• FAQ Pakistan’s operations in Waziristan
• Matthew Bell on Pakistan’s campaign against militant groups
• Jeb Sharp’s ‘How We Got There’ podcast

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MARCO WERMAN:   As we just heard, Pakistan’s military seems to take a selective approach when it comes to cracking down on militants inside the country’s border.  Given the rash of attacks in recent weeks, some mind it hard to understand why the military would hold back at all but historians say there is a reason and it’s rooted in Pakistan’s past.  The World’s Jeb Sharp takes a look back.

JEB SHARP:  The nation of Pakistan was born in August 1947, carved out of India at India’s moment of independence from the British.  Mohammed Ali Jinnah was Pakistan’s founder and first leader.

MOHAMMED ALI JINNAH:  It is in Pakistan.  It is with feelings of greatest happiness and emotion that I send you my greetings.  All this specific things, the birthday of the independence and sovereign state of Pakistan.

SHARP:  The idea was to give India’s Muslims more political power by providing them with a homeland of their own but thee was trouble right from the beginning, over a beautiful mountainous region both sides wanted, Kashmir.  Pakistani’s felt they got a raw deal, according to Arif Jamal, he’s the author of “Shadow War – The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir.”

ARIF JAMAL:  Pakistani’s feel that the British were unfair dividing their empire.  They gave some Muslim majority parts to India and if they had not given those Muslim majority parts to India in Punjab, India would not have ready access to Kashmir and Kashmir would have gone to Pakistan.

SHARP:  The two countries went to war over Kashmir almost immediately but Pakistan was never a match for its much larger neighbor. It lost that first war.  A second in 1965 ended in a stalemate.  Then in 1971, Pakistan lost half its territory when Bengali separatists seceded from Pakistan with the help of India.  East Pakistan became Bangladesh.  Historian Ayesha Jalal of Tufts University says that loss only magnified Pakistan’s sense of weakness.

AYESHA JALAL:  India is more than four times Pakistan’s size, it is a huge, huge presence and they have a very conflicted history.  I mean you are aware that there are now more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan and Pakistan has managed to lose the majority of its population in ’71, again with the help of India so those are the narratives that really cause bitterness.  Jalal says a sense of inferiority and insecurity has long driven Pakistani military policies.  Pakistan’s fear of India led it to develop nuclear weapons and it motivated Pakistan’s alliance with the United States during the Cold War.  That fear also skewed the balance of power inside Pakistan, making the military strong and civilian institutions weak.  Shuja Nawaz is the author of “Crossed Swords –Pakistan, its Army and the Wars Within.”

SHUJA NAWAZ:  This beginning at the war at the birth of Pakistan, essentially laid the seeds for the military to stat taking decisions and to get into conflict with civilian rulers who they thought were not making firm decisions or providing the kind of leadership that the country needed.

SHARP:  The Cold War also reinforced military dominance.  The United States poured money into Pakistan to ward against Soviet influence in the region.  When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, backed the Afghan Muja Hadeen in their so-called Jihad against the Soviet occupiers.  The Americans were driven by anti-Soviet worries but Pakistan, led by the Islamist general Zia-ul Haq, was still obsessed with India, according to Arif Jamal.

JAMAL:  When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Americans decided to wage a Jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, General Zia-ul Haq was very happy.  He joined the Afghan Jihad because he wanted to wage a Jihad in Kashmir.  So to convince his fellow generals and Islamists, he said that if he allied himself with the Americans, he would get the resources for preparing a Jihad in Kashmir.

SHARP:  That policy of promoting Jihad as a tool of foreign policy came back to bite Pakistan when the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal.  Again, Shuja Nawaz.

SHUJA NAWAZ:  The United States left in a precipitated matter.  Pakistan was not prepared for the after effects.  It inherited what was later to be called the Kaleshnikov culture.  Lots of weapons, people ready to use them and a growing number of international Jihadists who had gathered to fight the good fight using Pakistan as a base and who made it their home.  This is where Al Qaeda was born, eventually and Pakistan is now reaping that whirlwind.

AYESHA JALAL:  We know that Al Qaeda emerged out of the war against the Soviets.

