By PAUL KORING, Toronto Globe and Mail

Only rarely during his race to the White House did president-elect Barack Obama invoke his young children to dramatize a tough foreign policy position.

An ill-paid Filipino deckhand armed with a fire hose and peering into the blackness from the stern of a slow-moving supertanker is little match for dozens of heavily armed pirates swarming aboard from high-powered Zodiac launches.

The Taliban, once dismissed as too stupid to know they would lose if they dared to fight well-trained U.S., Canadian and allied troops, have proved themselves resilient, if still ill-equipped, warriors, learning from their early defeats and adapting to stage sophisticated attacks, inflicting serious casualties and winning key propaganda battles.

Getting on the United Nation's terrorist list is easy. Getting off is next to impossible.

The blacklist created by Security Council Resolution 1267 in 1999 turns the listed into international pariahs. All U.N. member states are obligated to seize their assets, prevent them from traveling and prosecute anyone who gives them money beyond the absolute minimum for subsistence.

Compelling evidence that Canadian-transferred detainees are still being tortured in Afghan prisons has emerged from the government's own follow-up inspection reports, documents it has long tried to keep secret.