NEWSBYDANIEL J GERSTLE

There are numerous crises affecting millions of people in Pakistan: civil war, terror groups, recurring floods, periodic earthquakes and massive poverty.

But the global response has been modest to painfully inadequate. Why? Perhaps people around the globe have trouble empathizing, or simply don't know how to help in a way that will make the most impact.

This fall Oxfam International, a progressive aid agency with a successful track record on humanitarian advocacy, has been rallying concerned global citizens not only to donate for emergency response after the catastrophic flood but to do something rather simple that could potentially have a huge long term impact: Sign a petition calling on global finance ministers to drop Pakistan's debt.

There is much more to Pakistan than what we see in the Western media. It's a country with an incredibly colorful and diverse tapestry. Traveling through Pakistan one sees roadside market storytellers, passionate lovers, witty entrepreneurs, creative matriarchs, mountain sufis, cyber punks, young people enjoying life, families working hard to make ends meet and young kids trying to enjoy life with whatever's in the neighborhood.

To get one's head around Pakistan's debt problem and why sending Oxfam's letter will help, imagine Jim and Pam. Jim and Pam are nice folks from an enormous distribution company (the United States) going to visit a flea market or covered bazaar where local traders, small producers and even some nearly homeless families are selling whatever they can (Pakistan).

This week, Oxfam International premiered its latest advocacy effort for arms control and violence prevention with a unique new project called ShootingPoverty.org.

The project allows you - yes, you! - to send in your videos and links to form part of the movement to curb violence globally.

What? How? One wonders whether only those with funds, nice cameras and training will be able to contribute. But filmmaking is getting easier every year with community centers, libraries and universities sharing their tools, and the project really is open and accessible to almost anyone.

You can be anywhere from 7 to 157 years old, computer illiterate or living in a rural area, but if you have a good point to make which persuades a few people at the local college or library with access a simple camera, you can contribute to the movement. If not, then hey, just enjoy the films on the website and tell friends about it and what it means for preventing violence.

There was a red-haired and tense Bosnian man named Senad, who told me back in the 1990s how, during the war, a man had climbed out of an enemy trench and tossed a grenade between him and his two friends who were guarding their village.

He told the story while sticking the stump of his right hand into the clump of his shirt. That freed his left hand, which had been hiding the wound, so that he could shuttle his fingers nervously through his hair.

As a U.S. Marine trained in the art of men killing men -- and still okay with that at the time -- I just sat on his couch there outside Tuzla, nodding, as if it was all to be expected. It was a war, after all. But this was one of my first times back then learning about war not from American soldiers in America but from locals who lived under bombing for three and a half years and who thought they might be rounded up and shot Holocaust-style because of they were Muslim.

That's when Senad's wife, Alma, got impatient, as if Senad's heartbreak about not being able to save his friends was not so serious. Alma looked down at their son who was scribbling in my notebook, scribbling what turned out to be a picture of a house which was on fire. "Now Hasan has been having nightmares," Alma told me, "about Senad having nightmares. And I can't take it anymore."

When I served in the U.S. Marine reserves in the 1990s, I took time off right after the Dayton Accords ended the war in Bosnia to carry out research on the refugee crisis there. The summers before I had learned how to fire all kinds of weapons, plant plastic explosives and landmines, how to kill with a knife, and how to recover and fingerprint the dead.

This week the political leaders of the world are meeting at the UN to discuss arms control, disease prevention, kangaroo dancing, penguin colonies on Mars, and ... are you still reading?

Yes, we want to reduce arms, to prevent disease, and work together! But this week's vital meetings often appear so incredibly boring to the greater public that the press stories that get the most traction tend not to be about a victory over malaria, but rather 'what did that crazy cat Qaddafi (or insert any other leader's name from the axis of eccentricity) do this time?'

That's why I was very happy to snag an invite from Oxfam International, thanks to Oistein Moskvil Thorsen, to a much more dynamic event series at New York's 92nd Street Y overlapping with the world leaders summit called the UN Week Digital Media Lounge.

Here topics are a bit more youthful, turbo-tech, and there's plenty of networking space to continue to cover the UN talks, meet new people, and chat about arms control, malaria prevention, and, of course, penguin colonies on Mars.

Perhaps one of the most important talks on this first day, though brief, was about new technologies in emergencies. There has been an interesting challenge revolving around the use of the internet and other technology in places where people can barely afford shoes. And yet it is vital for crisis responders to link rapidly with that local population to prevent or respond to an earthquake as in Haiti, war as in Afghanistan, or public health crisis as in, well, everywhere.

If you see a tall distinct African man and his entourage walking past you on the road somewhere between New York and Washington, D.C. these next two weeks, arriving on October 7th, it's Simon Deng of the project Sudan Freedom Walk.

My friend Matthew Kohn, a filmmaker and consultant for Sudan Sunrise, told me about it this week and blogged about it for the Huffington Post, "250 Miles to Walk for Freedom in Sudan."

Deng and his supporters (that could be you!) are on a quest to rally global support not only to deal with current conflict and poverty challenges in Sudan, but also to prevent, mitigate, and transform conflict revolving around the coming 2011 referendum on the sovereignty of southern Sudan.

This past week we celebrated World Humanitarian Day, or at least tried to. The global audience did not rally as much as some of us would have hoped. Why not?

A good indicator is how right after the UN released it's clever World Humanitarian Day project video, one version was rapidly overtaken, tackled, and dismembered in highest-click-count on YouTube, 2.5 million to 50,000, by the very simple Soldiers Surprising Their Loved Ones video. Many of you saw this evolving on your Facebook updates punctuated by calls to "Thank the Lord for our brave troops!" and "We love our fighting fathers!"

