Inside Indonesia - The wives of Noordin Top

The media portrays women who marry terrorists as victims, but the reality is far more complex

Sally White

In her book People Say Father's a Terrorist, Paridah Abas, the Malaysian widow of Mukhlas, details her experiences as a foreign national in Indonesia after Mukhlas was arrested for his role in the 2002 Bali bombing. She discusses the impact on their children, and her own trial for immigration offences, as well the enforced separation from her newborn son Usamah whom she had to leave behind for over a year in Indonesia.

Immediately after the bombings of the Marriot and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Mega Kuningan, Jakarta, on 17 July 2009, media attention focused on the hunt for the elusive fugitive Noordin M Top, the man believed most likely to be behind the bombings. Noordin, a Malaysian Jemaah Islamiyah member who, until his recent death, led what amounted to a breakaway faction of the organisation, attained near legendary status through his ability to evade capture and to continue to commit acts of terror. He demonstrated a unique capacity to persuade sympathisers and fellow travellers to give him shelter, to draw new recruits into his movement, and to disguise himself, moving unhindered and undetected from one community to another.

One aspect of his modus operandi in particular has been highlighted by the media: his marriages to local women. Journalists have shown great interest in who these women are and how they came to be married to such a notorious criminal, particularly as two of his wives have denied knowing who their husband was. But despite all the news reports written about Noordin’s wives, what do we actually know about any of them? And more importantly, what do their stories tell us about how women fit into the larger picture of jihadist activity in Indonesia?

Noordin’s wives

Noordin’s first marriage to an Indonesian woman took place in Johor Baru in the late 1990s. He married Siti Rahmah who he met at the Lukmanul Hakim pesantren (Islamic boarding school) founded by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) members in 1991. Siti Rahmah is the sister of Muhamad Rais, who was convicted for his role in the bombing of the Marriot Hotel in 2004. Her father, Rusdi Hamid, was reportedly also a JI member. Noordin was forced to flee to Indonesia from Malaysia following the crackdown on Islamic militants in that country in 2001-2. He took his wife with him and they settled initially in her home province of Riau. When Noordin deserted Siti Rahmah in 2002 to take up his struggle against the Indonesian state, she had two small children and was pregnant with her third.

In June 2004, Noordin married Munfiatun al Fitri, a graduate in agriculture from Brawiwijaya University in Malang. Munfiatun claims not to have known she was marrying Noordin, who she met through the husband of a former fellow student. However, she had apparently expressed the wish to marry a jihadist, and knew her husband-to-be was on the run for jihadist activities. After several months on the move with Noordin, Munfiatun was arrested and sentenced to three years prison for hiding a suspected terrorist and falsifying documents (their marriage certificate).

Then in 2005, Noordin married Arina, in a marriage arranged by her father. Arina also told police that she did not know her husband’s true identity. Arina has two small children. She was taken into custody, along with her mother and children, five days after the 17 July bombings, and elected to remain in a safe house provided by the police once it was declared that she was only a witness, and not a suspect, in the search for Noordin Top.

Despite all the news reports written about Noordin’s wives, what do we actually know about any of them?

The importance of marriage as a means of establishing, strengthening and maintaining solidarity among jihadist networks was first noted by Sidney Jones and the International Crisis Group. More specifically, we can say that Noordin’s marriages to local women brought him a number of benefits. First, in the cases of Siti Rahmah and Arina, his marriages cemented a connection to families who were sympathetic to the broader jihadist movement, if not his specific aims and methods. According to a police source interviewed by the Jakarta Globe, Noordin married Arina in order to ensure the loyalty and protection of her father Barhudin Latif, or Baridin.

Second, Noordin’s marriages provided him with the capacity to blend into local communities, although neighbours thought he was a somewhat mysterious figure in Cilacap where he lived with Arina, their two children and her parents. Even though locals knew that Baridin hated America and he had a reputation for being ‘hard’ (keras) in his religious belief and practise, it seems no-one ever questioned his new son-in-law’s identity. Noordin was able to hide behind the persona of being Arina’s husband, a religious man who travelled often. The oddity of his behaviour – the fact that he only ever arrived and left when it was dark, on a motorbike wearing a helmet, the fact that he never spoke to anyone, that no-one had ever seen his face, not even at the celebration following his marriage to Arina in 2005 – all this was accepted because he was Arina’s husband.

Finally, less tangibly, Noordin’s marriages gave him the opportunity to lead a normal life, to relax and feel himself part of a family, for short periods of time at least. Before his death in a raid by police on a house in Solo on 17 September, Noordin was on the run for over seven years; hence the psychological importance of having a comparatively safe ‘home base’, not to mention a legitimate sexual outlet.

Wives as victims?

But what of the women he married? What benefits did they gain from their relationship to Noordin Top? After all, he was the most wanted man in Indonesia, and a key figure in organising every major bombing in the country starting with the 2003 Marriot bombing. In personal terms, they gained a husband, and both Siti Rahmah and Arina have had children. But the Indonesian media has focused on the costs incurred by the women, on their suffering, and the shock and stigma they have endured since finding out that they were the wives of the man who was Indonesia’s most wanted terrorist.

Media coverage of Noordin’s wives has been largely sympathetic. Journalists have presented Arina, in particular, as a victim. She was married to a man she had not met before in a marriage arranged by her father, she never met his family, and never knew the most basic things about him. She is a victim by virtue of the fact that her husband was a terrorist when she thought she was married to a man by the name of Abdul Ade Halim involved in Islamic education in Sulawesi. She has now lost a husband and the father of her two children, not to mention her own father who is also on the run. At times Arina is also presented as a victim of the state – many (though not all) of the local reports of her arrest by security forces in Cilacap mention the number of police involved, and the fact they broke down the door of the house where she was staying with her uncle and aunt. The police, on the other hand, have been careful in their treatment of her, her two small children and her mother, obviously seeking to deflect claims that she was harshly treated by overzealous officials. She and her family have been kept in a safe house, the children have access to toys, are being looked after by a bevy of female police officers, and are doing well, the public has been told.

Noordin’s marriages gave him the opportunity to lead a normal life, to relax and feel himself part of a family, for short periods of time at least

But the media presents the other wives as victims too. Like Arina, Munfiatun, his second wife, claims not to have known who her husband was when she married him. She subsequently served three years in prison for hiding him. The spotlight was placed on Noordin’s first wife, Siti Rahmah, when the police needed to use DNA taken from her eldest son to check the identity of the man shot dead by police in a raid on a house in Temanggung, Central Java, on 7-8 August. Interviews with her father and a spokesman for the family were widely reported. Reports emphasised that Siti Rahmah had not seen her husband for many years and had received no income support from him in this time. She had to bring up the three children on her own, with the help of her family and had been subject to pressure from the Malaysian police. All of these facts made her a victim also.

Where does this sympathy for the wives of terrorists such as Noordin Top come from, and why is it so dominant in the media’s portrayal of these women? Behind this sympathetic portrayal of these women are a number of assumptions. The first is that these women have had no agency in the misfortune that has befallen them. It is assumed that the women themselves have not been involved in the process of selecting a marriage partner, but have been ‘forced’ into marriage as in the case of Arina, or duped as to their husband’s real identity, as in the case of Munfiatun. Second, the women do not know anything about their husband’s activities. And third, it is assumed that the women are telling the truth. The stories of the women are not treated with any scepticism.

Underlying these assumptions and the sympathetic portrayal is the wives’ status as victims. The willingness to ascribe victimhood to the women is in part because of what we think we know about them, and in part because of what we do not know about them. With regard to the first, the experience of women such as Arina fits with our perception of how women in fundamentalist Islamic groups are treated. The common picture of women in such circles is that they are not permitted to seek their own marriage partner but instead are passively married off without their consent. They are subjected to polygamous marriages, often without their knowledge. Further, once they are married, the wife is fully subject to her husband’s authority; she has no right to question what he does, or where he goes and must obey his commands.

