• Jeb Sharp on Clinton’s demand for an end of the sexual abuse
• Jeb Sharp’s award-winning series on rape in Congo (2008)
• UNIFEM homepage

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: Wars are not just what happens between armies.  Civilians get caught up in the fighting.  We’re going to focus now on a particularly disturbing tactic of war that is aimed at civilians.  That’s the use of rape as a weapon.  The United Nations Security Council is scheduled to tackle this issue tomorrow.  Perhaps the worst recent cases have been in places like eastern Congo where armed groups have used rape to terrorize communities.  I visited eastern Congo last year and spoke with rape victims at a place called Panzi Hospital. Here are some of their voices and I should warn you their stories are disturbing.  Here’s one girl I met, a tiny ten year old in blue jeans named Marie.

MARIE:  I’ve been raped by a Hutu soldier who came in my house.  They first of all killed my parents and then they raped me, there were three.

SHARP:  Another young patient at the hospital, also called Marie, was traveling to the local market with six other women when their vehicle was ambushed by armed men.  She says the attackers dragged the women into the bush.

MARIE:  So they took off all our dresses and we were naked.  They killed one woman among us; one man raped me and another one make sex with me, put his sex in my mouth.

SHARP:  Those are the kinds of stories you hear all too often in war zones like eastern Congo.  Joining me now is Anne-Marie Goetz.  She’s the chief advisor for Governance, Peace and Security at UNIFEM, the UN Development Fund for Women.  Anne-Marie Goetz, first just let me ask you what strikes you about those women’s voices and their stories.

ANNE-MARIE GOETZ:  These are awful experiences and what’s horrifying is that if anything, rape in war seems to be increasing.  Particularly in this context, in eastern Congo where in spite of the signing a peace agreement earlier this year and the effort to round up remaining militia, rape has if anything been on the increase and in parts of eastern Congo, for example in North Kivu, three out of four women have been raped by men in uniform.  This is an emergency on a phenomenal scale and that’s exactly what’s so important about the Security Council resolution which will be discussed tomorrow on Rape in Conflict.

SHARP:  Now tell us about that.  The U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to chair the session.  The council is expected to pass a fresh resolution on preventing and punishing rape as a weapon of war but what’s in the resolution–and I don’t mean the flowery UN language–I mean what are the two or three tangible things in there that are actually going to make a difference?

GOETZ:  What’s going to happen tomorrow is that the Security Council is going to recommend the Secretary-General appoint a senior Special Representative of the Secretary-General on sexual violence, whose sole job will be to address this horrifying feature of fighting.  In addition, there’s going to be a task force of technical advisers on judicial systems who, at the initiation of governments in the post-conflict phase, will be able to come in and strengthen judicial response.  This is exceptionally important for addressing the problem of impunity, de facto impunity enjoyed by perpetrators of this violence.

SHARP:  One of the problems in eastern Congo is a huge number of rapes are reported and a tiny percentage makes it into the court.  How does this change the judicial picture?

GOETZ:  The idea is to go into a place where the judicial system is in dissarray, the corrections system is virtually non-existent and to quickly support the country, to set priorities for fast tracking investigations and prosecutions of these crimes.

SHARP:  Anne-Marie Goetz, this sounds really, really good.  How can you persuade us though that we should not be really skeptical, given the nature of the UN bureaucracy?

GOETZ:  I think we are seeing a sea change in the way that this issue is being approached by the United Nations.  There is no question that there’s an uphill battle, that a great deal of peacekeeping troops need to be trained in a different way.  The challenges are huge.

SHARP:  The former UN Under-Secretary-General (for Humanitarian Affairs), Jan Egeland, had a good way of explaining the way rape as a weapon of war had been viewed at the UN, really right up until now.  Let’s hear that tape.

JAN EGLAND:  I think it may be one of the biggest conspiracies of silence of history, this. And we treat it at best as a humanitarian problem.  So you’ve been gang-raped, have a blanket.  You’ve been gang-raped again, have another blanket.  Whereas it should be a political and a security and a justice problem.

SHARP:  Anne-Marie Goetz, it sounds as if you would agree with that but do you see the mentality, the emphasis shifting to the degree it needs to?

