Many Americans disagreed with that stance. And when a ship headed for Pakistan with military equipment and ammunition was set to stop at a US port, one group of Americans felt it was necessary to get involved.

“I was ready to risk my life there,” says 78-year-old Richard Taylor. “I just wanted to get in front of that ship.”

In July 1971, Taylor and a group of protesters used canoes and kayaks to try and block the Pakistani freighter Padma from reaching the Port of Baltimore.

The ship was coming from Canada, bound for Pakistan. It was said to be carrying military equipment and ammunition, presumably to aid the government in its war with what was then called East Pakistan.

The US had ordered an arms embargo on new shipments to Pakistan. But newspapers reported that Pakistani freighters like The Padma were still visiting US ports to load military equipment that had been purchased before the embargo.

Taylor’s flotilla of two canoes, three kayaks and a rubber raft left from Baltimore’s Broening Park. The police and Coast Guard tried to stop it. But Taylor says the group was undaunted.

“One of key parts of this was that the US government was sending military aid to the West Pakistani government that was doing the invasion,” says Taylor. “So that made it poignant. People were suffering thousands of miles away, but our government was helping that suffering to happen.”

Timmy Aziz knew that suffering first hand. He grew up in East Pakistan. He was 10 when war broke out. He now teaches environmental design here in Baltimore.

“It’s really impressive how far they would have had to have gone,” says Aziz. “They would have been way in the middle of the water and completely in harm’s way. This massive freighter and these tiny little canoes, which would easily get washed away in the wake of the ship that size.”

Forty years on, Bengalis are expressing a renewed interest in their country’s independence movement. One of them is New Yorker Arif Yousuf. He finds the canoe blockade story so fascinating that he’s making a documentary on it.

“I wanted to see if I could make a film about the history of 1971, Bangladesh’s independence war and what happened in the US and be able to put it together from the people who participated at that time,” says Yousuf.

What happened that time in July 1971 was that the US Coast Guard foiled Richard Taylor and his friends. The Padma made it into the harbor; it was eventually loaded and left. The following month, protesters expanded their actions to include any Pakistani ship trying to dock in the US, regardless of its cargo. And they enticed longshoremen at the Port of Philadelphia to join the boycott.

“The cause had a heart, had a deep heart,” says 64-year-old Elliot Gevis. “And there were tremendous atrocities that were going on.”

Today, Gevis is a pediatrician. But back in 1971, he worked the docks in Philadelphia. He learned about the war in East Pakistan and the canoe protest from flyers, and helped convince other longshoremen not to load ships. The first freighter affected was The Al-Ahmadi. Richard Taylor and other protesters again used canoes and kayaks to try and block the ship. When it ran the blockade, Gevis and other dockworkers refused to unload it.

“Not everybody was supportive of that,” Gevis recalls. “But then again, they did respect unions. And they did respect not crossing picket lines, things of that sort. But at the same time, they had to pay bills and feed families. That was a big consideration.”

When the ship pushed off, no cargo had been loaded or unloaded.

After four more months of intense protests–and picketing in front of the White House– the US government finally ended all arms exports to Pakistan. It marked the end of one of the more unusual protest movements in America’s history.

“We’ve been just humbled by people who are Bengalis saying we couldn’t have done it without this movement here,” says Phyllis Taylor, Richard’s wife.

She, too, was involved in the protests.

“Not us necessarily, but a small group of committed people giving us hope, as Dick said, in the jungles that you could make a change.”

After nine months of fighting, East Pakistanis won the war. Their prize: a country now known as Bangladesh.

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Joshua Goldstein of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about his book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.”

Goldstein says war may not be inevitable.

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Lisa Mullins: 2011 has not been a great year for Albert Einstein. This year scientists discovered particles that go faster than light. The finding could contradict Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, though it’s too early to say for sure. Then there was Einstein’s lesser known Theory of War. He said as long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable. Maybe, maybe not. Joshua Goldstein of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of Winning the War on War. He says war may not be inevitable.

Joshua Goldstein: In the big picture America’s coming off a decade of war. The rest of the world during that decade became remarkably more peaceful than in the past. And the big part of this change is that the regular national armies with all their tanks, and artillery, submarines and airplanes are not fighting against each other anywhere in the world anymore. They haven’t since the US invaded Iraq in 2003.

Mullins: What about in Afghanistan though?

Goldstein: That’s not head-to-head national armies. That’s a government with some outside help fighting against insurgents. And that’s what we have left in the world.

Mullins: Yeah, it’s still a major…right, it’s a major war with major conflict and lives lost.

Goldstein: Well, it is major, certainly if you’re in the middle of anything like that it’s just as bad as being in a world war, but on the scale of past civil wars these are actually smaller. So Afghanistan is about a tenth the size of the Vietnam War in terms of the number of people killed and the destruction that is caused. And also there are wars that have ended that we don’t notice anymore because they’re not worthy in places like Sri Lanka, Sierra Leon, Ivory Coast, they’re not all perfect, violence still goes on, but these are terrible long wars that have now wound down. And if you count the number of people killed in wars worldwide it’s about half what it was in the 1990s and a third what it was during the Cold War, no comparison to the World Wars. So the trend here is towards smaller wars, fewer wars, more localized, fewer people dying. The trend is down.

Mullins: You say the trend is down, but to what extent is this kind of a technical use of the term war because as you say, there are smaller skirmishes that are incredibly deadly and keep people from living normal lives all over the world. And we hear about them all the time.