The Indonesian media has focused on the costs incurred by the women, on their suffering, and the shock and stigma they have endured since finding out that they were the wives of the man who was Indonesia’s most wanted terrorist

While this common picture is an oversimplification, many of these elements appear to ring true for Arina. If Arina did not know who her husband was, she surely also did not know that he had at least two other wives, although perhaps she suspected that his long absences were connected to visiting another family back in Sulawesi.

It is reported that Arina’s father, now also a fugitive, was a strict parent, who told his wife to mind her own business when she questioned him regarding the absence of witnesses at Arina’s marriage, and the failure to meet any members of the bridegroom’s family. Such matters, he said, were the affairs of men.

Beyond victimhood

While these women surely are victims, is this the full story? This brings us to the second point; what do we actually know about any of these women, the wives of Jemaah Islamiyah members, or other jihadists? Take Arina, for example. Despite the thousands of words written about her and her marriage to Noordin Top, she herself has at no stage spoken directly to the media or been interviewed. All the information concerning her comes either from villagers where she lived in Cilacap, particularly the village head and his wife, from the police, or from her lawyers.

If it is difficult for journalists and researchers to interview male jihadists, who may be unwilling to talk to outsiders for ideological reasons, or in prison, it is even harder to gain access to their wives. Interviewing a jihadist’s wife requires the permission of her husband. And whereas terrorists such as the Bali bombers Mukhlas, Imam Samudra and others have written extensively concerning their ideology, motivations and experiences, only two women in Indonesian jihadist circles to date have written detailing theirs. Paridah Abas, the Malaysian first wife of Mukhlas, wrote a diary chronicling her experiences for a two year period following the arrest of her husband in December 2002 for participation in the Bali bombings. Fatimah Az-Zahra, the wife of Abu Jibriel also recently published a book detailing her life as the wife of a jihadist. Paridah Abas has given a couple of media interviews, and Rahayungingtyas (Ning), the wife of the fugitive Zulkarnaen, has also given one mid-length interview, but that is the sum of information publicly available on women in the Indonesian jihadist movement.

Where does this sympathy for the wives of terrorists such as Noordin Top come from, and why is it so dominant in the media’s portrayal of these women?

All of this is not to argue that Arina and other women in her situation are not victims, but rather to say that until more research has been done, we should be cautious in generalising to all women in the movement from the few well publicised cases discussed in the media, especially that of Arina. For one thing, my initial research in this field shows that although Arina and some other women that we know of were married off by their fathers without knowing the true identity and jihadist activities of their husbands’ beforehand, other women have chosen their own husbands in full knowledge that they are jihadists, and indeed, appear to have sought a husband from among jihadist circles. Munfiatun, for all her claims not to know her husband was Noordin M Top, certainly knew he was a jihadist sought by police for terrorist activities. Other women have also elected to marry jihadists, at times even when these men were in prison for their involvement in terrorist actions, and at times even with the knowledge they were already married.

Veterans of the Afghanistan war who trained in the JI military academy are said to be sought after as marriage partners, both by parents and the women themselves. Mukhlas, when he was on death row, reportedly received many offers of marriage from women wanting to attain the status of a martyr’s wife. Imam Samudra’s wife Zakiyah is now a celebrity on the preaching circuit because she is his widow. And while some women suffer greatly from polygamous marriage, particularly the first wives, others embrace it and the independence it gives them when their husbands are absent. Just as they wear the cadar, leaving only their eyes visible, as a badge of honour, emphasising their difference from those around them, they flaunt their status as a multiple wife.

Then there is the question of how much women know about their husband’s activities, and whether they are complicit in them. In general, the secret nature of jihadist organisations and their extra-legal functioning extend to the women as well; women do not know exactly what their husbands are doing because they are not allowed to know. Further, the men are often away for long periods, engaging in jihadist activities, and their wives may not know where they are. But in reality, it is hard to imagine that the wives are completely ignorant, despite the separate spheres that men and women inhabit in social interaction in fundamentalist circles.

I suspect that the extent of women’s knowledge varies greatly. There are some women who know next to nothing, either because they do not want to know, or because they are only privy to limited information. But it is also clear that there are others who know quite a bit, and indeed actively support their husbands’ activities through efforts such as fundraising, managing finances, hiding their husbands or husbands’ jihadist colleagues, and teaching their children jihadist doctrines. Some women, and Arina appears to be a case in point, may be victims, but others are not, and would certainly reject that status. Women, too, can chose to join jihadist movements for ideological reasons, through the best means available to them in Indonesia: marriage. ii

Sally White (sally.white@anu.edu.au) is a researcher at the Australian National University. Her research is part of a group project examining the origins and development of Islamic terrorist behaviour in Indonesia, funded by the Australian Research Council.

Powerful Afghan Governor Challenges President - WSJ.com

Defiant Former Warlord With Popular Backing and Armed Supporters Demands a Say for Karzai's Defeated Rival Abdullah

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan -- An escalating quarrel between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a powerful governor is stoking fears of bloodshed in one of the country's more peaceful and prosperous provinces.

During this year's presidential election, Balkh Gov. Atta Mohammad Noor was alone among Afghanistan's 34 governors -- all of whom were appointed by Mr. Karzai -- to openly back challenger Abdullah Abdullah.

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Adam Ferguson for The Wall Street Journal

Afghan National Police searched cars at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, Wednesday.

Mr. Karzai's victory last week, declared by an election commission after months of controversy, has Mr. Atta steaming, and tensions rising over the prospect that Kabul will try to reassert central authority in this province of two million people.

"Karzai is a thief of people's votes. Democracy has been buried in Afghanistan. He's not a lawful president," Mr. Atta said in an interview in his vast rococo-styled office, as turbaned supplicants lined up to petition for his help in resolving court cases and disputes with local authorities.

Mr. Karzai was declared the winner after Dr. Abdullah withdrew from the race, claiming that the election commission was biased. Dr. Abdullah has yet to concede defeat, and is seeking a broad say in policy making.

The governor, whose personal bodyguard militia lines city streets in the mornings, with rocket-propelled grenades poking out from their backpacks, hinted at what could happen if Dr. Abdullah's demands aren't met.

"We do not want to use violence to further our demands -- but the people have the right to defend themselves if democratic norms are violated," he said.

Mr. Atta didn't rule out reconciling with Mr. Karzai. He said such a deal would involve giving key ministries to the Abdullah team -- and must include Mr. Karzai embracing the challenger's agenda for a decentralized, corruption-free government.

The governor's control of this vital province, on the crossroads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization supply routes from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, serves as Dr. Abdullah's strongest card in trying to wring postelection concessions from Mr. Karzai.

But Mr. Atta's defiance of Kabul is also stoking fears that Mr. Karzai could seek to replace the province's police chief -- who is a presidential appointee but loyal to Mr. Atta -- and even fire the governor himself.

That, some say, could bring a repeat of the carnage inflicted by feuding mujahedeen commanders in the 1990s. "We have dark memories about the civil war in the past, and we fear that such days are again in our future," says S.M. Taher Roshanzada, a prominent businessman who heads the Balkh Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Mr. Atta is genuinely popular here, and any movement against him is likely to spark unrest. "All the people of Mazar will be in the streets if Atta is removed -- and some will bring the weapons with them," said Munir Ahmad, a 21-year-old student in Mazar-e-Sharif, the provincial capital and the bustling economic hub of northern Afghanistan.

Maj. Gen. Murad Ali, the regional Afghan army corps commander based in Mazar-e-Sharif, says he is seeing intelligence suggesting that some of Mr. Atta's supporters are arming themselves in expectation of a showdown.

Kabul authorities shouldn't be afraid of confronting the governor, adds the general, who is a Karzai appointee loyal to the president. "If a president cannot even replace a governor, what kind of government is this?" he wondered. "How can people trust it?"