GOETZ:  Have mentalities changed?  Within the humanitarian sector, as Jan Egeland rightly points out, there has been much more willingness to detect and to do something about sexual violence but very much in the sense of responding to the needs of its survivors.  Within the uniformed personnel of the UN and certainly within for example, even the peacemakers, the mediators, yes, lots of work has to be done to raise awareness.  That this is a way of fighting, it is a prescribed method of war, just as landmines and cluster bombs are and therefore this must be addressed and attacked.

SHARP:  Anne-Marie Goetz is the Chief Advisor for Governance Peace, and Security at UNIFEM, the UN’s development agency for women.  She joined us from the UN.  Thank you.

GOETZ:  Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Health Canada
• Foreign lessons in hospital efficiency

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World.  This was a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television broadcast from July, 1962.

NOLTON NASH:  Good evening, I’m Nolton Nash and this is another special report on the Saskatchewan Medicare fight.  A fight that has torn Saskatchewan apart in almost unbelievable bitterness and anger.

SHARP:  That summer, doctors in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan, went on strike.  Their grievance?  A new government healthcare program.  It was the beginning of what was a long uphill battle to implement universal health care in Canada. Roy Romanow was Premier of Saskatchewan from 1991 to 2001.  He joins us from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  Roy Romanow, you Canadians have been through this uproar already.  Give us a sense of what the rhetoric was like back in Saskatchewan at the beginning.

ROY ROMANOW:  When we listened to the rhetoric going on in parts of the United States, that’s exactly the rhetoric that you heard in Saskatchewan, with the exception thankfully of any reference to violence, physical violence.  But the usual rhetoric, this was Socialism; this was introducing a plan whereby a government bureaucrat would be between you and your healthcare provider.  Freedom, you couldn’t afford it, the quality of healthcare descending and all of those things that are coming across in the United States of America.

SHARP:  Why were the doctors striking specifically?

ROMANOW:  The doctors felt very strongly that the program made them “employees” of a government plan and initially, the idea was to put them on a salaried basis as opposed to a fee for service basis and they argued that once you’re salaried, then by definition you’re an employee of the state.  In fact, the eventual solution came about as a result of the intervention of Lord Taylor from the UK House of Lords, who was brought in as a mediator and they negotiated an agreement whereby the provision on salary was removed but the battle raged on for a number of years after that.

SHARP:  I was going to say.  I mean, was the doctors’ argument about being salaried employees the main argument or was there a much stronger main thrust that was simply anti-government?

ROMANOW:  It was a stronger anti-government thrust, just the notion that a government would be the somehow arbitrator of the delivery of healthcare to people in Saskatchewan.  I attended several rallies and our rallies here were very large by Saskatchewan standards, eight, nine, ten thousand people, so it was a combination but mainly a combination of mainly the argument of politics and ideology and some flaming rhetoric attached to issues of healthcare and the quality of healthcare. The argument which tried to focus on the quality of healthcare was really the weakest and the least pronounced.  The most pronounced was essentially the scare tactics and of course the largest scare tactic was when all the doctors, with the exception I think of three or four, went on a province wide strike so we had no doctors and then we had to bring in UK doctors who rallied to the cause in a humanitarian way and very quickly were processed by the UK government and the Canadian government, in fairness to the Canadian federal government, to come to Saskatchewan to help break the strike.

SHARP:  I do want to help Americans understand what happened in Canada by talking a little bit about the man who drove the change in Canada to a universal healthcare system.  His name was Tommy Douglas.  Douglas was the Premier of Saskatchewan and he launched a campaign in the late nineteen forties to create what became Canadian Medicare. Here’s Tommy Douglas in an interview with the CBC in 1962, explaining why this new healthcare system was needed.

TOMMY DOUGLAS:  Most of these plans, in order to stay solvent, have to eliminate a great many groups of people because of age, because of chronic conditions, because of congenital illnesses, past medical histories and so on and these are precisely the people who need some kind of protection.

SHARP:  That was former Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas speaking in 1962 so again there, you know, we’ve heard these arguments before but what’s it like to hear that old tape and think about what it means now, especially with regards to the United States as opposed to Saskatchewan?

