“Child soldiers.” The phrase evokes many images: schoolchildren snatched from their homes at night to be porters and sex slaves for the Lord’s Resistance Army, drug-addled Liberian adolescents, rail thin Somali teens dwarfed by their own weapons. And now, the connected conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan have given child soldiering a new face --the child suicide bomber.

Abu Dhabi daily The National provides a snapshot of this chilling phenomenon:

Very little is known about the boy. He may have been 12, 13, or 14. His handlers identified him by a code name and convinced him that he was carrying out God’s work. His parents may not even be aware of his fate. On Monday, as a Pakistani security convoy sped past the bazaar in the Shangla district of the Swat valley, he stepped off the edge of the curb, flung himself at the vehicles and set off an explosion, killing himself and 41 others.

In Afghanistan, child soldiers have been a prominent fixture of war since the early days of the anti-Soviet resistance, and thousands of children fought for rival militias in Afghanistan's civil war. But sending children to carry out suicide bombings was not something militant groups did in either Afghanistan or Pakistan until around 2006.

In the Frontline documentary Children of the Taliban, Pakistani journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy interviews young Taliban recruits and would-be child soldiers. She finds that the children have mostly the same motivations for fighting as adults have: revenge for the deaths of friends and family killed by the Pakistan army and in American airstrikes; prestige and recognition; religious fanaticism; and sense of duty.

The children Obaid-Chinoy interviews are stranded in dreary camps for the internally displaced and urban slums, with no education and no ambitions beyond inflicting pain on those the children hold responsible for their suffering. At one point, Obaid-Chinoy asks a stern-faced boy named Wasifullah if he would kill his best friend, Abdurrahman, who intends to join the Pakistan army and fight the Taliban. Wasifullah says he would; he wants to join the Taliban to avenge his 12 year old cousin, who was killed in an American airstrike and had to be buried "in bags."

In a truly surreal scene later in the film, another boy, a student at a Taliban-affiliated madrassah in the poorest neighborhood of Karachi, tells Obaid-Chinoy that he "would love to" carry out a suicide bombing for the Taliban, but needs to ask his father for permission.

Though some of Obaid-Chinoy’s interviewees seem to have made a calculated decision to fight and kill, it’s important to keep in mind that the Taliban’s child recruits are just that: children. Neuroscience tells us their brains are still developing. They aren’t yet capable of adult reasoning or impulse control, and the desperate circumstances of their lives make them easy prey for militant groups seeking youth to convert to the cause.

The recruiters, for their part, wholeheartedly agree. “In madrassahs, a student can’t even stand straight in front of his teacher, he always stands slightly bowed with his hands tied in front because he thinks it’s an honor to be able to touch his teacher’s feet or shoes,” one Punjabi mullah tells The National. “Due to such training when we tell them to blow themselves up or attend a certain training camp they can’t even dream of saying no.” The headmaster at the Karachi madrassah tells Obaid-Chinoy that his students are "sacrificial lambs." When Obaid-Chinoy shows a Taliban recruiter a video of adolescent boys training to carry out suicide attacks, the recruiter remarks that the boys in the video are "quite grown up" compared to his child recruits. "Mine are 5,6, and 7 years old," he says.

Two years ago, a six year old boy wearing a suicide vest approached American soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan. The boy didn’t remember what he was supposed to do with the explosives, and the Americans managed to disarm him.

Ultimately, the motivations of the Taliban’s child soldiers are irrelevant in a legal context. Children are seen as deserving special protection in all societies, and this common value is reflected in a body of treaty law, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which only Somalia and the United States have not signed, and the UN Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty. Use of child soldiers in armed conflict is also defined as a war crime under international law and prosecuted as such by the International Criminal Court.

One of the many tragic consequences of the Bush Administration’s insistence that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were fundamentally different from all others has been disregard for the distinction between adult and child combatants in both conflicts. This was most obvious in the handling of the Omar Khadr case.

A fifteen year old Canadian boy from a family with ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Khadr was captured barely alive (warning: graphic photo) after a battle between US Special Forces and militants near Khost, Afghanistan in 2002. He has spent the past seven years imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay and faces charges of murder (for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier), spying, conspiracy, and providing material support for terrorism. Requests from the UN special representative for children in armed conflict to attend Khadr’s military tribunal hearings have been repeatedly denied.

Some Afghan Taliban child soldiers captured more recently by international forces have been transferred to Afghanistan's notoriously abusive intelligence service, at whose hands they are at risk for torture.

The United States and its allies must look past the Taliban's religious visage and treat it as what it is: a collection of armed, non-state groups that routinely violate international law and view children as ammunition. The flip side the American media's portrayal of the Pakistan and Afghanistan Taliban as something exotically evil and inscrutable is a perverse romanticizing of militant leaders who have a lot in common with Joseph Kony and Thomas Lubanga. The children who fight for the Taliban are no less victims of adult manipulation, and of their adult superiors' war crimes, than the child soldiers of central Africa. Rehabilitation and reintegration should be prioritized for all child soldiers, no matter who they took up arms for, or why. International forces will no doubt encounter more of the Taliban's child soldiers in the future. Those sad, exploited children should be treated not as enemy combatants, but as the victims they are.