Mazar-e-Sharif and the surrounding province of Balkh have been ruled by Mr. Atta with an iron hand since 2004. Like Dr. Abdullah, Mr. Atta -- identified as "Full-rank General" on his business cards, though he usually wears charcoal banker suits -- is a former comrade-in-arms of Ahmad Shah Masoud, a Tajik warlord assassinated by al Qaeda in 2001.

Campaign banners with portraits of Dr. Abdullah and Mr. Atta hang all over Mazar-e-Sharif, proclaiming that the two men "come from the same trench" -- marking the city as solid opposition territory.

While corrupt officials stuffed nearly a million fraudulent ballots for Mr. Karzai elsewhere in Afghanistan during the election's first round in August, here in Balkh the falsification occurred to Dr. Abdullah's advantage, according to the United Nations-led election watchdog.

Many of Mr. Karzai's supporters, especially from the ethnic Hazara and Uzbek communities, want the Afghan president to fire Balkh's mutinous governor. "He's been in power for too many years -- and if water stands still, it turns into a cesspool," says Sardar Mohammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Mr. Karzai's re-election campaign in the north and regional chief for the mostly Hazara Hezb-e-Wahdat party.

Yet such moves are likely to be discouraged by the U.S. and Western allies, diplomats say. Balkh, under Mr. Atta's rule, has been largely insulated from the Taliban insurgency that spread over the past year through other formerly peaceful provinces of northern Afghanistan.

Famous for its medieval tiled mosque where Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law is believed to be buried, Mazar-e-Sharif is a remarkably relaxed city by Afghan standards, with few of the razor wire barriers, cement blocks and Hesco fortifications that give Kabul or Kandahar the look of a military camp under siege.

Mr. Atta "is the son of this province -- he's been here during the jihad, he's been here fighting the Taliban, he knows everyone here and everyone knows him -- which is why he was able to play a big role in making this province secure," says the Balkh chief of Afghan National Police, Gen. Sardar Mohammad Sultani.

In a sign of how safe this part of Afghanistan is perceived to be, the foreign troops responsible for security in Balkh and three adjoining provinces consist of a few hundred soldiers from neutral Sweden and Finland.

The contingent's acting commander, Finnish Army Lt. Col. Tommi Härkönen, says he doesn't foresee much trouble because of Mr. Atta's fallout with Kabul. "There could be some demonstrations or crowds gathering, but we don't expect a major problem," he says.

Interviews with many Mazar-e-Sharif residents, however, suggest a more alarming picture. "People trust and respect [Atta]," said Hamid, a 25-year-old businessman who, like many Afghans, goes by one name. "But if he's gone, they will turn to backing the Taliban, as it happened in other provinces."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Saudi Forces Bomb Yemeni Rebels on Southern Border - WSJ.com

By MOHAMMED ALY SERGIE, SUMMER SAID and MARGARET COKER

RIYADH -- Saudi Arabia launched bombing raids Thursday against Yemeni rebels along the border between the two countries, marking a significant escalation in efforts to stamp out an insurgency that Yemen has struggled to contain.

The raids followed the killing of a Saudi soldier when a border patrol was fired on by "infiltrators" Wednesday, according to Saudi state media. The Saudis warned of a fierce retaliation.

Yemen began a military offensive this summer, called Operation Scorched Earth, against the rebel group, known as the Houthi. The flare-up of a five-year-old conflict has raised fears that al Qaeda members who have found refuge in Yemen could take advantage of instability on the rugged, porous border to attack Saudi Arabia.

The Houthi, which isn't connected to al Qaeda, is fighting for autonomy against what it calls an ineffectual and corrupt central Yemen government. The government calls the uprising treasonous. Members of the group, which is named for its founder, practice an offshoot of Shiite Islam, instead of the Sunni Islam that most Yemenis adhere to.

Saudi Arabia is a strong supporter of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and a major donor to its impoverished southern neighbor. A top Saudi official recently reiterated Riyadh's commitment to ensuring Yemen's internal security.

The mobilization of Saudi forces is a rare event for the country, which boasts one of the most high-tech and largest military forces in the region.

Details of the Saudi military response Thursday were difficult to confirm. The territory involved is remote and mountainous. The Saudi government declined to comment on the military action or confirm details.

Residents in the Saudi town of Jizan, about 50 miles from the Yemeni border, reported hearing squadrons of fighter planes roaring toward the border before daybreak Thursday. The sorties continued until the end of the day, said one resident, who said he also saw Saudi infantry troops moving toward the border.

Saudi forces evacuated some towns north of Yemen's border which armed infiltrators had occupied Tuesday, carried out airstrikes in Saudi territory and took control of the area, the official Saudi Press Agency reported early Friday.

Rebel leaders told the Associated Press that Saudi bombs had hit their positions well inside Yemeni territory and caused numerous civilian casualties.

The Saudi television network Al Arabiya, which has a reporter on the Saudi-Yemen border, reported that the Saudi military was bombing rebel positions along the border as well as inside Yemen. The network said at least 40 rebels had been killed. That number was impossible to verify, as were reports of civilian casualties.

A doctor working at King Fahd Hospital in Jizan said Thursday night that staff there had been told to prepare for military casualties. Hospital workers had already treated numerous Saudi soldiers who had been wounded in the incursion earlier in the week, he said.

Yemeni diplomats denied that Saudi forces had entered Yemeni airspace or moved across the border into Yemen. "The Houthi insurgents continue to disseminate false information to deflect media attention from their collapsing morals and foothold," said Mohammed Albasha, a spokesman for the Embassy of the Republic of Yemen in Washington.

During this summer's battles, both the army and the rebels accused outside capitals of interceding on their enemy's behalf. Yemen claims Iran is helping arm the rebels, and the rebels say Riyadh has helped the central government.

The rebels deny getting any help from Tehran, which has offered to mediate in the conflict. A Yemeni Interior Ministry official said that the Saudis had never intervened militarily in Yemen.

The five-year-old conflict between the Houthi rebels and the Yemeni government has uprooted more than 150,000 Yemeni civilians from their homes and added to a deteriorating security situation in the country.

Besides dealing with the rebels in the north and a separatist threat in the south, the government is struggling to contain al Qaeda militants who are establishing havens in lawless parts of the country.

Saudi officials say the Houthi insurgency distracts the Yemeni president from what they see as the more important task of disrupting those jihadi groups.

Saudis have kicked out or jailed most of their homegrown al Qaeda and are watching the Yemen border closely to keep militant cells there out of the kingdom. This summer, a Yemen-based al Qaeda militant attempted to assassinate the Saudi deputy interior minister, a member of the ruling family.

Reviews Raise Doubt on Training of Afghan Forces - NYTimes.com

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By THOM SHANKER and JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WASHINGTON — A series of internal government reviews have presented the Obama administration with a dire portrait of Afghanistan’s military and police force, bringing into serious question an ambitious goal at the heart of the evolving American war strategy — to speed up their training and send many more Afghans to the fight.

As President Obama considers his top commander’s call to rapidly double Afghanistan’s security forces, the internal reviews, written by officials directly involved in the training program or charged with keeping it on track, describe an overstretched enterprise struggling to nurse along the poorly led, largely illiterate and often corrupt Afghan forces.

In September, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, recommended increasing the Afghan Army as quickly as possible — to 134,000 in a year from the current force of more than 90,000, instead of taking two years, and perhaps eventually to 240,000. He would also expand the police force to 160,000. The acceleration is vital to General McChrystal’s overall counterinsurgency plan, which also calls for more American troops but seeks more protection against the Taliban for the Afghan population than the Pentagon could ever supply.

While General McChrystal knew of the latest assessments when he wrote his plan, their completion just as President Obama considers the general’s proposal has given fresh ammunition to doubters.

“Nothing in our experience over the last seven to eight years suggests that progress at such a rapid pace is realistic,” said Representative John F. Tierney, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on national security.

The latest reports offer new details that show just how tough it will be to meet General McChrystal’s training goal. Among the previously undisclosed conclusions: one out of every four or five men in the security forces quit each year, meaning that tens of thousands must be recruited just to maintain the status quo. The number of Afghan battalions able to fight independently actually declined in the past six months.

“The most significant challenge to rapidly expanding the Afghan National Security Forces is a lack of competent and professional leadership at all levels, and the inability to generate it rapidly,” concluded one of the reviews, a grim assessment forwarded to Washington in September from the American-led training headquarters.

Another September report, the Pentagon inspector general’s annual review of the training program, warned that any acceleration “will face major challenges. ”

A third assessment, a quarterly report sent to Congress last week, revealed that despite the formation of new army battalions, fewer of them were capable of operating independently. One reason may be that the Afghan Army’s jerry-built logistics system, a relic of the Soviet era and one of the training program’s orphans, has become a drag on the combat forces.

The problems have been a recurring topic during Mr. Obama’s policy review, broken out for separate discussion among the president and his top advisers. Accelerated training has been one of the constants among the various options before them. “We’re aware that it’s an enormous challenge,” one senior administration official said. “We feel, though, this is essential for any strategy going forward.”

Among other problems, one of the reports found, the United States military’s training headquarters simply does not have enough people to do all it is already being asked to do, a flaw that “has delayed and will continue to delay” building the Afghan forces and that unless corrected would only prolong the American presence in Afghanistan.

Construction is also falling behind, leaving recruits living in tents and making a boom in barracks-building problematic, since there are not yet enough qualified engineers. And attempts to draw Afghan businesses into the war effort have backfired. One local start-up company assigned to do basic weapons maintenance for the Afghan Army tried to use hammers and nails to hold grenade launchers together and ultimately had to be trained by an American contractor.

The Americans are sometimes stymied by delays in training that sprout unexpectedly from profound cultural differences. Costly delays in the building of barracks for new recruits, for example, are a result not just of scarce labor and materials, but also of time-consuming repairs of damage that occurs as soon as the troops move into their new quarters. Afghan soldiers reportedly ripped sinks from barrack walls and used them to wash their feet before praying, an important custom. They also built fires on barrack floors for heating and cooking, even in buildings with furnaces and kitchens, according to the reports.

Despite the obstacles, few disagree that Afghanistan’s forces must eventually become bigger and better. And senior Pentagon and military officials insist that it can happen faster, too. But it may take 10,000 to 15,000 more trainers from the United States and NATO, which have just agreed to overhaul the training program.

Even that decision required a concession to European sensitivities: the creation of a wholly new NATO training effort to operate alongside the American forces who currently dominate the training program and who typically accompany the Afghans they train into combat. Some European governments balk at that practice.

A three-star Army general, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, will soon take command of the new NATO training mission — and overhaul the American-led program. General Caldwell, a West Point classmate of General McChrystal, was previously in charge of the influential Army schools and training programs at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and he will command both the American and allied training headquarters.

“Our NATO allies have been an active participant in Afghanistan from the very beginning, but with this new NATO structure, we perhaps will see even more involvement by partner countries,” General Caldwell said in an interview.

At a meeting of defense ministers in Slovakia on Oct. 24, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates won from the alliance an agreement that the NATO training mission “will need to be fully resourced in order to build the capacity necessary.”

Pentagon planners consider NATO’s contribution essential — if overdue — given the strains on the American force as it builds up.

Because of those strains, the Pentagon has failed to provide fully qualified trainers even when they have managed to hit their own numerical goals, officials said. The Pentagon’s top generals have resisted bleeding the combat ranks to field permanent, full-time training units. But using combat forces as ad hoc trainers has proved less effective, according to Pentagon analysts.

Maj. Gen. Mike Ward, the Canadian two-star officer who will serve as General Caldwell’s deputy for the allied training mission, said in an e-mail message that NATO’s bigger role “will invite a much broader community of expertise and practice.”

One example is the brigadier general who will join them from Italy’s Carabinieri — the national police force that is a part of the military — as the American military has nothing comparable.

Today, only about one in 10 Afghan police units is capable of operating wholly independently, according to the latest report to Congress. Despite that, the police force is constantly attacked and is taking casualties at an even greater rate than the Afghan or American military, it said.

The Afghan National Police currently fields 92,000 people, but only 24,000 have actually completed formal training, according to Pentagon records. The attrition rate is 25 percent, the training command in Afghanistan reported. The situation is not much better in the army, with 19 percent attrition.

“Clearly we will have to continue generating new forces at the small-unit level,” General Caldwell said. “But leader development also has to be a priority. For us to have enduring and sustainable Afghan security forces, we have to put commensurate time and effort into the leader portion of the training effort.”

Peter Baker contributed reporting.

U.N. Says U.S. Delays Led to Aid Cuts in Somalia - NYTimes.com

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By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — United Nations officials said on Friday that the supply of critical food aid to Somalia had been interrupted and that rations to starving people needed to be cut, partly because the American government has delayed food contributions out of fears they would be diverted to terrorists.

Last month, American officials said that they had suspended millions of dollars of food aid because of concerns that Somali contractors working for the United Nations were funneling food and money to the Shabab, an Islamist insurgent group with growing ties to Al Qaeda. American officials played down the impact of the delays and said that the food shipments would resume soon, once the American government was assured that the United Nations was doing more to police the aid deliveries.

But on Friday, the World Food Program said, “the food supply line to Somalia is effectively broken.”

United Nations officials said that around 40 million pounds of American-donated food was being held up in warehouses in Mombasa, in neighboring Kenya, because American officials were not allowing aid workers to distribute it until a new set of tighter regulations was ironed out. United Nations officials said the American government was insisting on guarantees that were unrealistic in Somalia, like demanding that aid transporters not pay fees at roadblocks, which are ubiquitous and virtually unavoidable in a nation widely considered a case study in chaos.

American aid officials declined to comment on Friday.

In the drought stricken regions of central Somalia, where entire communities are on the brink of famine, elders said that many children who had been surviving off of the American donations were now dying from hunger.

“We are totally dependent on this food and people are now suffering,” said Ahmed Mahamoud Hassan, the chairman of the drought committee in Galkaiyo, central Somalia. “We have nothing else to eat.”

Somalia is one of the neediest nations in the world — and one of the most complex environments to deliver aid. Ever since the central government imploded in 1991, this parched country has lurched from one crisis to the next, the latest being a vicious civil war between a weak government and an extremist Islamist insurgency during one of the worst droughts in years.

The United States has played a huge role in saving lives by supplying about 40 percent of the $850 million annual aid budget for Somalia. But that aid is often only loosely monitored at best once it enters the country because of the dangers of working in Somalia and the fact that so much of it is a no-go zone for foreigners.

For months now, United Nations officials have been negotiating with American counterparts, trying to agree on language for new rules that would ensure, as much as possible, that American donated food goes to needy people and not to the Shabab. Last month, American officials said they were legally bound to do this, because the American government has listed the Shabab as a terrorist organization, a designation that means that aiding or abetting the Shabab is a serious crime.

There is increasing evidence, according to United Nations documents, that some of the United Nations contractors in Somalia have been stealing food and channeling the proceeds to the Shabab and other militant groups. United Nations officials are currently investigating some of their biggest contractors.

United Nations officials say that other donor nations have been skittish to contribute aid during these investigations, which is another reason for the aid shortages in Somalia. The global recession has also taken a toll on aid operations around the world.

That said, “the United States is traditionally WFP’s largest single donor,” said Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the World Food Program, “and other donors cannot make up the difference.”

He warned that the food supplies for Somalia were steadily dwindling each month and that by December, “we will completely run out.”

Partly because of the standoff over the new rules and the ensuing interruption in the food pipeline, the United Nations World Food Program recently halved the emergency rations to the more than 1 million displaced Somalis.

United Nations officials said they have been urging the American government to release at least some of the food from the warehouses in Kenya while they work out the new rules. United Nations officials said that even if they wanted to bypass the American government and ship in food from other countries, which would cost millions of dollars, it would be impossible to get it to Somalia in time and that the American sacks of grain sitting in Mombasa was the only solution to averting a widespread famine.