ROMANOW:  Well, before I get to the United States, very briefly, hearing Tommy’s voice, I knew him, I was much younger of course.  Those of us who actually saw that debate and heard the oratory of Douglas and his successor, Woodrow Lloyd, this brings goose bumps because it was a very difficult period, bordering on civil disorder a bit in Saskatchewan but essentially, Douglas’ analysis then is dead right now.  I think Obama is going to be forced to adopt reforms limiting the insurance companies’ capacities to limit or to delist those kinds of people that Douglas identified as having illnesses which do not permit coverage.  That’s what I think the legislation will be aimed at, trying to rectify.  I don’t think it’ll work because there will still be a market system which will be involved in the process and there will be ways and means to get around it.  But this again speaks to the values.  If America could ever adopt an approach that healthcare is a social good, that there’s a communitarian value to this, then of course they would see the elimination, if not complete, largely those categories of people who have been denied, had been denied before Medicare in Saskatchewan and are being denied in the United States of America.

SHARP:  Roy Romanow, are you finding it quite excruciating to watch the debate unfold here from up north?

ROMANOW:  Well I am, actually.  I’ll give you one small anecdotal story.  I was in Ottawa, our capital city, oh four or five weeks ago at a congressional, joint congressional and Canadian conference on healthcare and primarily the American healthcare system.  And we had two representatives from Congress, both Republican and Democrats who were there and I, excruciating may not be the word but I certainly find it very befuddling to hear some of the language that is kicked around.

SHARP:  But why since you, you all went through very much the same thing up there.

ROMANOW:  Yes, I would have thought that you know, history’s a bit of a teacher, that we learn from other countries, the good things and avoid the bad things.  And we can adjust some of the good things to fit our own societies.

SHARP:  In 2004 there was a CBC poll to find the greatest Canadian and the winner was actually this Premier from Saskatchewan, Tommy Douglas, who championed healthcare.  Do you think he’s a hero?

ROMANOW:  He is a hero.  He really struck a nerve, implemented a great program.  He remains a Canadian hero.  Leadership is very important.  Douglas and Lloyd went through fire to implement the Medicare plan.  They were prepared to sacrifice their government and they had the authority of the parliamentary system to do so.  Obama needs to exhibit leadership and a determination to go through fire to have a reformed healthcare Medicare system in the United States.

SHARP:  Roy Romanow, great to have your perspective, thank you.

ROMANOW:  Thank you for inviting me.

SHARP:  Roy Romanow is the former Premier of Saskatchewan.  He’s now the chair of the Institute of Well Being Advisory Board.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• More BBC coverage
• Article from The Guardian
• More on Cockney rhyming slang

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP:  For a little less serenity, we take you to the east end of London.  That’s where you’ll find some unusual bank machines about five of them in fact. These ATM’s use Cockney rhyming slang, the language of working class Londoners in the eighteen hundreds.  The World’s Laura Lynch decided to take a butcher’s.

LAURA LYNCH:  That’s going for a look, from butcher’s hook for those of you unwise in the ways of Cockney.  Now I like to think I’ve got a little bit of Cockney blood in me and here’s why.  These are the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church in east London.  Tradition holds if you’re born within hearing of these bells, you’re full blooded Cockney.  Well, my dad may just have heard the bells the day of his birth in his parents’ bedroom a few miles away.  Never mind he left Britain when he was six so when I heard about Cockney bank machines I had to investigate.  Deep in the heart of the east end, I find the cash machine and a real live Cockney to translate.  Roy Parker is a dispatcher at a taxi company steps from the machine and he’s eager to lend a hand.  I brought my card.

ROY PARKER:  Yeah, you put your card in.

LYNCH:  And I see we’ve got a limit on the withdrawal so that’s good.

PARKER:  Alright now it says select the English or Cockney.

LYNCH:  Okay.

PARKER:  So say you’re going to use Cockney, right?

LYNCH:  Right.

PARKER:  So bringing you a bladder of lard, which rhymes with card.

LYNCH:  Card, yes.

PARKER:  Please enter your Huckleberry Finn.  Pin.

LYNCH:  Huckleberry Finn is your pin, your pin number.

PARKER:  Yeah, yeah.

LYNCH:  Now you know what my Huckleberry Finn is.