Goldstein: If you had cancer and you said well, I still have tumors, so my treatment is failing. That’s not the right test. You want to know is your treatment causing your tumors to grow or to shrink? Our problem with war in the world, our treatments are working, the tumors are shrinking.

Mullins: If war, the number of wars, especially the big national armies fighting against each other, if the numbers are down, why are they?

Goldstein: I think there are three big reasons for it. One is that over time people have changed their views, and norms and attitudes about wars. So it used to be glorious and a test of manhood and this kind of thing. Now, we recognize war is pretty horrible and it’s a last resort. The second is that economically war used to pay because the conquest of land was how you made money. Now, you make money by trading and war doesn’t get you that. And as countries become more prosperous war has less appeal. And then the third is the United Nations and the international community. So that in a place like Libya which was facing a long term, very brutal civil war, the international community was able to come in with a consensus and end that civil war a lot quicker, prevent a mass atrocity in Benghazi and get to a more successful outcome. So there’s a learning curve where things we couldn’t have done 10 years ago with the international community now work better.

Mullins: All right, Joshua Goldstein, author of many books, including Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Thanks a lot.

Goldstein: Thanks for having me.

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.

Mnikwa Dlamini, for example, is the current chief of Hhelehhele, a rural area in the north of the country. He’s also an 88-year-old veteran of the war in Europe.

Swaziland is a small country in southern Africa. It gained its independence in 1968.

Before that it was ruled by the British, and before them the Boers. When war came to Europe, the British came knocking.

“All our life here in Swaziland was under British control,” remembers Chief Mnikwa. “It was mostly okay because the British and us had a good relationship. They at least treated us better than the Boers did.”

“We first heard in 1939 that the Germans were fighting with the British. They only said that they used to be friends with the Germans, and then after a while the Germans had started fighting them.”

As the war drew on, the then-King of Swaziland, Sobhuza, agreed to gather volunteers to fight as part of the Allied forces. In exchange, he extracted promises from the British of greater autonomy for his country in the future. But the young Mnikwa, not yet a chief, had his own reasons for signing up.

“The reason why I was eager to go to war was because there were rumors in my home that I might become the next chief,” he recalls.

“I said it’s better that I go to die. It was never in me. I said it’s better that I should go there because the way to heaven I would definitely find there.”

He didn’t want to be the chief because there would be ‘too much noise’.

So Mnikwa and a few thousand other young Swazis registered with the British authorities. They were given boots, khaki uniforms, the works.

In late 1941 Mnikwa was shipped off for training near the Suez Canal. He was soon fighting in the deserts of Libya, and then in Italy.

“[Benito] Mussolini, who was a politician, was friendly with Hitler. We then had to fight the Italians as well.”

“There were lots of bombs around. And they used to have bombs planted around in the ground, and you would touch some of them and they would go off, and people would die.”

Along the way, Mnikwa met soldiers from all parts of the world, including the United States. He remembers that they were “not people who liked to talk to other people very much. They would talk every now and then, but most of the time they kept to themselves.”

The war ended, and Mnikwa traveled back to southern Africa. He spent some time in Johannesburg, trying to avoid the inevitable. But eventually he returned to Hhelehhele to take up his responsibilities.

“I then realized that I can’t just do my own will. Clearly it was God’s wish that I should live.”

There are people who go to war out of a moral obligation, but perhaps not that many. Most sign up to pay their bills, or to pay for college. Others go because they’re told to.

Mnikwa Dlamini, the chief of Hhelehhele, a rural area in the north of Swaziland went because he didn’t want to be a chief.

Within seconds of stepping into the War Horse exhibit at London’s National Army museum, visitors are transported to the lush green fields of Devon.

The pastoral scene also features in the children’s novel and play that inspired the exhibit. “War Horse” was written by Michael Morpurgo and it opens as a horse appropriated from a Devon farm and shipped off to the front.

Morpurgo said it all began when he met a WWI veteran of a cavalry regiment in his local pub.

Morpurgo asked him what he did during the war.

“And then he said something wonderful. He said ‘I was there with ‘orses.’ And he said it like that “with ‘orses.’ And then he just started talking,” said Morpurgo.

The new exhibit traces the use of horses in war down the centuries through WWI. Curator Pip Dodd said they were critical and not just for charging into battle.

“The horse really was the motorized vehicle the helicopter and the transport ship and plane of its day. They were hugely important,” said Dodd.

There are also reminders of the grueling, often deadly conditions the animals endured even before they reached the battlefield.

One room recreates a ship’s hold, complete with creaking boards. Dodd said the demand for horses in WWI was enormous.

“In the first 12 days the British army bought up about 120 thousand British horses from farms and from bus companies but there weren’t enough or good enough to be army horses so they had to look further afield, “ he said.

They looked to the United States.

More than three hundred thousand horses and mules were sent over on transport ships, many dying en route. Those that made it were then shipped out again and into battle.

The video opening the exhibit recreates moments of horror and violence.

Morpurgo heard about it firsthand from the veteran he met., but what really touched him was the former soldier’s intense bond with the horse who carried him to the front lines when he was all of 17 years of age.

“He was terrified. They were all terrified, he said. All his pals were terrified but they couldn’t talk about it. They absolutely could not talk about it. And he must not talk about it, he knew that. So the only person he could talk to and he used the word person, the only person (he) could talk to was (his) horse. And (he) would go to the horse lines at night when (he) was feeding them, and (he) would stand by them and I’d stroke the neck and (he) would whisper into his ear and (he) would tell him stuff I could never even mention to my pals because we were all going through it anyway,” Morpurgo recounted.

The author’s book and play, like the exhibit focus on the warriors who never chose to go into battle and never knew what was was coming.

Of the 1.2 million horses used by the army, nearly half died. For Morpurgo, it is a vivid reminder of the cost of war.

“Roughly the same number of men and horses died in the First World War. So they did this thing together. It was extraordinary courage, loyalty, horror all together. But they didn’t do it apart they were supporting each other,” he said.

Curator Pip Dodd admitted to being moved by what he discovered during his research.

“Of course the vast majority of horses that served are now completely unknown and unknowable and anonymous and there were millions of them and so somehow we wanted to pay our respects really so we came up with the idea of this mirror box,” he said.

The box, surrounded by mirrors, is filled with dozens of cutout horses. The mirrors reflect off each other, multiplying the number into infinity.

Of all the horses used in war, only a handful returned to Britain. The rest were sold over seas as as riding horses, work horses or for their meat. Morpurgo finds that almost unforgivable.

For him, the horses of war are heroes just as much as the soldiers who relied on them.

Steven Spielberg plans to release a film version of War Horse in December.

He ordered a complete withdrawal from the country, nearly nine years after the invasion under President George W Bush.

About 39,000 US troops remain in Iraq, down from a peak of 165,000 in 2008.

The US and Iraq were in “full agreement” on how to move forward, Mr Obama said, adding: “The US will leave Iraq with its head held high.”

Before the speech the White House said: “This will allow us to say definitively that the Iraq war is over,” and said the US and Iraq would work as two sovereign nations.

Anchor Lisa Mullins discusses the announcement with former New York Times Baghdad bureau chief John Burns.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. President Barack Obama today announced that all US troops in Iraq will leave the country by the end of this year. The president made the announcement after speaking through video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. Mr. Obama left open the possibility of future US military help for Iraq, but he made clear that he’s set on plans to pull American troops out of Iraq completely by the end of December.

Barack Obama: After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over. Over the next two months, our troops in Iraq, tens of thousands of them, will pack up their gear and board convoys for the journey home. The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.

Mullins: President Obama speaking earlier today. John Burns has spent over twenty years covering Iraq. He’s the former New York Times Bureau Chief in Bhagdad. He’s now in London. John, about President Obama’s announcement today, how do you look back on all that’s transpired since 2003 and how are you hearing this announcement?

John Burns: Well it’s a momentous occasion of course. An occasion which America has longed for, I think, in it’s great majority. It’s fought, of course, with danger and complications, not the least of which is getting the troops out.

Mullins: Maybe talk, John, as well about the enterprise itself. When we look at how many American troops alone, I think it’s about a million troops have passed through Iraq since 2003. A forty thousand remain. We’re talking about more than four thousand at least US troops that died in Iraq. What are we left with right now as President Obama makes this announcement of the final withdrawal?

Burns: Well, it struck me that the President did leave the door open in his remarks by talking, saying that they would be continuing discussions about the training program and that suggests that there might be some residual presence. Not, obviously, the three to five thousand troops that have been in discussion and not combat troops and it seems to me that Iraq will enter into a new phase of great danger when the last American troops go because, in effect, those diminishing number of US troops, and they have been out of major combat operations now for some time, were the tripwire. They were the guarantee against real political mayhem in Iraq. Nothing political has been resolved in Iraq. Let’s remember that. The fissures which bedeviled the American occupation from the beginning have never been resolved. Your listeners will be very familiar what the, with what those are. Sectarian, political, ideological, you name it. It’s a very fractured society. It hasn’t mended and there is a grave danger that Iraq could slide back into the sort of situation that we saw in 2005, in 2006 when Iraq, as you know, was plummeting towards an all-out civil war. We may hope that the Iraqis have learned that the lessons of that time and will not wish to return to it. The vast majority of them don’t, but there are some very sinister characters on the Iraqi political scene. Not the least of them is Muqtada al-Sadr, the very man who has made it impossible for the present Iraqi government to make an arrangement with Washington to keep a residual troop presence there. So I think that we have to be alert to the possibility, not perhaps immediate, but certainly within a matter of months of the political center in Iraq beginning to disintegrate.

Mullins: John Burns, former New York Times Bureau Chief in Baghdad. He’s now in London. Nice to speak with you.

Burns: It’s a pleasure.

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.

Hers is a life story that in many ways mirrors the history of Afghanistan over the last three decades. Now she is embracing a new dream for herself and her country. Koofi wants to become the next president.

Koofi’s story, the story of a life lived on the edge of death in Afghanistan, begins with a letter written to her two daughters.

Dear Shurha and Shahrazad,

Today, I am going on political business to Faizabad and Darwaz. I hope I will come back soon and see you again but I have to tell you I may not. There have been threats to kill me on this trip. Maybe this time these people will be successful.

Koofi’s letter is included in her new memoir. The words are touching, intimate and frightening. It reflects the threats, assassination attempts and danger she has faced throughout her life, most recently from Taliban fighters.

Koofi and her daughters live in a house just off a busy road in Kabul that is choked with traffic day and night.

Koofi with her daughters; Shuhra on the left and Shaharazad on the right. (Photo: Laura Lynch)

It is a tense time in Kabul. A senior politician was recently assassinated and when Koofi greeted me, she looked visibly fatigued. She shared a dream she had the night before.

“I couldn’t sleep the whole night and I had different kinds of dreams,” she said. “I believe in dreams. So I dreamed that I could not see. I’m struggling to see.”

Struggling could be a word that defines Koofi’s existence.

As a newborn, the 19th of 23 children in the household, her mother left her out in the sun to die.

Koofi survived that and the trials and violence that followed. In the rugged terrain of the northern province where she grew up, she watched her father beat her mother.

She knew from an early age that politics was a dangerous game.

Her father, a member of the Soviet backed parliament was killed by mujahedeen warriors before she turned four. She also lost her husband and two brothers through the years of conflict.

Now, she has become her father’s political heir.

Another excerpt from the letter

For me, now what I say that if you want to really stick to your values and don’t change on a daily basis, don’t become a political game player you have to pay a price. It means if I want to continue with what I am doing now, I need to see the sacrifice is there in one minute time, in hundred days time, I don’t know.. But it is there, I have to keep that in mind.

At a committee meeting inside the heavily fortified parliamentary compound, Koofi’s political skills were on display.

The justice minister arrived for questioning about the condition of women’s prisons, taking his place at the far end of a long conference table. As chairwoman, Koofi dominated the hearing, almost lecturing the minister. She controlled the questioning by handing other committee members written questions she wanted them to ask.

After half-an-hour the minister began banging the table with his hand, defending his attempts to overhaul prisons despite the country’s security challenges.

It is a bit of political theatre, one provoked by Koofi’s interrogation.

Koofi chairing a committee at the Afghan Parliament buildings in Kabul. (Photo: Laura Lynch)

Women’s rights activist Selay Ghaffar believes MPs, women included, are selfish when they should be selfless – it’s all about me, me, me, she said.

“All the topics of discussion in the parliament is to increase their salary to increase to give the number of bodyguards they have, to give them bulletproof cars, to give them better expense accounts, pocket money,” Ghaffar said. “This is what I am always hearing from our MPs. They are thinking of themselves, rather than what they need to do for their people.”

Koofi bristled at the accusation, saying she does not even own her own home. Displaying a flash of impatience herself, Koofi puts it down to the electorate’s inexperience.

“They expect you to get a passport for them, to get an Iranian or Pakistani visa for them. A job, a school or divorce from their husband. A high position job for their husbands or for themselves, if they are men. If they are police officers in Helmand they want to be shifted to Mazar because it’s more secure. You name it. They want you to help them financially for their marriage. Everything. It’s just such high expectations,” Koofi said.

The expectations seem even higher for a woman aspiring to the presidency, especially a woman who is raising her children alone. In fact, Koofi’s concern for her children could be the only thing that might hold her back..

“This is the only thing that makes me worry sometimes. What happens to my daughters because they don’t have a father as well. Let’s see if God wants me to be the mother of my daughters with all the things I want to do, I will. Otherwise, they will find their way,” she said. “I was three years old when my father was killed. I was 18-years-old when my mother died. We found our way. So my daughters will find their way as well.”

As far as the children are concerned, their mother’s ambitions are cause for both pride and worry.

Twelve-year-old Shaharazad spends time almost everyday working on her mother’s Facebook campaign page. Eleven-year-old Shuhra supports her mother’s political aspirations and admits she too would like to be president of Afghanistan one day.

Though they lost their father at a young age, they have enjoyed lives of relative peace and privilege. Still, it is easy for Shahrazad to summon the memory of the day her mother left that letter.

Koofi sits beneath a picture that shows her with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. (Photo: Laura Lynch)

In many ways, Koofi embodies the Afghan experience of the last decade, of the ways the country has and hasn’t changed.

She plans to run for president, but sometimes still wears the head to toe burka she hates for disguise and protection. Her life is under threat, but she says she worries more about rumors (some have suggested, wrongly, that she goes bare headed outside the country ) that could harm her reputation.

The life Koofi wants for her country, for her daughters, still seems a distant dream.

Another excerpt from the letter

Be brave, don’t be afraid of anything in life. All of us human beings will die one day. Maybe today is the day I will die. But if I do, please know it was for a purpose. Don’t die without achieving something. Take pride in trying to help people and in trying to make our country and our world a better place. I kiss you both. I love you both. Your mother.

But the exploitation of those minerals drives much of the violence that plagues the African nation.

In Eastern Congo, the ongoing conflict has included widespread sexual violence.

The details of the attacks are often gruesome: women being brutally raped, beaten and sometimes killed in front of their own children.

We know these horrific details because of people like Chouchou Namegabe.

Namegabe is a Congolese journalist who started a radio talk show in 2001 to air the testimonies of rape survivors

She is also the founder and director of the South Kivu Association of Women Journalists. The group trains Congolese women to report on connection between mass rape and resource extraction.

Now, the issue of mineral extraction and mass rape has reached American College campuses and students want to know what they can do to help the crisis in Congo.

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Namegabe, who is in the US to deliver keynote address at a conference on the subject at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. The Democratic Republic of Congo is blessed with mineral riches. But the exploitation of those minerals drives a lot of the violence that plagues the African nation. In Eastern Congo, the ongoing conflict has included widespread sexual violence. Details of the attacks are often gruesome. Women are brutally raped, beaten, and sometimes killed in front of their children. We know these horrific details because of people like Chouchou Namegabe. She’s a Congolese journalist, who in 2001, started a radio talk show to air the testimony of rape survivors. Namegabe is the founder and director of the South Kivu Association of Women Journalists. The group trains Congolese women to report on the connection between mass rape and resource extraction. Namegabe is in the US now to deliver the keynote address on the subject at a conference on the subject at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. She says the situation for women in Eastern Congo is not improving.

CHOUCHOU NAMEGABE: Every day there are attacks of militias in rural areas. Even now, civilians are copying.

MULLINS: The civilians are copying the militias who are raping.

NAMEGABE: Yes, they are copying.

MULLINS: Why?

NAMEGABE: Because there is impunity. They are not punished.

MULLINS: Now tell us the link between the extraction of minerals in this part of Congo and mass rape, what is the connection?

NAMEGABE: Where there is the mines, there are communities which live there. But it’s not easy for them to exploit it with the presence of the communities. That’s why they use their weapons and sexual violences to intimidate the population to move from places where there are mines. Because they know that the woman is the heart of the community, so they fight on her body, by using rape.

MULLINS: The women, as you say, are the heart of the community. And so when something happens to them, the community disassembles, and people move out?

NAMEGABE: Yes.

MULLINS: Now, you are going to be speaking this weekend. This is the reason that you’re in Massachusetts now, at the Clark University Conference, about the link, even from Eastern Congo and what you’re talking about, to what all of us basically use on a daily basis, and that is a cell phone, a laptop computer. Anything that happens to use some of these minerals in order to function. Why is it so hard for countries, for instance the United States, to get to the heart of this, and make sure that we know exactly where these minerals are coming from? Why is it hard?

NAMEGABE: It’s hard because the mineral resources which are exploited in the eastern part of Congo, they go out through neighbors’ countries. It means that they are not declared that they are coming from the eastern part of Congo. They are going through Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda.

MULLINS: I see, so it looks like the minerals are coming from there, from Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, instead of from Congo.

NAMEGABE: Yeah, instead of Congo. That is why it is difficult.

MULLINS: And then that leaves in the mining areas, it still leaves the militias. Chouchou, you have put the voices of some of these rape victims on the air on your radio program. Let me just ask you why this entire issue, not just the rape of women, but the whole issue around conflict minerals, and the consequences of that, is so much a part of you and what you do. How come?

NAMEGABE: The issue is important for me because it’s touching the right of men, the right of women. And I feel concerned because I’m a woman too. And also I’m a journalist. I saw that I couldn’t do anything. I don’t have guns to fight against it, but I’ve got my microphone, to use it, to fight against the rape and sexual violence. That’s why we give the microphone to victims, to tell their stories. Because somewhere it’s the first way to heal their internal wound, to talk about it, to make it known, to call for actions, because we want it to end. It’s really a big crime.

MULLINS: These things are very difficult to hear, but tell us what your listeners in Congo have heard, some of these testimonies.

NAMEGABE: There is another woman who were kidnapped with her five children. She was brought in the forest, and every day, she was raped in front of her children. And when she was hungry, they killed her child, and they forced her to eat the flesh of her child. Every day, which practices they killed one of her children. And she was forced to eat the flesh of her children. She was asking to be killed, but they refused. They say we can’t give you such a good death.

MULLINS: Can you comprehend why, when these things are done, they are done with the amount of intentional brutality like that, why?

NAMAGABE: We understood that it’s a plan, it’s a tactic. For them it’s a message that they send to the community.

MULLINS: Chouchou Namegabe is a Congolese journalist. She’s been reporting on mass rape in Eastern Congo for more than a decade. She’s going to be speaking this weekend at Clark University, at a conference on gender violence and the extraction of minerals in Eastern Congo. Clark is in Worcester, Massachusetts. Chouchou, thank you.

NAMEGABE: Thank you.

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Lisa Mullins: I am Lisa Mullins and this is The World. The Taliban militants responsible for shooting down a U.S. helicopter in Afghanistan have now been killed themselves. U.S. officials say that the militants were targeted with an airstrike. The loss of that helicopter was a significant blow to the U.S. in Afghanistan. Thirty-eight American and Afghan forces were killed including several elite Navy Seals. Freelance reporter Anna Badkhen is in the Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. She says the helicopter incident made an impression on people there.

Anna Badkhen: People in Mazar-e-Sharif who watched the news on TV, they will say, “Have you heard about the helicopter?” And then they will click their tongues and then they will say, “Things are getting worse and worse every day.” People in Mazar-e-Sharif are very concerned because Mazar-e-Sharif is one of the few places in Afghanistan that actually has benefitted from the invasion and from some aid money that, sort of, sifted through many, many pockets before it came here. So, fear that people will lose say, internet cafes or TV, or large weddings with music; people in the city have things to lose. People in the villages mostly have not heard of the crash. Actually, I was here a few days after Osama Bin Laden was killed, and people in the villages were saying, “Who?” They had never heard of Osama Bin Laden, because to them it is completely irrelevant.

Mullins: Anna, you were in one particular village – it’s a desert area north of Mazar-e-Sharif where you are right now – and you saw evidence of the Taliban moving in. Tell us what happened on one particular evening?