“The urgency of the situation has been communicated,” said one United Nations official in Nairobi, who spoke on condition of anonymity because negotiations were continuing. “Basically, USAID,” the American government’s aid agency, “has to come through, one way or the other.”

Unemployment Rate Rises to 10.2%, Offering Little Reassurance to Job Seekers - NYTimes.com

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By PETER S. GOODMAN

The American unemployment rate surged to 10.2 percent in October, its highest level in 26 years, as the economy lost another 190,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The jump into the realm of double-digit joblessness — from 9.8 percent in September — provided a sobering reminder that, despite the apparent end of the Great Recession, economic expansion has yet to translate into jobs, leaving tens of millions of people still struggling.

“The guy on the street is going to ask, ‘What recovery?’ ” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The job market is still in reverse.”

The sharp rise in unemployment seemed certain to inject fresh tension into the debate over economic policy in Washington.

Republicans point to elevated joblessness as proof that the Obama administration’s $787 billion spending package aimed at stimulating the economy had failed. Labor unions and some Democrats are calling for another round of spending to create more jobs. And all of this comes against a backdrop of continued worries about swelling federal budget deficits.

In an interview this week, Richard L. Trumka, president of the nation’s largest labor union, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., called on the government to unleash fresh spending on large-scale construction projects to put people back to work.

Absent that, “it will probably be 2012 before there starts to be real job creation,” Mr. Trumka said.

Yet despite the headline-grabbing unemployment number in the government’s snapshot of the October job market, economists sifting through the details found several reasons to take comfort.

The pace at which jobs are disappearing continued to taper off in October, the precursor to eventual growth.

Between November 2008 and April 2009 — amid the paralyzing fear that accompanied the collapse of prominent financial institutions like Lehman Brothers — the economy shed an average of 645,000 jobs a month. Between May and July, the pace dropped to an average monthly loss of 357,000 jobs. And over the last three reports, average monthly job losses have slipped to 188,000, after factoring in upward revisions to the data for August and September.

The number of temporary workers increased by 44,000 in October, adding to gains in the previous two months — an apparent sign that businesses have squeezed as much production as they can out of their existing workforces and feel the need to bring in more people.

“That goes the right way,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “That’s an encouraging sign.”

The hope is that as the economy expands, companies will use fresh profits to add to payrolls as they reach for increased sales. As workers spend their paychecks, they will create opportunities for other businesses, generating more jobs.

Some experts see this scenario unfolding now, asserting that the economy will add jobs by late winter.

“People are hurting, but if you can get past the sticker shock of the unemployment rate and look at the guts of the report, they are still very consistent with a recovery,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the research and trading firm MKM Partners. “We’re getting very close to the peak unemployment rate.”

But some doubt whether recent trends can continue, absent another dose of government spending.

Though the economy grew at a 3.5 percent annualized rate between July and September, much business activity was stirred up by special programs aimed at encouraging consumers to spend, not least the cash-for-clunkers program that provided taxpayer-financed cash incentives to people trading in their cars.

As the effects of this and other stimulus programs fade over coming months, fundamental weakness may reemerge, with consumers — whose spending accounts for 70 percent of overall economic activity — confronting enormous debt, the loss of wealth and fears about job security.

“We just went through an unbelievable financial catastrophe in this country and it typically takes a long time to come back,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR, a market research firm in New York, who envisions jobs continuing to decline until at least the middle of next year.

Beneath the dueling interpretations of future prospects, the report left little doubt that the present was still bleak in millions of American households.

In Columbia, S.C., Raymond Vaughn is still unemployed a year and a half after he lost his job installing and repairing windows. Back in April, he was training for a new career in medical billing, a growing field, through an online course he found on the Internet. But his unemployment benefits soon ran out, eliminating his $221-a-week check, and then he could no longer muster the $98 weekly payments for his course.

Mr. Vaughn, 43, is back to what has become a familiar if dreary everyday routine. He drives to the unemployment office downtown, where the crowds seem thicker than ever. He waits his turn to sit in front of a computer so he scan meager listings and send out fresh applications. Then, he returns home, to his sagging couch and his television, where cheerful news anchors tell him that the economy is looking up.

“They say it’s supposed to be better, that’s what I see on the news,” Mr. Vaughn said. “But I sure see a lot of people down at the unemployment office. I really don’t see how the job stuff is going to change. I don’t see any jobs out there.”

Last month, Mr. Vaughn thought he had a job, a position at a factory that makes flooring boards for $13 an hour. But two weeks before he was to go in for training, the company called him to revoke the offer.

“They said they had a hiring freeze,” he said.

And so Mr. Vaughn finds himself stuck in a crowded slice of a lean economy: another unemployed man living on the largess of a woman. His fiancée’s wages from her secretarial job pay the bills.

The latest job report amplified the reality that the pain has fallen particularly hard on men, who suffered a 10.7 percent unemployment rate in October, as compared to 8.1 percent among women. Among African American men, unemployment reached 17.1 percent in October.

Unemployment reached 9.5 percent among white Americans, 13.1 percent among Hispanics and 27.6 for teenagers.

Among all groups, the underemployment rate — a broader measure of the jobs shortfall which includes people whose hours have been cut, those working part-time for lack of full-time work, and those who have given up looking — is 17.5 percent.

Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding 29,000 jobs in October. For another month, construction and manufacturing led the declines, losing 62,000 and 61,000 jobs respectively.

Such were the details of a report dominated by a single fact: The official jobless rate now occupies two digits. More than a mere statistical marker, some worried that this could perpetuate anxiety, prompting a further hunkering down within the economy.

“It’s a benchmark,” said Mr. Baker. “It’s part of a general backdrop of economic news that does affect decisions by businesses and purchases of big ticket items.”

Javier C. Hernandez contributed reporting.

Kimberly Munley, Officer Who Shot Fort Hood Suspect, Is Firearms Expert - NYTimes.com

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By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

KILLEEN, Tex. — The police officer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base was on the way to have her car repaired when she heard a report over a police radio that someone was shooting people in a center where soldiers are processed before they are deployed abroad, authorities said on Friday.

As she pulled up to the center, the officer, Kimberly Munley, spotted the gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base.

Sergeant Munley bolted from her car and shot at Major Hasan. He turned toward her and began to fire. She ran toward him, continuing to fire, and both she and the gunmen went down with several bullet wounds, Mr. Medley said.

Whether Sergeant Munley was solely responsible for taking down Major Hassan or whether he was also hit by gunfire from another responder is still unclear, but she was the first to fire at him.

Sergeant Munley, who is 34, is an expert in firearms and a member of the SWAT team for the civilian police department on the base, officials said.

She received two wounds in each thigh and one to her right wrist. The base’s fire chief applied torniquets to stop her bleeding, and she was taken to a hospital that the officials did not identify, where she was reported in stable condition on Tuesday

Sergeant Munley joined the police force on the sprawling base in January 2008 after a career in the Army. Mr. Medley described her as highly trained, and said she had received specific training in a tactic called active shooter protocol, which was intended for the kind of situation she encountered on Thursday.

She lives with her husband, who is a soldier, in a tidy community of ranch homes on the south side of Killeen. Her neighbors described her as quiet and friendly. Her husband, who has not been identified, is currently assigned to Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

She was also scrupulously honest, according to friends. A year ago, she took pains to pay for the damage she caused to a neighbor’s car with her sport utility vehicle, even though no one had witnessed the fender bender.

“She seems like a sweet person, she tends to say hi when she drives by,” said one neighbor, Helen Pleas, 20 years old.

Sergeant Munley’s biography on her Twitter site reflected her sunny outlook. “I go to sleep peacefully at night knowing that I may have made a difference in someone’s life,” she wrote.