SHARP:  Again, historian Ayesha Jalal.

JALAL:  We also know that the Pakistani ISI in conjunction with the American CIA nurtured a complex web of militants who are known as Muja Hadeen, to fight the Soviets and that infrastructure survived.  It was never dismantled.  If anything it grew and became a state within a state so it really nurtured a very complex critical economy of war which it became very difficult to disassociate from.

SHARP:  And Pakistan supported the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990’s but after the attacks of 9/11, Pakistan official joined the United States in its war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.  And yet, Pakistan is selective in its targets, going after some militant groups on Pakistani soil but keeping others around for the long simmering rivalry with India.  Ayesha Jalal says if you want to solve Pakistan’s crisis, you have to understand that mentality.  Even now, as these groups attack their own government, there’s concern the military won’t go after all of them.  Jalal says the stakes are huge.

JALAL:  I think it’s a battle for Pakistan, the final battle if you like, it’s that serious.  If this battle is lost, then I’m afraid it won’t be long before the state as presently constituted will come undone.

SHARP:  For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp.

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• BBC coverage
• Jeb Sharp on the controversial US drone strikes in Pakistan

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  In Pakistan today, two alleged militants were killed in a missile attack, believed to have come from remotely operated U.S. drones.  The attack took place in one of Pakistan’s tribal areas.  It’s close to another lawless region, South Waziristan, where Pakistani forces are engaged in an offensive against the Taliban and other groups.  The Pakistani military announced today that in the past twenty four hours, government troops have killed twenty eight suspected militants.  Ahmed Rashid joins me now, he’s the author of many books about Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia and when we hear that unmanned U.S. drones have killed two suspected militants and the Pakistani military has killed twenty eight others, do you think oh, this offensive against the militants is really working or do you feel it’s just window dressing?

AHMED RASHID:  First of all, we really don’t know.  There’s no independent analysis, we only know what the military tells us.  There’s no press, no aid agencies there and not only that, but all the phone lines have been shut down.  The mobile phones have been shut down so we really don’t know but I think there’s no doubt, that I mean the last two, three weeks in this offensive in South Waziristan, the military has, it’s aiming to take three of these strategic towns where the militants are housed, where a lot of their training camps and logistic base is and where they were training suicide bombers and housing explosives. Now it seems that Leddow, which is one of these towns, has fallen after very intense street fighting and the army is now pursuing them in two other towns but the real question is winter is literally upon us and it’s very cold already there and it’s going to snow very soon and you know, is the army going to continue or is the army just going to declare victory and walk out once winter starts?

WERMAN:  So no independent confirmation of these attacks on militants.  When news like this is announced, do you think the offensive in South Waziristan starts to look more like proving to the Obama Administration that Pakistan is serious about rooting out militants or is it truly about responding to a domestic Pakistani terrorist threat?

RASHID:  Well, I think the first aim is to respond to the Pakistani domestic terrorist threat. I mean the fact is that these terrorists have attacked the army headquarters in Ravo Pindi.  They’ve killed army officers in Islamabad.  They have targeted the army and of course, civilians, some three hundred people have been killed in October alone, on account of suicide bombings carried out by these militants so I mean the army has to be seen to be responding to a growing public demand that this militancy gets wiped out.  I think that’s the first thing. T he second thing regarding the Obama Administration, certainly they you know, this has cooled down some of the doubts that the U.S. military may have had about Pakistan, but the very serious doubts still remains and that is that the Pakistan military is not touching those areas where the Afghan Taliban are based and it’s those Afghan Taliban who are crossing the border into Afghanistan and then killing NATO and American forces and that’s where the missiles are landing.  The U.S. is using drones to find missiles into North Waziristan which is where the Afghan Taliban are based and where the Pakistan army is not carrying out any operation.

WERMAN:  And why is the army not going after those Afghan Taliban?

RASHID:  Well, it’s a long story but it never has gone after the Afghan Taliban and essentially a longstanding presumption I think now by the Americans and raised by Hillary Clinton when she was in Pakistan just a few days ago was that there seems to be a nod and a wink as far as the Afghan Taliban are concerned.  They can stay where they are and they won’t get harassed by the Pakistani’s.  As long as they do their fighting against the Americans in Afghanistan.  And of course this is something that Ms. Clinton has raised that Admiral Mullen, the chairman of Joint Chiefs has raised.  It remains a very big contradiction between the Pakistani’s and the Americans.  The Pakistani’s will tell you, well our first target of the Pakistani Taliban, we’re doing what we can but this record of not touching the Afghan Taliban goes back to 2002.  The Taliban have been able to reorganize themselves in Pakistan because they are not fearing anything from the Pakistani military.

WERMAN:  Finally, Ahmed Rashid, maybe you can just tell us how important is this military offensive for Pakistan’s own stability?

RASHID:  You know, this is a very critical time. I mean you’ve got the American president Obama having to make his decisions about Afghanistan, whether to send more troops or not.  That’s something the Pakistani government and army is watching very closely.  All the regional countries are watching very closely and that’s what the Taliban are watching very closely.  The Taliban believe both in Afghanistan and to some extent in Pakistan, that they’re on the cusp of some kind of victory.  The Americans will eventually withdraw and all we have to do is just sit out the Americans and they turn the Americans in a year or two will withdraw and we just have to keep our powder dry and keep the pressure on and they will all pull out.  You know, there’s very little happening internationally which is really refuting this point of view of the Taliban.

WERMAN:  Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid.  His latest book is called “Descent into Chaos, United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.”  Ahmed Rashid, thank you for speaking with us.

RASHID:  Thank you.

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• BBC coverage
• Survival International – The movement for tribal peoples

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MARCO WERMAN:  Just to give you an idea of how far swine flu has spread, it has now reached an indigenous group deep in the Amazon.  The government of Venezuela has sealed off part of the rainforest to prevent the flu from decimating the Yanomami Indians.  A thousand members of the tribe are believed to have caught the flu, seven have died.  Survival International is a London based indigenous rights group.  Fiona Watson is research and field director.  Fiona, how is it that this isolated group was exposed to swine flu?

FIONA WATSON:  Well, we think it came in through a place called Novaka which is the place in the Yanomami territory in Venezuela which has the most contact with national society.  There’s an air strip there, there’s a Catholic mission station so people who are working with the Yanomami or visiting for whatever reason, it could be doctors, government officials, people working on health and education programs, come in and out so I think it has come in that way.

WERMAN:  And remind us who the Yanomami are.

WATSON:  They are one of the largest relatively isolated indigenous peoples living in the Amazon rainforest.  There’s about thirty two thousand in Brazil and Venezuela.  They’ve lived there for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  They live by hunting and gathering and it very much a people who are living in the forest, completely self-sufficient and came into contact with outsiders really in any great way from the fifties onwards and the Yanomami have very little immunity; many Amazonian tribes, remote tribes have very little immunity to common diseases you know, which for us don’t present too much of a problem like the common cold or flu.  They haven’t had this immunity because they’ve been so isolated.

WERMAN:  As you say the Yanomami have suffered from other epidemics that were introduced from outside their community.  How have previous epidemics come into their community and what were the consequences?

WATSON:  Well the epidemics almost invariably come in through outsiders.  I mean in the fifties when you had the border commission authorities from Brazil went up to the border area to survey the border and then missionaries came in shortly after that, there were devastating epidemics of particularly measles and then I think possibly the most devastating, certainly in terms of numbers who died were the invasions in the 1980’s where you had forty thousand gold miners invaded the Yanomami territory in Brazil and twenty percent of the Yanomami died and that was through these diseases like malaria, like measles, like flu to which they had no resistance.

WERMAN:  Can you tell us specifically what Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan government are doing right now?  I mean they’ve been quite outspoken on indigenous rights.

WATSON:  It seems to me they have acted fairly quickly.  They’ve got the doctors in there trying to contain the epidemic but I think this raises a wider question and it’s a question really for both the Brazilian and the Venezuelan governments is that there has not been, in my view, sufficient attention given to permanent healthcare in the region so that they are in place when these epidemics do happen.

WERMAN:  Isn’t there a risk though of bringing in more outsiders and creating more transmission of disease?