PARKER:  Yeah, now that, Tom Hanks means thanks.

LYNCH:  Tom Hanks?

PARKER:  Yeah.

LYNCH:  Tom Hanks for thanks.  Well, that’s got to be modern.

PARKER:  Yeah, that’s what I’m saying it’s modern.

LYNCH:  Roy is ruddy faced, barrel chested and practically strutting with pride about his heritage and his language, never mind that it evolved as a kind of coded language for crooked street merchants to keep secrets from the police and unwitting customers.  Roy laments what time has done to the dialect.

PARKER:  The real old feeling of Cockney as such, the real way’s cheerful, always, Hello, me old china plate, how are you?  Hello mate, how are you?  You know.  It’s like you saying hi, how are you?  So it was just another kind of language really but it was a language that was understood mainly, only by people from the east end.

LYNCH:  And not well understood by me.  I am too slow or talking too much and the machine decides I’ve taken way too long.

PARKER:  Oh my God.

LYNCH:  Uh oh, it just stole my card.  Well, we were a little bit silly about that one, weren’t we?

PARKER:  Now you’re in a bit of a Barney Rubble now.

LYNCH:  And what’s the Barney Rubble?

PARKER:  Trouble, that’s modern.

LYNCH:  Not much I can do now but luckily Gemma Salsbury steps up to withdraw some cash and she lets me watch and learn.

GEMMA SALSBURY:  Lady Godiva.

LYNCH:  Oh, these are the names of the dollars, Lady Godiva …

SALSBURY:  Fiver …

LYNCH:  Fiver Lady Godiva, speckled hen, ten.  And so it goes.  The company that created the Cockney machines is trying them out for three months but Roy Parker knows his neighborhood knows how it’s changing.  He doubts Cockney is going to catch on with today’s crowd.

PARKER:  The way people are moving in this world today and people, a hundred miles an hour.  All they want to do is get their money out.  It takes a Cockney slang, ten people say what’s Cockney slang, what’s that?

LYNCH:  As for me, I may have lost my bank card but hey, I’ve gained more than a little Barney Rubble.  I’m in touch with my inner Cockney and in Roy Parker, I found a new china plate.  For the World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

SHARP:  You can catch up on all the latest in global language on our Weekly World in Word’s Podcast, just visit TheWorld.org/Language to listen or subscribe.  This is PRI.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Illustrated transcript of part II
• Created in China Series page
• Mary Kay’s 2007 series on “Young China.”

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp; this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  China’s ruling Communist party wants to build a more innovative economy but it’s used to governing through decrees and five year plans and that’s a hard habit to break.  The party has spent billions in the past decade on research labs but it’s given scientists strict guidelines to come up with new ideas.  The results have been mixed at best.  China does innovate but rarely in a way that’s compelling enough for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice.  The World’s Mary Kay Magistad has the second part of our series, “Created in China.”

MARY KAY MAGISTAD:  One of the success stories of China’s push for greater innovation is a company called CapitalBio.  Framed patents line the walls of the company’s reception hall.  A glass display case shows off its biochip products for use in medical care.

SPEAKER:  There’s a sperm viability assessment chip, electromagnetic cell chip, cell network electrophysiological monitoring chip, lab on a chip.

KEITH MITCHELSON:  See, it’s using these advanced tools for manipulating cells.

MAGISTAD:  Keith Mitchelson is CapitalBio’s Vice President for Marketing and the company’s sole non-Chinese employee.  He says CapitalBio is working on a technology that would allow doctors to use these bio chips in their clinics, to conduct tests normally done by large machines, with long waiting times for results.  CapitalBio is located in the government built Zhongguancun Science Park.  Z-Park as it’s known, is in the same leafy corner of Beijing where some of China’s top universities are based.  In fact, CapitalBio is a private company spinoff from one of them, Tsinghua University.  Xia Yangqui is a Beijing municipal government official and the deputy director of the science park.  He says the kind of innovation you see at Capital Bio is what the government had in mind when it created the Zhongguancun Science Park.

XIA YANGQUI:  Z-Park is the high tech concentration area and also serves as an incubator of high tech businesses.