Lt. Gen. Bob Cone, commander of the base, said Friday morning that Sergeant Munley had reacted swiftly and aggressively to stop the gunman. “It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer,” he told the Associated Press.

Mr. Medley, the emergency services director, said that Sergeant Munley was an advanced firearms instructor for the civilian police force, which is employed by the Department of the Army to assist the military police on the grounds of the vast fort, where 150,000 soldiers and their families live and work.

Sergeant Munley comes from North Carolina, where her father owns a hardware store in Carolina Beach and is a former mayor. She attended Hoggard County High School.

According to the Associated Press, Sergeant Munley worked as an officer in the Wrightville Beach Police Department in North Carolina from 2000 to February 2002. She received three letters of commendation or recognition for her performance there.

Suspect in Fort Hood Shooting, Nidal Malik Hasan, Was to Be Sent to Afghanistan - NYTimes.com

Image by Bling$Bling via Flickr

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JACK HEALY

KILLEEN, Tex. — Amid a public outpouring of grief on Friday for those gunned down at the Fort Hood Army base, new details emerged about the chaotic moments of the shooting and the Army psychiatrist suspected of opening fire on dozens of his fellow soldiers.

The gunman, identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, was shot four times by a Fort Hood civilian police officer responding to the scene. He remained hospitalized on a ventilator on Friday in stable condition and was expected to live, Army officials said.

The death toll rose to 13 people, including 12 soldiers, in what is thought to have been the most lethal shooting on an American military base in history. Another 27 people were still hospitalized on Friday afternoon, all in stable condition.

Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, and John M. McHugh, the Army secretary, traveled to Fort Hood as a widespread investigation into the shooting began, and promised to provide whatever resources the staff at the base might need. The Army is already sending chaplains and mental-health counselors.

But General Casey acknowledged that the wounds from the shooting would not heal quickly.

“This is a tough one,” he said in a news conference at the base. “It is inside. And it’s a kick in the gut. There’s no doubt about that.”

As military and law-enforcement investigators waited to interview Major Hasan, a contradictory portrait of him emerged. Neighbors described him as a man who dressed alternately in a military uniform and flowing white robes, and who gave a copy of the Koran to his next-door neighbor a day before the shooting.

Reports from the shooting suggested that soldiers may have heard him shout something like “Allahu Akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — just before he fired two automatic handguns. He was shown on a security video tape from a local convenience store wearing white robes just hours before the shooting. And family members said that he had complained about being harassed expressly because he was a Muslim, and that he had expressed deep concerns about deploying.

Acquaintances said Major Hasan was upset about his future deployment in a war zone, and heatedly opposed United States foreign policy in discussions with fellow soldiers. Earlier this year law-enforcement officers monitoring Islamic Web sites identified a man of the same name as a blogger who posted comments on suicide bombings in which he equated such acts to those by soldiers who use their own bodies to shield fellow soldiers from exploding shrapnel.

But Major Hasan also reportedly required counseling at different times in his life, including for a time as a medical student before United States involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan were issues.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, said Army officials were trying to determine “if there is something more than just one deranged person involved here.” She said in remarks at the base on Friday that while he was the only one who had fired at the other soldiers, it was still unclear if he had planned this completely alone.

“That is a question still to be asked,” she said. “That is not a question that has been resolved.”

Senator Hutchison said the shooting had prompted Army officials to examine procedures in tracking people who may have problems.

“Was enough done?” she asked. “Should there have been more triggers? I think that’s what we’re trying to learn right now. And I think that it’s a legitimate question and it’s a question the Army is asking itself.”

“I don’t think that anyone would have ever expected a psychiatrist trained to help others mental health would be the one who would go off himself, unless there’s more to it, and that’s what they’re looking for,” she added.

President Obama asked people to avoid “jumping to conclusions” while the investigations continued.

Army officials said Friday morning that Major Hasan had not caused any problems since transferring to the Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood this year. Col. John Rossi, an Army spokesman, told reporters that investigators were examining whether Major Hasan had registered the two handguns used in the shooting.

Major Hasan is the sole suspect, after three others who were immediately taken in custody were released.

A joint investigation by agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Army criminal investigative division is under way, as government officials discuss how to prosecute Major Hasan. He could face murder charges in federal district court or a military court martial.

A law-enforcement official said high-level discussions between Justice Department and Pentagon officials over that question have been taking place since Thursday evening. The ultimate decision will be made in collaboration between the two agencies, the official said.

One factor that could shape the decision is whether investigators conclude that Major Hasan acted alone — so that it was a purely military-on-military crime — or whether they uncover evidence of any civilian co-conspirators off the base.

Under either civilian law or the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a murder conviction could carry a penalty of death. But there are some procedural differences between the two systems.

Army officials said they had declared a day of mourning on the base. President Obama said flags at the White House and other federal buildings would fly at half-staff until Veteran’s Day, “as a modest tribute to those who lost their lives.”

In interviews with reporters on Friday, Army officials praised the police officer who shot Major Hasan, Kimberly Munley, saying she and her partner had arrived within three minutes of reports of gunfire and put an end to the rampage. Ms. Munley, 34, was wounded in the exchange, officials said.

In a brief telephone interview, her stepmother, Wanda Barbour, said Ms. Munley had grown up in Carolina Beach, N.C., and described her as an excellent police officer.

“She’s concerned about all the people who’ve lost their lives,” Ms. Barbour said. “We’re just real proud of her and so grateful and thankful to the Lord that she’s going to be O.K.”

By midday on Friday, family members had publicly identified five of those killed. Among them was Sgt. Amy Krueger, a 1998 graduate of Kiel High School in Kiel, Wisc.

“Amy was a typical high school student,” said Dario Talerico, the high school’s principal. “She was kind of a tomboy type of kid. I know she was very, very proud of being able to serve in the military. She chose the military very soon after graduating.”

The victims were cut down in clusters as Major Hasan, clad in a military uniform, sprayed bullets inside a crowded medical processing center for soldiers returning from or about to be sent overseas, military officials said.

In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, a base spokesman, was asked about the reports that Major Hasan had yelled “Allahu Akbar.” General Cone said soldiers at the scene had reported “similar” accounts.

Witnesses told military investigators that medics working at the center tore open the clothing of the dead and wounded to get at the wounds and administer first aid.

As the shooting unfolded, military police and civilian officers of the Department of the Army responded and returned the gunman’s fire, officials said.

Gunshot victims were “everywhere,” as were soldiers who rushed to the scene to help, said Sgt. Andrew Hagerman, 27. Some of them pressed uniforms onto victims’ wounds to stanch their bleeding while others broke down tables and used them as stretchers. Soldiers carried their wounded friends, and directed ambulance traffic.

“I was here all night,” said Maj. Stephen Beckwith, 33, who attended to victims in the hospital.

Fort Hood, near Killeen and about a two hours’ drive south of Dallas-Fort Worth, is the largest active duty military post in the United States, 340 square miles of training and support facilities and homes, a virtual city for more than 50,000 military personnel and some 150,000 family members and civilian support personnel. It has been a major center for troops being deployed to or returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

United States military around the world observed a moment of silence Friday afternoon, in honor of those who died at Fort Hood, which General Cone said, was “absolutely devastated.”

But already the shooting has been glorified on at least one Jihadist Web site. A nearly four-minute video displayed media clips of the aftermath of the shooting, and declared that Maj. Hasan "did Jihad in that base and killed no less than 13 Crusader foreigners" and "put terror and chaos in the ranks of the enemy."

Michael Brick and Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from Fort Hood, Tex.; Elisabeth Bumiller, Charlie Savage and David Stout from Washington; and Carla Baranauckas, Michael Luo and Liz Robbins from New York.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Obama calls for calm amid fears of Fort Hood backlash (guardian.co.uk)
• US army gunman shouted 'Allahu Akbar' as he fired (guardian.co.uk)
• 12 Dead, 31 Wounded in Base Shootings (nytimes.com)
• Suspect Was to Be Sent to Afghanistan (nytimes.com)
• Accused Ft. Hood killer 'hardworking, dedicated' (thestar.com)
• Home of Fort Hood suspect raided (cnn.com)

Generation Recession - Nation

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When David Thyme was an even younger man than he is today, his fantasies of early adulthood did not include a 9:30 pm curfew and a bed in Covenant House, a shelter for homeless youth. Then again, they also didn't include a recession so severe that his financially strapped father would ask him to help with rent--or that when he couldn't find an entry-level job to do so, his father would ask him to leave home. "He was like, Son, you got to do what you got to do. I can't have you in my house," recalled the thin-faced 18-year-old from the Bronx.

Shawn Bolden, an earnest 23-year-old from Harlem, also nursed a different vision of his youthful years. A graduate of Monroe College with a degree in criminal justice, he imagined dedicating his days to nurturing the minds of the next generation of neglected students, doing his part to solder shut the school-to-prison pipeline. But since losing his job teaching arts and college prep at a local nonprofit in June, he's been struggling to find his way back into the classroom, all the while worrying about feeding his newborn daughter.

And then there's Charles Channon. A 25-year-old graduate of George Washington University, he dreamed that his postcollege days would be devoted to an onward-and-upward career with an international development firm--or at least a job with which to pay off $65,000 in college debt. "I wouldn't pretend that there's absolutely no conceit in me, but I do want to get out there and make the best difference I can," he said.

So much for youthful fantasies.

These are not happy days for America's young and striving. Indeed, as the economy has rocked and tumbled its way through 2009, spewing jobs like a sea-sick tourist, these have become very, very bad days. In September, the unemployment rate for people between the ages of 16 and 24 hovered morosely at 18.1 percent, nearly double the national average for that month. At the same time, the actual employment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds dropped to a startling 46 percent, the grimmest such figure on record since 1948, the year the government began keeping track. Taken together, this same group of young people has lost more than 2.5 million jobs since the economy began deflating in December 2007, roughly one-third of all the jobs lost, making them the hardest-hit age group of the recession.

And it gets bleaker. Bad as the youth unemployment numbers are, the underemployment numbers are even more distressing, with young people once again taking the hit. During the second quarter of 2009, for instance, the underemployment rate for workers under 25 was an alarming 31.9 percent; for workers between 25 and 34 the underemployment rate was 17.1 percent.

All of which suggests that for all this country's unbridled fascination with the glories of youth; for all the teen-lusting TV dramas, wunderkind "it" kids and peewee tech moguls, to say nothing of all the industries built on making the rest of us look and feel teen-queen young--being a member of today's youth explosion isn't a particularly enviable position after all.

"Young people under 30 have been far more affected than other groups in the economy during the recession," says Andrew Sum, professor of economics and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. "And the younger you are, the worse off you've been."

The reasons for this are multiple and complex, but perhaps the one that young people cite most is their desperate new job competition: adults twice their age with college degrees and decades of experience are now applying for entry-level positions. Moreover, those young people lucky enough to have found work often fall prey to the old "last hired, first fired" syndrome, putting them right back where they started. The result is that young people are not only working less than at any time since the Great Depression but could suffer the consequences deep into their individual and collective futures.

"These effects are long-lasting; they're not short and measly-lasting," explains Sum, citing several studies suggesting that a slow employment start can have long-term consequences. In the case of white male college graduates, for instance, an influential study showed that for as long as fifteen years after college, those who graduated into the recession-rocked economy of the early 1980s earned less than those who graduated into a sunny employment market. Equally disturbing: those who work only part time when younger, as so many young people must now do, see little benefit to their future wages compared with those working full time.

"We are throwing out of the labor market those kids who will benefit the most from the work experience they get, and they will lose that for the rest of their lives," Sum warns. "That's why it really is a depression for young workers. And I don't use that word lightly."

This was not the graduation party that most young folks imagined when they daydreamed about their liberation into early adulthood. It's certainly not the champagne-and-streamers rager that millennial boosters and other youth gurus anticipated when they dashed off all those messianic star charts predicting that this new wave of young folks would usher in the next epoch of dreamers and do-gooder types: the next Great Generation.

And yet, bleak as the current climate is, the story behind the statistics is also far more complicated--and, in some ways, uglier--than many of the recent apocalyptic pronouncements about a "lost generation" and "dead end kids" would suggest (see BusinessWeek's October 19 cover story and the September 27 New York Post, if you dare). Certainly there are scads of lost young souls roaming the aisles of job fairs, cluttering unemployment offices and weighing whether it's more important to pay the electricity or the phone bill. But in this generation of 80-odd million, some people are far more lost than others, while some have the luxury of not being lost at all. Quite simply, the real danger of the recession is not necessarily a lost generation of unemployed millennials so much as a Swiss cheese generation where the places once occupied by the least affluent--particularly the least affluent people of color--have simply been carved out.

"I hope people are really clear that this is not an equal-opportunity recession, that it's hurting the weakest," says Dedrick Muhammad, senior organizer and research associate for the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good, who has done extensive research on the recession's disparate, and decidedly racial, impact on the people of this country.

Once again, the data help tell the story. As reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in early October, young African-American teens between the ages of 16 and 19 have an unemployment rate of 40.7 percent, while young Latinos of the same age are unemployed at a rate of nearly 30 percent--both drastically higher than the 23 percent unemployment experienced by their white peers. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the disparity is even more dramatic: while young white workers in their early 20s have an unemployment rate of 13.1 percent, their African-American compatriots are unemployed at the rate of 27.1 percent, more than twice as high.

Or as Sum summarizes, "If you are both low-income and black or low-income and Hispanic, you have lost the most. And if you are young, affluent and a woman, in terms of just labor market studies, you've done OK... although across the board everybody has lost."

These losses have stacked up quickly, but today's great youth crisis didn't happen overnight, the sudden result of an immaculate recession. For young workers--and in particular young, low-income and workers of color--the struggle began long ago, with the changes that began refashioning the economy as far back as the 1980s: the decline of unions; the long, slow death of manufacturing; the rise of the service economy; and the near-total disappearance of proactive government policy. The last decade in particular, with its post-dot-com recession followed by a jobless youth recovery, has been particularly bruising.

The result of all this has been that many of today's young people--again, especially the poor, those with less education and people of color--have a measurably harder road to travel than their generational elders, according to "The Economic State of Young America," a report published in spring 2008 by Demos, a New York-based research and advocacy organization. Between 1975 and 2005, for instance, the typical annual income for workers between the ages of 25 and 34 decreased across all educational brackets, with the exception of women with bachelor's degrees. Men without a high school diploma suffered most, their annual income plummeting by 34.2 percent, while men with a high school diploma or the equivalent earned the runner-up slot, with an income drop of 28.5 percent. As for women, those with less than a high school diploma, as well as those possessing just a diploma, lost less ground than their male counterparts; but then again, they're still doing worse than before and, perhaps more to the point, they still fare significantly worse than men their age.

At the same time, today's young workers have had to do more with less. College tuition rates have skyrocketed--in fact, rates for four-year public universities have more than doubled since 1980--with the unsurprising result that nearly two-thirds of students graduating from four-year colleges in 2008 left in debt. The cost of childcare now eats up as much as 10 percent of a two-parent family's income in many states (as much as 14.3 percent in Oregon). And young people between the ages of 19 and 34 are the most likely population to be uninsured--not because they don't want health benefits but because employers don't offer them. A case in point: 63.3 percent of recent high school graduates had employer-provided healthcare in 1979, whereas just 33.7 percent had it in 2004.

"What we're looking at is a situation where young people entered the recession already feeling the brunt of thirty years' worth of pretty gradual but nonetheless dramatic economic and social changes," says Nancy Cauthen, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos. "The recession just made a bad situation worse."

Thankfully, there's something of a pewter lining surrounding all this bleakness: not only are certain swaths of this generation among the most politically engaged in decades but the generation's politics in general trend decidedly toward the progressive. Indeed, many young people have already begun coming together, in protest and coalition-style advocacy, to push for everything from green jobs to increased bank regulation to state budgets that aren't balanced on students' backs (thank you, University of California protesters!).

This is promising, since the list of much-needed solutions to young people's recession problems is long and daunting--beginning, many researchers agree, with the need to create more jobs: green jobs, Job Corps jobs, public works jobs, even tax credit-induced jobs. However, these can't be just any old jobs; they must be jobs targeted toward young people, jobs for which employers are induced to hire the youthful, inexperienced and most vulnerable, because, as Sum says, "Very few kids are being hired by the stimulus." His solution: pull them into the workforce either through direct job creation, partial subsidies or targeted tax credits to youth-hiring businesses. Moreover, he advises, these jobs also must last longer than a brief six- to twelve-week summer fling. That's how long the roughly 284,000 summer youth jobs funded by the stimulus lasted, even though there is almost no evidence that a quickie summer job has any lingering effect on a young person's long-term prospects--though there is evidence that summer jobs that extend into longer-term employment help quite a bit, according to Sum.

But above all, these new jobs have to be far more plentiful and ambitious in scope than the ones created thus far, not the least because it will take years for the country to crawl out of the vast employment hole, roughly 10.7 million jobs deep, created by this recession. And while 284,000 summer youth jobs certainly represent an important start, they not only don't meet the current need but seem downright piddling compared with the nearly 1 million government-sponsored summer youth jobs that existed during the late 1970s.

"This is classic of Obama's situation: Obama can double something or increase it 100 percent from the previous administration, but it's still so insignificant to the problem," explains Dedrick Muhammad. By contrast, he observes, "Wall Street's booming because the government took seriously their problems and did a massive intervention."

Of course, even if a slew of youth jobs materialized overnight, it would only be the beginning, since, as Cauthen cautions, "the recession could end tomorrow and that's not necessarily going to mean a bright future for young people." For that, she and others have argued, this generation needs more systemic, probing change, including easier access to the protection of unions in the form of the Employee Free Choice Act, more affordable health insurance in the form of universal health coverage, childcare that doesn't decimate their paychecks. And that's just for starters. With these policies in place, the rising generation still has a chance at the starry future that's been predicted for it. Without them, well, just imagine the way things are now--and then extrapolate.

Two recent events in New York City illustrate the way the world is trending for two very different groups of young people--the young and bailed-out versus the young and bailed-on. The first took place amid the brick-and-ivy greenery of Columbia University, in the world of the bailed-out. It was mid-September, and several hundred college students had packed into the school's Faculty House for an intimate evening with a team of Goldman Sachs recruiters. A year earlier, these recruiters probably seemed like a dying species, a herd of expensively dressed mastodons taking their valedictory spin, while the sober-suited students must have looked almost pitiable. But on this evening, the recruiters looked very much alive--downright brash--as they wooed the standing-room-only crowd of eager if anxious-looking students. Clutching brochures that urged them to "make the most of your talent," these students listened in unblinking awe as the recruiters spoke of their bank's "competitive advantage," its "global impact," the golden "opportunity" that awaited all Goldman employees, old and young.

And in case the students missed the point, there was a promotional video, starring a comely squad of young analysts (all programmed, it seemed, to repeat the word "unique!"), that ended with the cultish mantra, "I believe, I believe, I believe in Goldman Sachs." It was as if it were 2006, not 2009, as if the good old days of overpaid young analysts with Town Cars and expense accounts were back again--which, thanks to the government, they essentially are.

"If you do well and you're ambitious, you really can do well," a handsome young trader of mortgage-backed securities promised a throng of students who'd gathered around him for advice.

Meanwile, several weeks earlier, in a part of town not touched by bank bailouts, a very different scene played itself out in a Covenant House conference room. There, nine homeless New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 20--among them, David Thyme--huddled around a table topped with pizza and soda and shared their failed attempts at finding a job. All of them wanted one, but none had managed to find one despite months of scratching at the closed doors of just about every fast-food, retail and service joint in town. According to Jerome Kilbane, Covenant House New York's executive director, the organization's job training program has placed 40 percent fewer young people over the past year.

"It's kind of discouraging when you go out and you come back empty-handed every day," said Samantha, a serious-faced 19-year-old who dreams of becoming a physical therapist someday but is currently so strapped for cash she can barely afford a MetroCard to look for a job.

"I feel if I had a job I wouldn't be here," added Leonda, who is charismatic, chatty and also 19. "Not to say that this is a horrible place, but I'd be able to stand on my own two feet and live as an adult and be me."

Samantha and Leonda, who are part of a wave of homeless young folks that has swollen the ranks of Covenant House's residents by 25 percent, expressed deep anxiety about their future. But they also knew their worth. When asked what they wanted to tell the people in power, Samantha didn't hesitate.

"I say, We are your future. If we don't make it now, then who's going to take care of you when y'all is in y'all retirement phase?" she asked. "If we don't make it out of this, then basically the whole world don't make it out of this."

Obama for America's Gallup Pol - Nation

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Nadine Padilla, 25, had been doing get-out-the-vote work for the Native American Voters Alliance for two years when she was recruited by the Obama campaign, which was looking for Navajo organizers in New Mexico. She'd been an Obama fan since his 2004 DNC speech, and in August 2008 she took a position as field organizer for McKinley County, a rural area an hour from where she grew up.

"I showed up at headquarters, and the state director said, 'You need to open an office.... This is what you're gonna do. Go do it,'" Padilla recalls. She drove to Gallup, a border town of some 20,000 whites, Native Americans and Latinos. At a coffee shop she fundraised from local Democratic donors to pay the deposit on an office, and opened up shop in a space with big glass windows on Main Street.

For a while, Padilla was lonely in there--locals were skeptical about participating. "Some people would say, 'Why should I even vote? I have my own government,'" she recounts. (The Navajo nation has its own sovereign government.) But gradually, by conducting one-on-one meetings, Padilla developed a team of 130 volunteers. She says that the vast majority were working on a campaign for the first time, and most were under 30. Gallup has a small University of New Mexico campus, which turned out some college-age volunteers, and local high school students also signed up.

Padilla dropped phone sheets off in remote rural areas for less mobile volunteers. She also created a supervised kids' area at the office so parents could phone-bank. The office became like a community center, with a front area where people drank coffee, listened to music and chatted. The challenge was to move them to the back, where the phone-banking and data entry happened. But by the end of the campaign, Padilla's team was working nonstop--some volunteers were even sleeping in the office.

On election day the hard work paid off. "The volunteers did it themselves. They had come such a long way," she says. "On the first day, they were like, 'What do you want me to do? Talk to somebody about voting?' to being able to run the entire day themselves. I just brought them coffee."

On November 4 McKinley County had the highest increase in voter turnout in the state--36 percent--and Obama won it handily. Some of the volunteers are now preparing to campaign for a state representative candidate. For Padilla, that's the most gratifying part of her experience. "On the campaign we always said, 'Work yourself out of a job,'" she says. "Pass on these skills so that when you leave they'll have those tools for whatever they want."

Padilla has stayed in close touch with the volunteers, and she's helping them strategize for the state campaign. After the election, though she was tempted by DC, Padilla decided to stay close to home. "I always knew I was needed on the reserve," she says. Today she uses some of the skills she developed on the campaign in her role as a community organizer against uranium mining in northwestern New Mexico, where mining has created radioactive waste that continues to cause health problems like cancer. Padilla is the sole paid organizer for Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, a coalition of volunteer-run groups, some of which are fighting new mining-company proposals while others work against soil contamination. It's a daunting issue that has affected her community for decades, which is why she took the gig. "I was inspired to take this job after the Obama campaign, because I had this feeling that anything was possible," she says.

About Elizabeth Méndez Berry

Elizabeth Méndez Berry, an award-winning journalist, has written about culture and politics for publications including the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Vibe.