Palestinian National security forces search for wounded people at the site of an explosion in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military’s decision to open a border crossing with the Gaza Strip for a few hours to allow fuel deliveries to the territory might solve the immediate problem of darkness, but the light at the end of the tunnel is still a long way from shining. Going by the dire predictions of UN officials, unless Israel eases border restrictions there could be a humanitarian disaster in Gaza not limited to fuel restrictions.
Gaza is a sealed-off ghetto, politically and economically. It is now almost entirely dependent on aid, with practically everyone reliant on handouts provided by the United Nations. The strip risks becoming a virtually 100 percent aid-dependent, closed down and isolated community within a matter of months, or even weeks, if the present regime of closures continues.
Israel has sealed off Gaza from the outside world since the takeover of Gaza by Hamas. Hamas and Fatah did the rest with their bloody feud, which effectively divided the Palestinian camp into two. Perhaps they wouldn’t be skidding down this steep slope had Fatah gracefully accepted the decisive win of Hamas in the parliamentary elections. It is, though, too late to wish what might have been. Still, the Palestinian cause may still be able to garner sufficient political will and enable leaders to emerge who see beyond their own or their factions’ interests, to chart a new course. A vast majority of Palestinians are for reconciliation and for ending a feud detrimental to their political aspirations.
Some Israeli politicians have already proposed that their government should start talking with Hamas, whereas Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinians, absurdly refuses to open a dialogue with his former prime minister, Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh. In this, Abbas does not represent the predominant opinion of his people who want a strong, unified Palestinian voice.
Abbas and his associates have placed their faith in Israel but have offered no evidence, however, that their position is correct. The historical record, Israel’s relentless territorial advance, as well as analyses of Israeli political forces and mindset, tell us that, in the absence of any competing force, will continue to expand and consolidate its colonial presence. If it were to offer Abbas anything, it would be at best a small, shredded and feeble entity.
Abbas has not just Israel as an opposing force; he has denigrated the Hamas-elected government and is discriminating against Palestinians who are affiliated to it. In the end, however, he must choose between being a leader and the compromises of real politick.
ARABNEWS.COM

In May, when Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles arrived in Kabul as the new British ambassador, there was intense speculation about London’s choice of a senior diplomat of the highest caliber for an assignment in a losing war.
This was natural, since within the Anglo-American condominium in Afghanistan, Britain has all along been the “brains trust“. The intriguing question was, what was there in the war at that point for
Cowper-Coles to salvage at all for Britain? However, soon after taking over in Kabul, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, Cowper-Coles firmly rejected all suggestions that the coalition forces were losing the fight against the Taliban.
The ambassador took a big step further when he termed the four-day peace jirga, which concluded in Kabul, a historic occasion. “There was a palpable sense of relief, pleasure, and of history being made,“ he told The Guardian newspaper.
Significantly, British Defense Secretary Des Browne forcefully echoed the ambassador’s optimism by asserting in a media interview that the situation in southern Afghanistan had reached a “turning point“.
What warrants such optimism? The jirga itself, comprising more than 600 representatives of Pashtun tribes, originated as an idea from Afghan President Hamid Karzai a year ago with the backing of the administration of US President George W Bush--as an experimental effort to employ the vehicle of traditional Afghan assembly for fostering good-neighborly relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It was to have been held last December in Jalalabad. Pakistan was lukewarm about it. And, when it finally got under way in Kabul, there was considerable skepticism. But it ended on a high note. The jirga authorized a 50-man team to be drawn equally from the two countries to hold regular monthly meetings and to work to “expedite the ongoing process of dialogue for peace and reconciliation with the opposition“.
In plain terms, the jirga has launched an intra-Afghan peace process with a comprehensive approach that aims to include the Taliban and its ally Hezb-i-Islami. Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, who attended the closing session of the jirga, said after his return to Pakistan that the proposed 50-member team should “engage warring forces in Afghanistan to bring terrorism and extremism to an end“.
Musharraf played his cards astutely. Addressing the jirga, he admitted with disarming candor that, yes, the Taliban enjoy support from Pakistan. “I realize this problem goes deeper; there is support from these areas,“ he told delegates. Karzai, who sat beside the general, nodded in approval.