Badkhen: The Taliban fighters on motorcycles arrived in Karaghuzhlah which is a village of about 2,500 people, mostly apricot and almond farmers in north of Mazar-e-Sharif. They arrived at night. They walked into a mosque and they delivered two identical letters demanding zakat, which is basically a 10% religious tax that would finance their holy war against the occupation and against the Karzai government. Then they returned a few days later and fired rockets at a police checkpoint in Karaghuzhlah to reinforce their message, and then they left. And then the police pulled out, basically leaving this village in a state of, sort of a dark limbo. So, people who lived in the village but worked for the government, or in police, or worked with foreign organizations, they stopped coming home at nights. People who remained in the village stopped going out at night because they are afraid again of being caught by the Taliban.

Mullins: What happened in this one community, how much is that really being replicated elsewhere?

Badkhen: I believe that this is a paradigm for this latest situation of war that is being scrawled over the [??] of woe that Afghanistan, Northern Afghanistan particularly, is. It seems to be a pattern. People I’ve spoken to in other villages basically tell me the same story or a very similar story; that the Taliban arrived and claimed dominion over a village and then left. But nobody is quite sure how far they went and people aren’t sure when they will return next time. Maybe they come back every night. Maybe they’ve been back 4 or 5 times. Nobody has seen them, or if somebody has seen them… You know, because they come in at night and people are afraid to go out at night, it’s very hard to grasp the level of Taliban presence.

Mullins: That’s Anna Badkhen in Afghanistan for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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.

Combat men and women carry cameras to document the war (Photos: Jake Warga)

By Jake Warga
(Excerpt from Jake Warga’s interview with Photojournalism Chief Joseph Kane)

“…real borderline on the exposure here, it’s almost overblown, we still have some detail, but be careful.”

“My name is MCC, that’s Mass Communication specialist Chief Joseph Kane, I’m the photojournalism chief for combat camera Pacific.”

“We missed the exposure, and when you’ve blown details out you’re not going to get them back.”

A major component in current conflicts is the war over information, and combat cameramen are in the front lines. They document battles for the historical archives, every image going into the pentagon’s library

“The bulk of our imagery doesn’t get seen until maybe fifty years when it’s declassified or whatever.”

But they also shoot for field strategy review and press releases. Some photos even end-up on Facebook to keep family and friends back home up to date. The military learned early on the power of the photo, that the camera can be a weapon:

“The Vietnam thing and how a piece of information or some imagery can turn the public sentiment, so it is an information war. I think the leaders understand that now …which is why this unit has so many missions now, that basically every six months we’re turning around, going back out the door.”

“What’s your primary mission? Someone tell me? Your primary mission is to bring back imagery. They only hire us to go out on these jobs because we know how to use a camera not because we’re good at weapons, the weapons just enable us to be there and to integrate.”

(weapons sounds) “Give me a thumbs up, you guys good to go”

But they are good at weapons, very good, and much of their training involves taking turns between weapon proficiency and photographing. In this exercise, soldiers shoot at targets inside a mock village with both their rifles and Nikons, we’re all wearing earplugs. The cardboard image of a gun-pointing terrorist hiding in one room did not survive the mock raid.

“I’ve been deployed to Iraq twice. There are some disturbing images, but I don’t know that I necessarily don’t want to remember them. I can do without some of the bloody gory things that come back, where maybe something happened, I don’t try to recall those very much even though some of them do stick there. Whether it’s our guys or their guys, to see human beings, human bodies is always difficult.

How do I live with the fact that I’m out there taking pictures, and this is what I’m risking my life for essentially, what is the importance of me being there? I think everybody probably agrees that we don’t want, we don’t want war, but… it keeps happening, and as long as it keeps happening it’s important that we have people who are going to document that. There’s certainly no magic button that I have access to that can stop the cycle.”

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That’s the million dollar question right. I think as a commander and having seen the human sacrifice, you know I love my guys and I think that’s the ultimate question you know is what I saw my friends endure, the kind of horrific things that I saw, the people who were caught in between, you know, I don’t know. I think that’s why it still bothers me so much. I think that loss is often the most powerful emotion because it’s something that you always have to deal with. Time never completely closes that wound, because there’s nothing to go back to. I hope, I hope that the legacy we leave behind, that we’ve been a force for good, you know and I tell my guys all the time, what you guys did, hunting high value targets, taking down some of these car bomb networks, with what we had control over, we did good.

Strategically, that’s not my question. I’m obviously very invested in it but not of my own doing or that of my guys. I think a large reason why Americans support soldiers nowadays days is because they recognize we’re public servants. We swore to the constitution and we go where we’re ordered to go and then carry ourselves with the morality our country expects of us so that we acquit ourselves with honor. I can say we did that. Can I say it was worth it? You know, no, I certainly have, I certainly have strong feelings. We’ll see, and ultimately it’s up to time to tell whether or not the impact that we had in Iraq was in the national interest of the United States and was worth the sacrifice of the men and women and some of the Iraqis that were caught in the middle that helped us. But I can’t answer that question.

“There’s a friendly atmosphere in Liberia”

For our tour, Korkollie took me to a few historic buildings and museums. Then he took me shopping at a local market. It was hot and sweaty… Filled with commotion and interesting stuff.

“This is cassava snake.
That’s’ a snake?
Yea, that’s a snake.
So you eat that?
No you boil it…”

The snake is a cure for jaundice. The snake, the grilled monkeys, it was a bit off-putting, but, the shopping trip was horribly interesting. Our walking tour progressed to Westpoint. It’s one of the worst slums in West Africa. Korkollie asked if I wanted to see it. I said, take me where you’d normally take a tourist.