WATSON:  That’s always a risk but I think if you’ve got a few dedicated teams of people who speak the language, who know the Yanomami well, who are trusted by them and who, themselves are screened before they go in, I don’t think that poses a problem.

WERMAN:  Fiona, your group, Survival International, has been typically fighting for indigenous land rights.  I’m wondering, is disease a game changer now for you?  I mean these indigenous people now have a really dire fight for survival, literally, on their hands.

WATSON:  Yes, I mean, certainly the question of disease is a huge challenge and a problem and survival is working particularly on contacted Indians.  This is tribes mainly in the Amazon region, but also in the Chako Forest of Paraguay and the Andamin Islands of India where you have isolated, if not uncontacted tribes and these people have absolutely no immunity at all, even less than the Yanomami because they have been isolated for hundreds of years and this is a very, potentially very serious problem and in areas like Brazil, in parts of the western Amazon where you’ve had massive penetration of colonists, of loggers, of miners, this is becoming an increasing threat to these very small, fragile groups where you may only have, I mean I know of cases where you might only have five survivors or twenty survivors of a tribe who are literally on the run, fleeing these invaders and if there is any casual contact, then they will be exposed to diseases and we simply won’t know.  It’ll be you know, like a hidden genocide.

WERMAN:  Fiona Watson, research and field director for Survival International, speaking with us from London.  Thank you very much, indeed.

WATSON:  Thank you.

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• Laura Lynch’s story on the first breach of the Iron Curtain in 1989
• Susan Stone reports how young Germans remember East Germany
• The World’s Gerry Hadden revisits the former East German border
• The World’s Alex Gallafent on owning a piece of the Berlin Wall

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LAURA LYNCH:  Students at this downtown school attend classes in a building that sits in the middle of Hungary’s storied history, is just blocks from the banks of the Danube where you can see the majestic Buda castle and the houses of parliament.  But being surrounded by history doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing history, especially recent history.

SPEAKER:  What are you going to be doing on November ninth?  Do you know what November ninth is?  Anybody?

LYNCH:  The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall isn’t a notable date for this class of seventeen and eighteen year olds.  Their parents may talk about the events of twenty years ago, but Norbert Nag and Fahnee Kerestesh are pretty much unmoved.

NORBERT NAG:  What it means to my mother is not the same what it means to me so of course she felt it much more personally as I did because I wasn’t even born at that time.

FAHNEE KERESTESH:  I see it like any kind of other Hungarian historical event because it was important but not personally.  Emotionally, it’s nothing.

LYNCH:  Daniel Szabo says his parents describe it as a time when life was simpler and safer.

DANIEL SZABO:  They said that there were more security on the streets and the police guys were on the streets not for get money from the bad guys but for make security on the streets.

LYNCH:  The students do study Hungary’s history but the events of 1989 aren’t covered in the official curriculum.  That’s frustrated for teacher Yanas Varga.  He thinks students really don’t understand or appreciate the monumental change that took place.

YANAS VARGA:  Sometimes I have time to tell them my stories.  For example, when I was a student in the 1970’s, reading an English newspaper or reading a weekly such as the Newsweek was a serious offense.  I was summoned by the deputy headmaster and I was threatened to be thrown out of school.  I was really frightened.  They laugh at it.

LYNCH:  That apparent complacency is one of the reasons Hungary opened the so-called House of Terror a few years ago inside the former headquarters of both the Nazi and Communist era secret police.  School groups are led through exhibits detailing the horrors of life back then.  The trains that shipped thousands off to the Gulags, the harsh living conditions and toward the end, the killings.  As an elevator descends to the basement prison cells, a video screen shows a former guard dispassionately describing the execution process.  Curator Maria Schmidt complains Hungary’s transition to democracy was so quick, so relatively smooth, Communist leaders were never really forced to account for what happened.  The story was never told from the victims’ point of view.

MARIA SCHMIDT:  I wanted to win the battle against the monopoly of the left wing, narrative on Hungarian history of the mainly, particularly on the twentieth century. I think that’s the most important part of democracy that you cannot monopolize the way of people are thinking on history.