MAGISTAD:  Xia hopes that China’s version of Bill Gates comes out of this park.  He says many companies, Chinese and foreign, have opened research and development centers here and total production value has increased fifteen fold to one hundred and fifty billion dollars during the past decade.  There’s no denying that China has made sizzling economic progress in recent years.  Most Chinese now have mobile phones and that includes farmers, even some living in caves.  More Chinese are now online than Americans and when new technologies come up elsewhere, Chinese are quick to copy them or tweak them for the home market and get them out to the masses. It happened so quickly that some Chinese can get confused about who created the technology in the first place.  Here’s what Chinese Academy of Sciences official Lu Yonglong said when I asked him what major inventions have come out of China in the past couple of decades?

LU YONGLONG:  DVD, the first generation of DVD was developed in China.  CDMA.  And flash disk.

MAGISTAD:  Actually, the DVD was invented by a consortium of Japanese, European and US companies.  An Israeli developed the flash disk.  But the Chinese did embrace both technologies early and enthusiastically.  And Chinese innovators have found ways to improve many such technologies for the Chinese market.  That’s reflected in the fact that China had more than eight hundred thousand patent applications last year and granted almost two hundred thousand patents.  The problem is that very few of those patents were for break through technologies.  Yin Xintian heads the legal affairs department of the Chinese patent office.

YIN XINTIAN:  In American history, Edison invented the light bulb and it changed how people live and also Morse telegram and nowadays it’s not easy to find such kind of Chinese inventions. In China, it’s more about a specific technique and improving the current technique.  It’s also important to specific development and to explore a completely new field, I can’t recall any of that.

MAGISTAD:  Yin says modern Chinese innovation has come a long way since he started working in the patent office thirty years ago as a young engineer.  He believes more important inventions will come as more Chinese get up to speed with international knowledge and international standards.  He says it helps that the government is committed at the highest levels to making this happen.  Premier Wen Jiabao has said as much just this month when he spoke at the world economic forum in the northern Chinese city of Dalian.

WEN JIABAO:  We should see scientific and technological innovation as a powerful engine of economic growth and rely on it more to make economic progress.  We will transform China into an innovative nation.

MAGISTAD:  China has made innovation a priority for a simple reason.  It provides more sustainable growth than just manufacturing innovations from other countries.  Duncan Clark is chairman of BDA, a high tech investment advisory firm in Beijing. He points out that IPODS are made in China but China doesn’t make much money from them.

DUNCAN CLARK:  For example, on a two hundred dollar sale of an IPOD, perhaps five dollars of value is left for China.  Most of the value goes to Apple for the brand, for the distribution.  Some of it goes to the components suppliers who mostly are Japanese, in the case of IPOD.  So China rightly, I think has been saying we don’t want to be just the manufacturing workshop where pollution is left behind and labor unrest when the economy of the US turns down.  So China is struggling to move up the value chain and they’re absolutely right to be focusing on greater value.

MAGISTAD:  But Clark thinks they’re less right in how they go about it.  The government throws lots of money at science parks and infrastructure.   Researchers are ordered to innovate on deadline and file patent applications and journal articles if they want to keep getting funding. That leads to quantity but not necessarily quality.  The pressure had led some researchers to plagiarize, fabricate data and generally cut corners.  Another problem is that government run research labs have a hard time staying current with what consumers want.  On top of that, some of the government led effort is infused with a nationalistic Chinese innovation for China approach.  Clark says that’s self-defeating.  He cites as an example the Chinese government’s costly effort to come up with a new high speed mobile broadband standard.

CLARK:  China, about ten years ago, was frustrated with the dominance of companies like Ericson, Alketel and Motorola in the Chinese market and thought that we could never compete head on in Western technology.  We need to create our own indigenous standard and by effectively walling off the Chinese market; we would be able to create a big enough market for a national champion or champions to emerge and then they could export based on the size of the Chinese market.  This was the plan.

MAGISTAD:  The reality, Clark says, is that the plan has failed miserably because nobody outside of China has made phones that use the Chinese standard.  Liu Jiren is the chairman and CEO of China’s largest software development and IT company, Neusoft.  He told an audience at the world economic forum in Dalian that it’s time for China to change its approach.