Selling grilled monkeys, market in Monrovia

“For the day, I can guarantee you 100 percent. There is nothing that is going to harm you during the day.”

Piles of trash were everywhere. The back alleys reeked of urine. And worse. War amputees hobbled around on crutches: It felt post-apocalyptic, more Mad Max than a nation’s capital. But like a Mad Max film, it was something I won’t soon forget. Though I kept wondering: Who really wants to spend their vacations seeing this?

“It’s definitely for someone that’s a little… not your average tourist, a little on the edge and kind of wants to get out there.”

That’s Seanan Denizot, the co-owner of Wow Liberia tours. She’s an American ex-pat who moved to Liberia for a little adventure herself. Denizot says, look, Liberia isn’t Hawaii, and that’s kinda the point. She says people who book her tours know that.

“They’ve tend to already traveled around Africa a lot and have maybe missed out on West Africa cause over the last 20 years, this area, it hasn’t been easy to access it. And now it’s their chance to see what’s going on. They don’t just want to see the kind of safari life that you can get in any safe African country. They really want to see something that other people haven’t really been able to experience firsthand.”

Nana's Lodge in Robertsport

Denizot admits that opening a tour company in Liberia may be premature. Business is slow. Some months they’ll only book one tour. But Denizot sees possibility getting in on the ground floor. Trendy new restaurants and small resorts are slowly popping up. And she says the natural attractions almost sell themselves.

Robertsport is – or was – the nation’s prime beach destination. There used to be a luxury hotel here, but it was destroyed during the war. Today, you can rent a cabin right on the beach. It’s like camping outside… with a big, comfortable bed protected by a tent canvas.
The place was pretty much deserted the weekend I went. Tourists haven’t really caught on yet and Liberians don’t take beach vacations.

“I have never played in the ocean throughout my whole life. Never. (I’m) Very afraid of the ocean.”

That’s 44-year old Liberian Edward Forday. He says people here are afraid of the strong current and undertow. And then there’s the negees, people who live under the water and perform witchcraft.

“The negees… Some people will say they don’t believe it. But you that live in Africa and you see what they can do. Sometimes they confess it. That yes, I did this, and I took this person under the water and this and that and all that. You believe it. Yea.”

The new RLJ Kendeja Resort in Monrovia

If you’re not intimidated by the negees, you’ve got a lot of ocean to enjoy.

“To surf by yourself, with you and your friends, or you and your brother, people spend their whole lives dreaming about doing. And to be able to come here and be able to do it by yourself is pretty special.”

On the beach, I met 25-year-old Australian Andrew James. James and his brother were spending close to a year traveling around Africa with their surfboards, hanging out and filming a documentary about the African surf. In Robertsport, they were camping on the beach, eating food from tin cans and buying the day’s catch from local fishermen. Of all the places he’s surfed, James gave Liberia the highest marks.

Surfers in Robertsport

“It’s not like being in Morocco or being in Indonesia where it’s just hundreds of surfers. And that, when it’s really developed brings its own culture. There’s big nightlife, and there’s heaps of drugs and alcohol and that sort of stuff. Whereas here, it’s just beginning, it’s so different.”

But the solitude can also be un-nerving. I went for a swim in Robertsport. No lifeguards, no other tourists, no friends nearby – my mind started to wander.

“The negees… Sometimes they confess it. That yes, I did this, and I took this person under the water…”

I don’t believe in underwater spirits, but still, I cut my swim short and got back on land. Hey, why take a risk? Negees aside, this could be a spectacular vacation spot. Problem is the Liberian government isn’t terribly interested in promoting the country. At least not yet.
After a 14-year civil war, Liberia is essentially rebuilding itself from scratch. Tourism just isn’t a top priority. Scholastica Doe heads Liberia’s Tourism office.

“We are not in that much of a rush as some of our private sector partners. For them, it’s a lucrative business; they see it booming in other countries in the sub region. And they feel that it can happen overnight once we have electricity, we have water, and the roads are fixed and everything.”

Many of Liberia’s roads look like they’ve been bombed out because, well, they have been bombed out. There’s almost no public electricity service. The country doesn’t even have a single working traffic light.

Typical pothole in Monrovia

Still, Liberian tourism is getting some glowing reviews in newspapers like the New York Times. So for the plucky traveler who wants a beach all to himself, and can brave the underwater spirits, it might be best to get there while the getting is good.

For the World, I’m Jason Margolis, Robertsport, Liberia.

Photos: Jason Margolis

More information:
Liberia Travel and Life Magazine
Nana’s Lodge in Robertsport
Wow Liberia Tourism
Kendeja Resort and Villa in Monrovia
“Thirty Thousand,” African surf documentary

• Ronald Arkin’s homepage
• BBC: Can battlefield robots take the place of soldiers?
• BBC: Robots of the future unveiled

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.

KATY CLARK:  Technology plays a key role in any U.S. military operation, including the current one in Afghanistan.  But by and large machines deployed in the battlefield still rely on humans to make decisions for them.  Now, though, researchers are working to develop software that allows military robots to make their own decision.  Ronald Arkin is a professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech.  He’s just completed a three year research project for the Army looking into the use of ethical battlefield robots.  We’ve all heard of unmanned aircraft being piloted by remote control from thousands of miles away.  Professor Arkin, how else are robots being used on the battlefield right now?