LYNCH:  But twenty years ago it seemed there was no time for reflection.  Instead, it was a headlong rush into the future and the future was capitalism.  Few sense that better than George Hemingway.  Today the American-Hungarian businessman is investing in the next generation himself, buying a soccer team and building a training ground in the suburbs of Budapest.  Hemingway has been in the game of investing here from the moment Communism ended, flying in from his home in Las Vegas to do business.

GEORGE HEMINGWAY:  When we came here in 1989, everybody thought I was making a foolish decision.  And we made a ton of money.

LAURA LYNCH:  Hemingway bought dozens of restaurants, food stores, a computer company and more.  He introduced Hungarians to Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dunkin Donuts.  But a few years ago, the economy started to stumble.  Government debt soared.  Hemingway saw it happen and got rid of half of his portfolio.

GEORGE HEMINGWAY:  The government was spending, spending and spending without any idea where the country, where it was taking the country.  Even what they were spending, they were spending badly and Hungary became a basket case.

LYNCH:  The global financial crisis made matters worse.  Last year, Hungary had to turn to the World Bank, IMF and EU for a twenty five billion dollar bailout.  There are new austerity measures in place.  Hemingway thinks Hungarians still haven’t come to terms with the sometimes harsh realities of the free marketplace.

HEMINGWAY:  Yes they won freedom and yes they want to make money and yes they want capitalism as much as they understand it, but they also want free healthcare, they want free schools, they want free universities, they want to go to the mayor and get some money if they don’t have it.

LYNCH:  It’s a combustible mix for a country still rising from the ashes of its Communist past.  The disappointment has led to deep political divisions and as in other former Eastern Bloc nations, a rise in popularity for extreme right wing groups.  Historian Attila Pok finds the shift disturbing.

ATTILA POK:  For the great euphoria of ten years ago totally vanished and people who have no option, find these black and white answers appealing.

LYNCH:  High school student Norbert Nag says he knows people who miss the stability that came with Communism and he kind of understands it.

NORBERT NAG:  You don’t want to know my opinion.

LYNCH:  I do, go ahead and share.

NAG:  No, it’s just a childish opinion, you know.  Dictatorship maybe because no, that’s not going to work, really.  It’s just a joke, a childish joke.

LYNCH:  This generation may not know that much about what happened two decades ago, but there’s no doubt these young men and women carry the weight of the past.  The expectations of 1989 have come to land at the feet of those who will have to move forward into the country’s uncertain future.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in Budapest.

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• Night Witches radio documentary
• Night Witches Audio Slideshow
• Lucy Ash on the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent

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We also found some amazing video footage to share with you:

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  The World Health Organization today gave a mixed assessment of where things stand with the global swine flu pandemic.  On the positive side, agency officials said there’s no evidence that the virus has mutated.  That means the H1N1 vaccines slowly making their way to the public should confer good protection.  On the negative side, the virus is spreading quickly in the northern hemisphere and that spread could accelerate as winter approaches.  WHO flu expert, Keiji Fukuda.

KEIJI FUKUDA:  We remain quite concerned about the patterns that we are seeing, particularly again because a sizeable number of people do develop serious complications and death.

WERMAN:  Nations continue to take new measures to deal with the pandemic.  Today, Norway made the flu medicines, Tamiflu and Relenza available without a prescription.  Russia has ordered its border guards to wear face masks and rubber gloves.  In a few minutes, we’ll hear how Venezuela is trying to protect a remote Amazonian tribe, but first we go to Ukraine.  The Eastern European country has responded aggressively to swine flu but as Brigid McCarthy reports, that response may say more about Ukraine’s politics and culture than about the nature of the epidemic there.

BRIGID MCCARTHY:  The government of Ukraine has imposed some of the Draconian measures of any country in response to the swine flu.  Prime Minster Yulia Tymoshenko has closed all schools for three weeks and banned public gatherings.  This after the country’s health minister announced an unusual spike in acute respiratory illnesses in Western Ukraine. People across the country have emptied pharmacies of pills, vitamins and surgical masks.  When the country ran out of masks, Prime Minister Tymoshenko urged people to make their own out of gauze bandages.  Ukranians have also been stocking up on garlic and vodka.  Sergei Lyemets, a reporter for Ukrainska Pravda, says people are panicking.