LIU JIREN:  That is most important today that we need to change original innovation way.  Especially for Chinese company.  We always want to try to create something by our self.  I don’t think you have enough resources, you have enough time, you have enough talent.  If you can integrate with global resources, you can share IPR with others, you also can share success, share risk with others.

MAGISTAD:  Entrepreneurs like Liu say there’s a better way forward than just pouring money into infrastructure and staking national prestige on whether China comes up with its own exclusive standard.  They say the government should focus on improving the climate for innovation.  Ramp up intellectual property protection so the inventors reap the rewards from what they create, rather than the pirates.  Improve how the stock market functions so start-ups can get the cash they need and put more effort into understanding the needs and the strengths of the private sector.  A gap in that understanding became apparent when a Chinese journalist asked China’s minister of science and technology, Wang Gang, a question at the world economic forum.  She said small private companies don’t have as much capacity for innovation as big companies so what are you doing to help them?  Well, he said, we’re encouraging them to work with universities and we’re encouraging the universities to receive them with open arms.  He said we pay special attention to the smaller private enterprises because their capacity for innovation is lower.  That prompted this response from James Turley, the chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young.

JAMES TURLEY:  My experience around the world is not consistent with the premises of the question.

MAGISTAD:  Turley said from what he’s seen, it’s the small private businesses that innovate more than the big bureaucratic ones.

TURLEY:  I think the magic of progress is when we can in a collaborative style, bring together the innovation and the vision that comes from nimble entrepreneurs with the power and the education in both the academic community and the state sector.

MAGISTAD:  Minister Wong nodded politely but he didn’t look convinced.  After all, when China’s one party state decides it’s going to do something, things generally happen, like now when the government is throwing its effort into building renewable energy as a leading industry.  China’s Communist party has come a long way since its hard line Maoist past.  But some habits die hard like a lack of faith in the private sector and a preference to let the state sector lead.  For China to become the innovative nation its leaders want it to be, it will have to do more than build infrastructure and graduate engineers.  China will have to rethink old assumptions and find new ways to fertilize the roots of innovation.  For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

SHARP:  Tomorrow, Mary Kay examines the ways China’s educational system thwarts innovation.  One former student says one teacher’s instructions to prep for an exam are typical.

SPEAKER:  If you ever encounter a test question on this topic, this is how you should answer it and if you run out of things to say, that you can always just praise the Communist Party.

SHARP:  That’s Part Three of Created in China, tomorrow on The World.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World.  There is no let up to the violence in Afghanistan.  A bomb destroyed a bus in Kandahar province today.  At least thirty people were killed.  At the same time, last month’s presidential elections are still up in the air.  The elections were marred by allegations of fraud.  Afghanistan was on President Obama’s agenda today.  He met with NATO chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.  They discussed the situation in Afghanistan and Rasmussen said NATO would keep troops there “as long as it takes to finish the job.”  Jean MacKenzie is Kabul correspondent for the online news site Global Post.com.  Jean, first give us the latest on the violence.  What more do you know about the bus blast?

JEAN MacKENZIE:  Well, we’re not actually sure what was going on.  In order to cause the level of causalities, thirty dead and an additional forty injured is what we’re hearing. This had to have been a very big explosive device, the type that are usually targeted against military convoys so we’re not sure whether this was a mistake, whether something went wrong.  This is not normally the type of bombing we would see in Kandahar.

JEB SHARP:  And obviously this comes against the backdrop of the controversy over the election. What’s the latest with the election count?

JEAN MacKENZIE:  Well, we’re expecting the final results within about ten days.  The electoral complaints commission are going through ballot boxes with suspicious counts but because there were so many of those, they’re only doing a one in ten sampling.  We’re not really sure what that is going to give us in terms of a feeling of legitimacy or comfort that the elections were transparent but we expect that within ten days we will have a final announcement.

JEB SHARP:  From afar, there already seems such a cloud over the elections, I wonder what it feels like there, what people say and what they ask and what the mood is like.  I mean, is it already considered to be completely illegitimate or what’s the word like on the street?