There was no acrimony over Musharraf’s dramatic turnaround from his consistent plea that the Taliban are an indigenous Afghan force. Musharraf added, “There is no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistani soil. The problem that you have in your region is because support is provided from our side.“
In his characteristic way of mixing bravado and bluster, the general underscored the criticality of his government’s role in the forthcoming intra-Afghan peace process. Again, Musharraf was forthright in asserting that any meaningful settlement will have to be on the basis of a political accommodation with the Taliban. He said, “The Taliban are part of Afghan society. Most of them may be ignorant and misguided, but all of them aren’t diehard militants and fanatics who defy even the most fundamental values of our culture and our faith.“
Clearly, an initiative that began as a modest effort aimed at defining the role of Pashtun tribes in mending Afghan-Pakistan relations seems to have galloped away. Sitting in the white tent where the jirga was held, the Guardian correspondent observed, “After four days of talk, the language was at times more Woodstock than Waziristan.“
The jirga’s agreement to push for reconciliation with the Taliban and other opposition groups constitutes a vindication of Pakistan’s stand that options other than a military solution should be adopted in reaching a settlement in Afghanistan. The high drama surrounding Musharraf’s appearance in Kabul at the concluding session of the jirga--allowing himself to be persuaded to attend by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who phoned him thrice--has enabled Pakistan to move to the center stage of the negotiations involving the Taliban.
Musharraf made it clear that the key to making success out of any conceivable Afghan peace process in the near future will be winning Pakistan’s support, and that cannot be extracted through threats and exhortations. He underlined that the West can certainly aspire to make progress with him, provided Pakistan’s legitimate concerns and interests are recognized.
ATIMES.COM

The high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among soldiers returning from Iraq is one of the many “inconvenient truths“ of this war. Inconvenient largely because it is costly: The most effective and humane means of treating PTSD are time-intensive and long-term.
The military, however, has changed the terms and given many thousands of enlisted men and women a new diagnosis: “personality disorder.“ While the government would be obliged to care for veterans suffering from combat-related trauma, a personality disorder--defined as an ingrained, maladaptive way of orienting oneself to the world--predates a soldier’s tour of duty (read: preexisting condition). This absolves Uncle Sam of any responsibility for the person’s mental suffering.
The new diagnostic label sends the message: This suffering is your fault, not a result of the war. On one level, it’s hard not to see this as another example of the government falling short on its care for Iraq war veterans. Yet there’s another, more insidious, bit of sophistry at work. The implication is that a healthy person would be resistant to the psychological pressures of war. Someone who succumbs to the flashbacks, panic, and anger that haunt many former soldiers must have something inherently wrong with him. It’s the psychological side of warrior macho: If you’re tough, you can take it. Of course, we know this is not true. Wars forever change the lives of those who fight them and can leave deep scars.
Now is not the first time that psychiatric diagnoses of returning soldiers have been altered apparently for reasons of political expedience. During World War I, countries in Europe were overwhelmed with men coming home complaining of paralysis, confusion, insomnia, and other unexplained symptoms. The disorder came to be known as “shell shock“--a term the British War Office banned in 1917 because it asserted a direct connection between the war and the problem, which meant those suffering were eligible for treatment.
German psychiatrists debated whether such mental problems were the result of “trauma“ (from the Greek for “wound“) or “hysteria“ (from the Greek for “womb,“ referring to a neurotic state associated with women). Over time the medical establishment favored “hysteria,“ which put the blame on the individual’s failure to adapt rather than on the intolerable nature of modern warfare. In fact, it was thought that the camaraderie and rigor of battle would help strengthen those with “weak“ mental constitutions and motivate potential malingerers.
In Germany and Austria, the goal shifted from easing a man’s pain to rendering him fit to go back to battle, often through the use of strong electric current. The switch in terms from trauma to hysteria (during World War I) or PTSD to personality disorder (today) is far from trivial. Rather, the new labels allow the government and society at large to do two things: 1) attribute symptoms after serving to individual psycho-pathology; and 2) disown the problem of the former soldiers’ suffering. We needn’t question the system that sends young people to war--merely the stability of those who bear the emotional brunt of battle.
Politicians have a vested interest in sidestepping the high price soldiers pay for their service. But we know better, and at the very least owe them appropriate medical and psychological care and the acknowledgment of their wounds.
Better screening at the enlistment and training stages is needed, both to forestall retroactive diagnoses and to identify soldiers with personality disorders that could interfere with their duties.
Better preparation prior to deployment would also help. The National Guard has seen higher rates of PTSD than the Marines. This may suggest that the more extensive training specific to combat received by marines helps them tolerate potentially traumatic situations.
CSMONITOR.OCM

How many people have died as a result of Khartoum’s genocidal counter-insurgency campaign in Darfur? What is overall mortality since February 2003?
These questions have been much in the news recently, particularly in the wake of a decision by Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that an advertisement by the Save Darfur coalition and Aegis Trust had inappropriately represented as fact a death toll of 400,000, when this was a matter on which opinions diverged.
