　Somali government officials admit that in the rush to build a standing army, they did not discriminate.

　　“I’ll be honest,” said a Somali government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject, “we were trying to find anyone who could carry a gun.”

　　Awil struggles to carry his. It weighs about 10 pounds. The strap digs into his bony shoulders, and he is constantly shifting it from one side to the other with a grimace.

　　Sometimes he gets a helping hand from his comrade Ahmed Hassan, who is 15. Ahmed said he was sent to Uganda more than two years ago for army training, when he was 12, though his claim could not be independently verified. American military advisers have been helping oversee the training of Somali government soldiers in Uganda.

　　“One of the things I learned,” Ahmed explained eagerly, “is how to kill with a knife.”

　　Children do not have many options in Somalia. After the government collapsed in 1991, an entire generation was let loose on the streets. Most children have never sat in a classroom or played in a park. Their bones have been stunted by conflict-induced famines, their psyches damaged by all the killings they have witnessed.

　　“What do I enjoy?” Awil asked. “I enjoy the gun.”

　　Like many other children here, the war has left him hard beyond his years. He loves cigarettes and is addicted to qat, a bitter leaf that, for the few hours he chews it each day, makes grim reality fade away.

　　Awil gobbles down greasy rice with unwashed hands because he does not know where his next meal is coming from. He is paid about $1.50 a day, but only every now and then, like most soldiers. His bed is a fly-covered mattress that he shares with two other child soldiers, Ali Deeq, 10, and Abdulaziz, 13.

　　“He should be in school,” said Awil’s commander, Abdisalam Abdillahi. “But there is no school.”

　　Ali Sheikh Yassin, vice-chairman of Elman Peace and Human Rights Center in Mogadishu, said that about 20 percent of government troops (thought to number 5,000 to 10,000) were children and that about 80 percent of the rebels were. The leading insurgent group, which has drawn increasingly close to Al Qaeda, is called the Shabab, which means youth in Arabic.

　　“These kids can be so easily brainwashed,” Mr. Ali said. “They don’t even have to be paid.”

　　One of the myriad dangers Awil faces is constant gunfire between his squad and another group of government soldiers from a different clan. The Somali government is racked by divisions from the prime minister’s office down to the street.

　　“I’ve lost hope,” said Sheik Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a defense minister who abruptly quit in the past week, like several other ministers. “All this international training, it’s just training soldiers for the Shabab,” he added, saying defections had increased.

　　“Go ask the president what he’s accomplished in the past year,” Sheik Yusuf said, laughing. “Absolutely nothing.”

　　Advisers to President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed say they have fine-tuned their plans for a coming offensive, making it more of a gradual military operation to slowly take the city back from the insurgents.

　　Awil is eager for action. His commanders say he has already proven himself fighting against the Shabab, who used to bully him in the market.

　　“That made me want to join the T.F.G.,” he said. “With them, I feel like I am amongst my brothers.”

NATO Has High Hopes for Afghan Peace Council

　　

　　By ALISSA J. RUBIN

　　Published: May 30, 2010

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　　KABUL, Afghanistan — Western leaders are banking on a national peace council set to begin here on Wednesday to start a new chapter in Afghanistan’s political life, bringing the country together and strengthening President Hamid Karzai, even as security deteriorated on Sunday in several areas of the country.

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　　Ahmad Masood/Reuters

　　

　　Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era.

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　　Times Topics: Afghanistan | North Atlantic Treaty Organization

　　In a joint news conference, the NATO commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, and the senior civilian representative, Mark Sedwill, emphasized that the West supported the peace council, called a jirga, even as many Afghans questioned whether those attending would truly represent the many factions in the country.

　　“This is a big week for Afghanistan,” said Mr. Sedwill, who described the conference as “the first of a series of major political events that are going to set the agenda of 2010.”

　　The jirga will be followed by the Kabul Conference on economic development in July and parliamentary elections in September.

　　“This is a critical moment for this country to bring together all of the people of Afghanistan, their representatives, in an opportunity to set the direction forward and create a national consensus behind the overall approach to security, to development, to reconciliation,” Mr. Sedwill said.

　　The Electoral Complaints Commission announced Sunday that 85 candidates had been preliminarily barred from participating in the parliamentary elections because they are members of illegal armed groups. They will have the right to appeal. Still, the number is far more than that in the first round of parliamentary elections in 2005, when just 17 people were disqualified for the same reason, according to a former E.C.C. commissioner, Fahim Hakim.

　　The increase suggests that a more rigorous review system is now in place, analysts say.

　　Even as the peace efforts proceed in the capital, Kabul, security appeared to be deteriorating in districts in the east and south of the country and on the western border, where Afghan insurgents trained in Iran are returning to fight and smuggling in weapons, General McChrystal said.

　　“There is clear evidence of Iranian activities, in some cases supplying weaponry and training to the Taliban that is inappropriate,” he said.

　　In Nuristan Province, on the country’s eastern border, hundreds of local and Pakistani Taliban have taken control of a remote district near the Pakistan border, Barg-e-Matal. The number of fighters who have crossed the border from Pakistan swelled through the week and now has reached 1,000 to 1,500, said Gen. Zaman Mamozai, the commander of the Afghan Border Police for the eastern region of Afghanistan.

　　They are “mostly from Pakistan and are conducting collective attacks,” he said.

　　It appears that many of the Taliban from Pakistan had come to Nuristan in search of a new haven after having come under attack from the Pakistani Army in Pakistan. There are few Afghan security troops in Nuristan’s rugged mountains and only a small number of American troops in the province.

　　NATO leaders say that they cannot control the entire country with the number of troops they have and had to rely on Afghan forces in remote areas. But because not enough Afghans have been trained, NATO officials say they may have to live with some insurgent havens.

　　“As we execute our strategy and our capacity to secure areas, we must prioritize the order in which we do those, and how we deploy our forces and our assets,” General McChrystal said when asked whether Barg-e-Matal was being allowed to become a sanctuary.

　　“The Taliban can still muster strength in places and there are a lot of unknowns there,” added a senior NATO officer, speaking about Nuristan on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record on the matter.

　　“If there are Taliban there, so what?” he said, adding that the district was far from any population center. He acknowledged that the situation would become more complicated if the Taliban filter out of remote mountain redoubts and into populated areas.

　　There was violence as well in the southeastern province of Khost, where a barely completed high school, built with international aid, was blown up late Saturday night by men using rocket-propelled grenades and bombs.

　　The school, which cost $220,000 to build, would have provided classrooms for 1,300 students, said Musa Majrooh, the spokesman for the Khost Education Department. A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, denied that the Taliban were involved in the blast.

　　Also in Khost, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle at the entrance to the police battalion that patrols suburban areas. Nine police officers were wounded, two of them seriously.

　　In Nangahar Province, in the east, which until recently was relatively calm, two bombings killed five members of the Afghan security forces, and in Badakhshan Province in the far northeast, six counternarcotics officers were killed when their patrol vehicle was blown up by a homemade bomb.

　　They were on a mission to eradicate poppy, and the province’s governor, Baz Mohammed, accused narcotics traffickers and the Taliban of setting the bomb.

　　Sharifullah Sahak and Waheed Abdul Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Khost.