JEAN MacKENZIE:  Well certainly people are more than aware of the fraud and very aware that this casts a cloud over the entire process.  But frankly, people are just tired of it.  They’re tired of the discussions, they’re tired of the fights and they just want it to be over.  What I’m hearing from most people is that we know what the result is going to be, we know what the end result is going to be which is President Hamid Karzai will be in office for another five years so why drag it out, why prolong the agony?  We don’t want more of the squabbling, we don’t want a second round of election, we just want an end to this entire mess.

JEB SHARP:  Jean MacKenzie, what are you, yourself watching the most?  What strikes you at this moment and what are you most concerned about?

JEAN MacKENZIE:  Well, we are watching a series of political standoffs around the country that have been triggered by the election.  Specifically in the north, which had been an area that was quite safe and quite calm up until now.  The elections have triggered some severe ethnic and political divides and we’re quite worried that might lead to some violence up there.

JEB SHARP:  Jean MacKenzie is Kabul correspondent for the online news site Global Post.com.  Thanks, Jean.

JEAN MacKENZIE:  Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: President Obama is also watching what’s happening in Afghanistan.  He faces a difficult decision in the coming weeks, whether to send in more troops to beef up a counter insurgency effort or whether to focus more on counter terrorism.  The World’s Jason Margolis has more.

JASON MARGOLIS:  President Obama hasn’t tipped his hand about a potential troop increase in Afghanistan.  Ten days ago he said there is no immediate decision pending.  Today the President met with the new Secretary General of NATO and offered a few public words about their conversation.

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  We both agree that it is absolutely critical that we are successful in dismantling, disrupting, destroying the Al Qaeda network and that we are effectively working with the Afghan government to provide the security necessary for that country.

JASON MARGOLIS:  After nearly eight years of trying to accomplish this, the question still remains how.  First, it’s helpful to define the enemy.  Are U.S. and NATO troops fighting insurgents or terrorists?  Audrey Kurth Cronin, author of the new book, “How Terrorism Ends,” offers some definitions.

AUDREY KURTH CRONIN:  An insurgency usually targets military targets and holds territory.  Terrorist groups targets primarily civilian targets.

JASON MARGOLIS:  To fight terrorism, the goal is relatively straightforward.  Capture or kill the enemy.  Launching a counter insurgency strategy involves protecting the population and getting them over to your side.  The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, says the U.S. needs to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.  That would be in line with the counter insurgency.  McChrystal says to do that effectively, more troops are needed.  That strategy may have seemed quite reasonable a few months ago, says Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.  But Korb says now, with the contested Afghan election, President Obama has to make a decision.

LAWRENCE KORB:  He’s going to have to decide whether this is a government that it’s worth Americans fighting and dying for and spending a lot of resources.

MARGOLIS:  If President Obama does shift more towards a counter terrorism strategy, Korb estimates that the U.S. military could cut its current troop levels in Afghanistan in half.

KORB:  What they would do is they would take out the majority of the combat troops, leave Special Forces in there to provide intelligence on where the insurgents might be and use drones or other types of air power from off shore to attack these camps.

MARGOLIS:  But launching counter terrorism and counter insurgency strategies often overlap.  Karin Von Hippel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington says drones and missiles can’t win the war alone.

KARIN VON HIPPEL:  In order to do even a more traditional counter terrorism operation in Afghanistan, you still need a very serious ground presence.  You still need good intelligence and you need to still focus on building up the Afghan capacity.

MARGOLIS:  There’s another school of thought over how best to defeat Al Qaeda.  Just get out of the way.

VON HIPPEL:  I think Al Qaeda is its own worst enemy.

MARGOLIS:  Again, Audrey Kruth Cronin.  She says historically, most terror groups naturally implode over time.

KRUTH CRONIN:  The most important way to try to move that dynamic along toward implosion would be to try to highlight the kinds of attacks that Al Qaeda and some of these Taliban factions are engaging in that kill their own people.

MARGOLIS:  Cronin won’t comment on the issue of troop levels and she’s not saying Al Qaeda doesn’t pose a threat but she does say moving the narrative away from the American presence in Afghanistan would speed up Al Qaeda’s demise. There’s one more factor for President Obama to consider with his Afghanistan policy, the Afghan people.  Namely, does the U.S. bear a moral responsibility to rebuild that nation?  For The World, I’m Jason Margolis.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.