SERGEI LYEMETS:  Fear, fear, fear.

MCCARTHY:  And their fear is being stoked by saturation media coverage.

LYEMETS:  From the TV, from newspapers, from internet.

MCCARTHY:  Especially the internet.  Rumors have been spreading faster than the virus.  Some bloggers worn people to keep their windows shut because government helicopters were spraying disinfectants.  Others warned that this was in fact something even more terrifying and lethal, pneumonic plague.  In fact, the World Health Organization said there’s no evidence Ukraine’s swine flu outbreak is especially severe so why the extreme response?  Prime Minster Tymoshenko launched her presidential campaign less than two weeks ago.  Reporter Sergei Lyemets says swine flu gave her the perfect opportunity to look decisive.  He says it’s unfortunate but if he were in her position, he too, would make every effort to portray the flu outbreak as especially dangerous.

LYEMETS:  So I could tell that I was the person who took the challenge of this horrible disease and I was the one who won the disease, won the fight.

MCCARTHY:  Even so, you might think working parents would be up in arms after the Prime Minister cancelled all schools for three weeks but not in Ukraine.  Khrystyna Pavaroznyk is a teacher at public school 92 in downtown Kiev.

KHRYSTYNA PAVAROZYNK:  We have no problems with it because the flu is very dangerous.

MCCARTHY:  And because closing schools is nothing new for Ukraine.  Almost every year government officials close schools for a week or two when there’s an outbreak of flu or other contagious diseases but three teenage girls wandering around Kiev’s mostly empty Dream Town Shopping Mall said they’ve never had school cancelled for three weeks.

SPEAKER: [RUSSIAN] they say they’re kind of afraid because you know, they think it’s a serious illness if they do catch it.  But so far, they don’t know anyone in their class or in their school who has been sick.

MCCARTHY:  Two teenage boys walked by.  One of them was clutching his three year old sister’s hand and looking morose.

SPEAKER:  [RUSSIAN] he said he’d rather be in school than have to babysit his little sister for three weeks.

MCCARTHY:  This boy wasn’t worried about the swine flu.  Neither was a college student killing time at the mall.  She was furious that her university was closed and blamed it on politics.

SPEAKER:  [RUSSIAN] because in Russia, even though there are more cases, confirmed cases of swine flu, nobody’s closing down schools everywhere because they don’t have an election coming up.

MCCARTHY:  Ukrainska Pravda reporter Sergei Lyemets says shutting down schools and offices is a sure fire way for politicians to win voters’ hearts.  He says half the population works for the government and Ukranians are, in their soul, still more Soviet than European.

LYEMETS:  They have a deep, deep memory from the times of USSR.  People here like not to work.

MCCARTHY:  But they love their soccer, which is probably why the government’s ban on all public gatherings didn’t extent to last night’s European champion’s league showdown between Kiev’s top professional team and a team from Milan.  Swine flu or no swine flu epidemic.  By the way, Milan won.  For The World, I’m Brigid McCarthy in Kiev.

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MARCO WERMAN:  President Obama will soon decide whether to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, as troops are available, if and when they’re needed.  But in the future, such a request might be more difficult to fulfill.  A new report out today shows that large numbers of young Americans are unfit for military service.  One of the main reasons for this is obesity.  Here is The World’s Katy Clark:

KATY CLARK:  According to the Centers for Disease Control, almost one in four young Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 is obese.  That’s up from one in twenty a generation ago.  Now America’s obesity crisis is no longer headline news.  What is new though is the connection that some people are making between obesity and national security.  Retired Rear Admiral, Jamie Barnett is part of a group of former military leaders who released a report today on the declined military readiness of today’s youth.

JAMIE BARNETT:  We realize that it’s unusual for retired admirals, generals and other military leaders to step on this, but we want to be unexpected messengers to talk about this as a national security matter.

CLARK:  Barnett says obesity and national security might not seem directly related but he says a world class military ten or twenty years down the road requires a more intensive focus on physical health today.