Notably, the ASA did not find, as erroneously asserted by Sam Dealey in the New York Times, that the advertisement “violated codes of objectivity and truthfulness“. Nor is the ASA likely to be the best source for understanding the complexities attending the competing claims of various mortality estimates, ranging from Khartoum’s figure of 9,000 to the figure of well over 450,000 generated by this writer.
Why does any of this matter? Here it’s useful to recall that in February 2004--one year into the most violent and destructive phase of the Darfur genocide--the official UN estimate for total human mortality was 3,000. In retrospect this is of course an absurdly low number, although there certainly was no effort to deceive by the UN. But only activist efforts--not those of professional epidemiologists--succeeded in compelling a closer examination of the data available, which were in fact extremely limited. Activist pressure also helped ensure that subsequently a significantly wider and more authoritative set of data would become available, although not always meeting specific epidemiological standards.
The most controversial data came from a study overseen by the nongovernmental Coalition for International Justice (CIJ) in August 2004--not “summer of 2003“, as claimed by Conor Foley in this space. Nor was it a study of “morbidity“ (degrees and extent of illness) as Foley asserts, confusing this basic term with mortality. Rather it was a study designed to determine whether genocide had occurred in Darfur. Those conducting the 1,136 carefully randomised interviews among Darfuri refugees at various locations along the Chad/Darfur border were professionals drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, including law enforcement, previous genocide investigations and human rights work. They had extensive resources, including a full complement of translators.
The overwhelming consensus among the investigators, according to one genocide scholar on the team, was that genocide had been committed and was continuing. This was the basis for the US determination rendered by then-secretary of state Colin Powell in congressional testimony of September 2004. But in addition to making clear the genocidal intent of the Khartoum regime, the CIJ study also yielded highly significant data about human mortality in Darfur, if in tantalisingly insufficient form.
The CIJ data is particularly important because of its comprehensiveness and timeliness: humanitarian organisations have reported that through summer of 2004 the overwhelming cause of death in Darfur was violence. At some point, perhaps late summer 2004, the primary causes of death became disease and malnutrition, often directly related to antecedent violence, and thus also genocidal deaths. But violence and its direct effects were the chief causes of death for nearly all the “look-back period“ in the CIJ study.
Three subsequent studies have attempted to take account of the CIJ data. All suggest that present mortality, from all causes, is 350,000-400,000 or greater. While all have been judged harshly for this use of CIJ data by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), the basic statistical challenge confronting any mortality assessment remains: without consideration of CIJ data, there is no effective way to calculate violent mortality on a global basis for Darfur. Because the CIJ study was not specifically designed as a mortality study, a range of assumptions must guide use of the data.
GUARIDAN.CO.UK

Kazakhstan, which suddenly had independence thrust upon it in 1991, has tended to enjoy a more positive image than some of its former Soviet Central Asian neighbours. This is partly because its President for all that time, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is a dab hand at public relations, and partly because his regime has been genuinely more benign than some of the regional horrors.
When the comparisons are with the regime of the late President Niyazov in Turkmenistan, who erected a golden statue to himself, and President Karimov’s rule in Uzbekistan, where political dissenters have been boiled in oil, the bar is set pretty low. The judicious, if belated, appearance of a national sense of humour over Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat has also played to Kazakhstan’s international advantage.
But there are other, less positive, reasons why Kazakhstan has been given an easy ride. Mr Nazarbayev, unlike his erstwhile counterpart in next-door Kyrgyzstan, has managed to keep his country relatively stable (and stay in power). More to the point, with the war in Iraq and Western military engagement in Afghanistan, Kazakhstan has become a significant strategic player. The rise of China only enhances its importance. In these circumstances, the West, and especially the US, may well have qualms about criticising the leadership of a country where they have troops based and that potentially holds so many cards.
Yet the elections this weekend suggest it may be time for the outside world to take a closer look at Kazakhstan and stop treating it with quite such delicate kid gloves. Mr Nazarbayev’s party, Nur-Otan, won a Soviet-style almost 90 per cent of the vote and a clean sweep of seats. No opposition group came anywhere near the 7 per cent bar for representation in the new parliament. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitored the elections reported a “lack of transparency“ in the count at more than 40 per cent of polling stations its observers visited. It also cited procedural problems and media bias.
Opposition parties complained about having campaign adverts banned and the editing of a televised debate. Before the election, the President’s son-in-law had been exiled to a diplomatic post in Austria and then indicted on charges widely seen as politically inspired.
Mr Nazarbayev called the election early in order to win a mandate for a new constitution--which includes a provision allowing the President to stand for an unlimited number of terms.
In gaining his compliant Parliament, however, Mr Nazarbayev may have risked his other objective--to prove Kazakhstan’s worthiness to become OSCE president in two years’ time. The country’s democratic credentials remain very much in doubt.
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK