The only time I ever pick-up a copy of "The Economist" is when I'm flying. It's a great read and it's like they have the people from "Maxim" writing the photo captions and headlines.

For instance, a story on Afghanistan's auxiliary police is titled "There's marijuana in their socks and their feet point the wrong way." Doesn't make sense, right?

[General Nasrullah Zarifi, commander of the main police-training center in Kandahar] says he threw six men off the [police training] course for propagating Taliban ideology, and expelled several more after finding marijuana in their socks. Some recruits rioted after deciding that their beds aligned their feet with Mecca while they slept.

We talked about this when the rioting was taking place of the Mohammad caricature, but I'll never understand the beating Christianity takes for their rituals and beliefs when other religions are rioting over trivial matters such as which direction their feeting are pointing.

So there's a report on Germany and Angel Merkel, their chancellor. I've been needing to respond to a post from Rob Whitlock trying to further explain why military action on behalf of the international community is of little to no benefit to the United States and, in many cases, is carried out for just as dubious reasons as the current conflict in Iraq.

But for right now the reason I'm posting this portion of the article is because of the burden the American military has to carry in order for these international police actions to be executed.

The Economist: "Merkel as a world star" (18 November 2006)

These has seldom been any open talk about military dangers [in Germany]. And only low-risk missions are proposed.

You can guess which country is asked to take on the task of handling the "dirty work" of combat.

Most [Germans] see soldiers as little more than armed development-aid workers, who expend goodwill and good works, but do not get harmed.

Well, let's not ask the military to take on too much! So the tangible effects of this modern German pacifism?

And these troops have rarely been at the centre of action: in Afghanistan, they stay in the relatively calm north; in Lebanon, they patrol at seas, not on land.

But this state of affairs may not continue. In Afghanistan, for instance, the north is no longer an oasis of calm and German soldiers are regularly attacked. Germans are also discovering that their soldiers can come home as traumatised war veterans, and sometimes do nasty things in action.