All power to the armed forces who risk their lives to try to protect us. Humanitarian aid workers risk their lives to protect us, too, but do so without weapons or armor. Why not afford them the same recognition and thanks?

When I trained as a U.S. Marine in the 1990s, I remember going away for training and learning how to kill to save. We Marines came home from that and everyone wanted to slap us on the back, kiss our cheeks, laugh over stories about how it went. Girls who never acknowledged our existence were suddenly giving us big hugs.

Later, some of us in the military shifted away from the violent side of protection and chose to leave the weapons, the armor, and the tough talk behind to try to help people caught in the crossfire, peacefully, as aid workers. Many humanitarian aid workers operate through battle zones or disaster zones — most of them originating from the communities in crisis — to provide medical support, fix farms, remove landmines, repair educational systems, innovate peacebuilding and conflict transformaton, and also, critically, to work on another vital wave of aid: disaster prevention and preparedness.

Considering there will be a number of midterm Congressional seats up for a vote in two months, and a critical Presidential election only two years from now, this fall is an important time to restore movements for progress.

Many of you are already rallying for the global good and against those who fight for the benefit of small groups at the cost of others, so many of you who identify as progressive, green, dove, or moderate will be working the next two years to prevent hard-line conservatives like Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin from winning the office of President of the United States, if not also to prevent similar folks from winning Congressional seats this November.

As an American who has served in the U.S. Marines and worked as a humanitarian aid worker in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and other crisis zones in the Islamic world overseas, I've compiled a few arguments on why former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich would not be a strong Commander in Chief. Some of the points may also work for debates regarding other candidates.

Of course, Americans who have been disappointed with the Obama Administration (and Democrats) on national security, conduct of the wars overseas, and other issues may have reasonable cause. But I implore folks to apply advocacy pressure on the administration itself to change and improve on these fronts, and not to use disappointment as a reason to avoid participating in the election. Is there any possibility that a President Gingrich or Palin would do better for the global good on national security? Any "lesson" to be taught by seeing what would happen would come, potentially, at a cost in lives. Considering the invasion of Iraq, that's not a whimsical suggestion.

"In Bold Display, Taliban order Stoning Deaths", reads a New York Times headline by Rob Nordland. What's shocking about this case of Taliban militants and family members killing a 25-year-old man and 19-year-old woman outside Kunduz is not only it's brutality, and that it happened in a part of the country not previously so influenced by the Taliban. It's also that it underscores some critical questions that anyone involved in Afghanistan or with the global effort to prevent extremism should be asking.

Why do stories about the killings of girls, the repression of women, and the prevention of romantic love come secondary to body counts, political conferences, and military movements? Isn't winning a war more about winning the majority population over to the side of peaceful co-existence, than about killing enemy? Could it be that people living under Taliban control are doing so with unified hatred of Western values, colonialism, women's freedom, and liberal lifestyles, or are they simply afraid of a Taliban boot, or of change?

To reduce the power of the Taliban and its consenters (can an extreme group which not only rallies for God but against life, living, and love, really have "supporters" as opposed to consenters?) maybe we need to spend more time demonstrating the great power of having a culture full of love, sharing, and joyous freedom, of peacebuilding exchanges and market-building partnerships, and spend less time letting loose those who rant about "killing the enemy" and the "violence of action"?

If someone killed your parents in a heat of passion in peacetime, wouldn't it be hard to remain civil, to greet them on the street and shake their hand? Now imagine somebody coldly, over time, designed the architecture to murder them among several million people. Checking them off like they are just another piece of trash to be burned.

Most would want to seek vengeance, or see the person suffer. But when Thet Sambath, orphaned by the Cambodia genocide, met Nuon Chea, one of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge which committed the crimes, he decided instead to have a long chat, a twenty year conversation about how it happened and why, and Sambath recorded it. This year's Sundance Film Festival unveiled the film, Enemies of the People, made by Sambath along with Rob Lemkin of Old Street Films about the conversation, and it won the Special Jury Prize. In fact, maybe Sambath should get a Pulitzer for investigative journalism for his twenty year search for the truth through primary sources.

There's a new book out you should check out: Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage, by Michael Otterman and Richard Hil with Paul Wilson (and with dozens of Iraqi bloggers who are quoted). Although those who remain champions of the 2003 invasion of Iraq may misjudge the book by its cover to be an anti-Bush argument, it is more accurately described as a pro-people, pro-local perspective look back on the Iraq War. Any book showing the Iraq War from the local perspective is, not necessarily by argument but by document, going to read pro-peace.

Up front, I'll admit that I'm friends with the lead author, Michael Otterman. He actually contributed to HELO Magazine's debate about journalism bias in Iraq last fall, before I knew him. We met and talked about Iraq, the Middle East, his previous book, American Torture, and hit it off. Because nothing builds friendship better than talking about harsh interrogation tactics.

What I really respected most about Otterman's approach was that unlike sooooo many other journalists and researchers, he goes directly to the local witnesses. It may not always be possible to get into Baghdad during a bombardment and interview people while it's happening, but any shrewd research should reduce the time committed to White House press briefings and Think Tank brown bags in order to increase time committed to reading through the many growing local witness blogs. With the Iraq debate we did last year, Otterman was the only non-Iraqi to bring in very specific local witness descriptions of events. And so this new book is much more.