BARNETT:  We’re calling on our people to do more, know more than they ever have before and that’s going to continue into the future.  So we have to have the people who are physically fit but also mentally fit and can do the jobs that we’re asking them to do.

CLARK:  One person who’s taking a detailed look at some of these issues is Beth Bailey.  She’s author of “America’s Army – Making the All Volunteer Force.”  Bailey’s not sure if Americans’ growing waist lines can be described as a national security problem but she says there’s no question today’s pool of recruits is less fit than ever.

BETH BAILEY:  We’re not talking here about whether or not people can run six minute miles or people who have an extra ten pounds of flesh that’s going to burn off during boot camp.  Iraq and Afghanistan are extremely challenging physical environments and if we’re looking for people who can serve in the military in those climates, people have to be in reasonable physical condition.

CLARK: The physical fitness of America’s youth seems to be a recurring concern.  Bailey says that President Eisenhower raised the alarm back in the 1950’s when research showed American kids were less fit than their European counterparts.

BAILEY:  This leads eventually to the President’s conference on the fitness of American youth and to Kennedy’s initiative to have young people have physical fitness tests.

CLARK:  But Bailey says the obesity statistics today are much more worrisome than anything in the past.  She hopes the call to action announced today by these retired admirals and generals will do its part to encourage a slimming down of America’s youth.  The military recently completed a record year for recruiting but when the economy improves, military service will likely become a tougher sale and the Pentagon will need as many young people as it can get.  For The World, this is Katy Clark.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is the World.  If you live in Berlin and like stadium rock, well today could be your lucky day.  That’s Irish supergroup, U2.  The band is performing a free concert in Berlin tonight to mark twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The anniversary is Monday.  Ten thousand Berliners and tourists snapped up free tickets for the concert, organized by MTV.  U2 will play in front of the Brandenburg Gate.  It’s a famous landmark visible from different parts of the city, only it won’t be so visible tonight.  The concert organizers are blocking off the view for those without tickets and their method is time tested.  They put up a temporary twelve foot high wall.  I know, weird.  I wish I were kidding.  There will be plenty of other parties in Berlin this weekend, presumably with greater access than that one at the Brandenburg Gate.  But for many living in what was once the Eastern Bloc, this anniversary isn’t much cause for celebration.  The last twenty years brought some welcomed freedoms, but they’ve also brought hardship and uncertainty, especially for young people growing up after Communism.  The World’s Laura Lynch begins our story in a high school in the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

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.

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MARCO WERMAN: One other piece of news out of Pakistan. It’s currently Pakistan Fashion Week.  Surprising right?  Well the four day event is billed as a chance for Pakistan’s top fashion designers to show off their wares.  It’s also an opportunity for the country to promote an image that doesn’t include violence and militant extremism.  You can see that alternative image of Pakistan on the runway in Karachi.  Models strutted in short or backless dresses.  Others showed bare midriffs.  Ayesha Tammy Haq is Chief Executive of the fashion week.  She says that the event is necessary to boost business.

AYESHA TAMMY HAQ:  These people who are here, all of them employ hundreds and thousands of people so we need jobs to continue, we need that job market to grow.  You know, we kick start this economy.  Fashion is a big thing, let’s make it bigger.

WERMAN:  Pakistan’s fashion week was twice delayed over security concerns and one of the models taking part, Nadia Hussain, says she was a little scared as she got ready to take to the runway.  But Hussain says life has to go on.

NADIA HUSSAIN:  I think fashion has also made it a point that fashion will continue as well.

WERMAN:  Still, not everyone feels that way it seems. Journalists from major international fashion magazines were expected to attend, but in the end, few showed up.

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.

The thing that struck me about Panama’s music is that we know about Cuban and Puerto Rican music, but we hardly know anything about classic Panamanian pop.

This was also a total labor of love. There was a guy named Miles Cleret of Sound Way who went to Panama on vacation and wound up spending all his time going to radio stations and stores and basically taking bundles and bundles of old 45 rpm 7″ records away with him. He had help from co-compiler Roberto Ernesto Gyemant, and on the 3rd collection they were joined by Will ‘Quantic’ Holland.

Panama!3

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Panama!