RONALD ARKIN:  Well Katy they’re being used in a variety of different ways.  There are certainly ground robots if you saw The Hurt Locker, for example, you’ve seen explosive ordnance disposal robots made by companies such as iRobot.  There are surface vehicles being developed by the Navy.  There are also undersea vehicles in addition to aerial vehicles.  So the unmanned spectrum for potential autonomy, not quite autonomous yet, goes from underwater, to the surface of the water, to the land and up into the air.

CLARK: But existing robots that you’re describing are still controlled by humans at least somewhere.  How could people be taken out of the loop?  Tell us a little bit about your work to get to this point.

ARKIN: Right, well it’s not exactly people being taken completely out of the loop.  In a military scenario there’s always someone in the loop.  We are now finding that autonomous systems, the decision-making is being pushed further and further forward to the so-called tip of the spear due to the ever-increasing tempo of the battlefield, the speed at which soldiers have to respond due to the increase in weapon capabilities.  For that particular reason, we find that autonomy, the ability to make decisions, even the ability to make a decision what to target and when to actually release the weaponry, is going to become more and more prevalent.

CLARK: So it all comes down to programming and you’re looking at moral, legal decisions being distilled into a computer algorithm?  If so, how does that actually work?

ARKIN: Right.  Well, it’s actually not hard to tell a robot to pull a trigger on a gun.  That’s the easy part.  The hard part is to tell the robot to pull a trigger on a gun that it has adequately and effectively discriminated its target, that it has made sure that the people that have been involved in the tasking of this system are completely responsible for its particular use; that it is acting with proportionality, in other words choosing the right weapons systems that match the particular situation at hand.  These are the sorts of things that at least I am trying to design into these systems.

CLARK: And I know that you’re also looking beyond just the moral and the ethical elements; you’re looking at putting emotions into these war-fighting robots too, aren’t you?

ARKIN: Where are emotions appropriate in the battlefield?  As I’ve written, anger and hatred and many of the emotions are actually ill-advised to build into these systems because they actually cloud the judgment of even human war fighters under those circumstances.  But there is a special set of what’s so-called “secondary emotions”, the moral emotions, which includes things like empathy and compassion and shame and guilt.

CLARK: Guilt.

ARKIN: Exactly guilt.  And guilt is the one that we have chosen.  Can these systems do better?  Not necessarily perfectly.  But if they can do better than humans can do in the battlefield, what that translates into, and this always sounds strange, is the saving of human life.  It results in the saving of non-combatant casualties and a reduction in non-combatant collateral damage.  That’s what this research is about.

CLARK: So what you’re saying basically is, we’re at the point now where we can build these ethical war fighting robots, but the question remains should we?

ARKIN: I would not quite go that far.  I would say that we have developed a proof of concept in our research that points the way to the potential creation of these systems.  The whole point is to lead to international discussions regarding the appropriate use of this technology.  We need to make decisions before it happens, proactively, not reactively.

CLARK: Ronald Arkin is a professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech.  He’s also the author of Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots.  Thank you so much.

ARKIN: It was my pleasure.  Thank you Katy.

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.

Adam Jacot de Boinod is a seeker of obscure but colorful English expressions. It all began when he was working for a BBC program called QI with Stephen Fry. He was asked to find interesting words beginning with an A. So he picked up an Albanian-English dictionary and found 27 words for moustache and 27 words for eyebrow. That research eventually spawned two books, The Meaning of Tingo and Toujours Tingo. The two books list foreign words and phrases for which there are no direct translations, and they are favorites of this podcast, especially as source material for the Eating Sideways segment. Of course, books that list words for which there are no English equivalents would seem to suggest that English has some deficiencies. And it does, but it also has more than its fair share of wonderfully inventive, if obscure, expressions. That’s where de Boinod’s new book, The Wonder of Whiffling, comes in. Read it, and you’ll know whether you prefer to muppet shuffle or dwile flunk. You’ll know if you are a pozzy-wallah. Some of expressions are brand new, others long gone. Some are from Britain, but many hail from former colonial outposts where English is re-invented with the help of local languages and customs. It’s almost impossible to choose a favorite, so I’ll pick three:

Charientism (c.1589): an insult so gracefully veiled as to seem unintended.

Bend-down plaza (Jamaican English): a row of roadside peddlers, specializing in items that are hard to get in stores, because of import restrictions.

Dulosis (Greek) : the enslavement of ants by ants.

Also in this week’s pod, the meaning of the word peace. Barack Obama is the latest public figure to tweak its definition when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and made the case for “just war”. His arguments weren’t especially new. But in making them as he collected the world’s foremost peace prize, Obama forced us to question our our settled sense of what peace is. He invited us to re-imagine it — or at least as it presents itself in the 21st century — as something that might be achieved only after vanquishing those who oppose peace. Before Obama got to talking about just wars, he acknowledged that he was no Gandhi or King . But he also pointed out that those figures were not heads of state when they espoused their theories of non-violence. Did Obama’s speech echo Psalm 85 and the painting on the left, the Kiss of Justice and Peace? (photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto) Or did it re-cast peace as the bastard offspring of war and justice? After we hear from Obama in the podcast, The World’s Alex Gallafent takes us through several alternative definitions of peace.

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