NEWSWAR AND PEACE

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).

Today’s election marks the end of an epic, historic campaign season that included witches, rallies for sanity, the Tea Party and a journalist handcuffed by a campaign. From Whitman to Reid to Miller, candidates have spent more than ever, fought more than ever and given us an election cycle of firsts.

But there is another first no one is really talking about: the surge of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans running this year.

Today, 27 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will seek national office. This is nearly four times the number of veterans of those wars currently serving in Congress. Twenty-five are campaigning for House seats and two are running for the Senate. Eighteen are running as Republicans, nine as Democrats. They are as ideologically diverse as the electorate they hope to represent and share only one agenda item: their desire to continue their service.

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 is no shortage of skeptics about peace prospects in Afghanistan, despite the significant progress over the past few months

To understand why the skeptics are drowning out the protagonists of peace in public debate, let's first go over the views of three prominent groups of Afghan peace cynics, and the reasons behind their doubts.

The first is represented by Michael Semple. A former UN and European envoy with a history of contacts with the Taliban, currently lecturing at Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Semple recently gave an interview to The Guardian: "It's traditional for people on either side [in Afghanistan] to develop linkages. The enemy go to the other side and make tactical requests. It's not just money but also requests for brothers and cousins to be let out of jail. Its a case of: give me a few bob and free my cousin."

"We know this kind of thing has been going on for a long time," Semple continues, "That is the way Karzai operates, but it's also standard operating procedure for Afghanistan... If this were a serious process they would be guarding its confidentiality for dear life."

The first and highly controversial conviction of a Guantanamo prison detainee under President Obama's watch occurred today, with Canadian Omar Khadr's confession at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The strange outcome of this extended ordeal has created a human rights and international law conundrum that is likely to lead to more confusion when it comes to bringing terrorists and militants to justice. Few single events bring together so many of our gravest concerns.

There is much to do, and your actions on this trial matter now because it is setting a precedent for the future.

Here are just four of the many troubling issues the trial has raised.

An international "Contact Group" of dozens of countries and global organizations has been created to support the shift from an Afghan war strategy to an Afghan peace strategy.

As previously reported on Change.org, this momentous event in the progress of peace in Afghanistan has already been diligently underway for months, but has left observers very confused.

No one is clear about what a "Contact Group" actually is or does, but among its members are United Nations, the European Union member-states and NATO. Having more countries and their resources invested in the peace process will hopefully help it along, but too many cooks in the kitchen can also become a hindrance.

There are a couple of surprise invitees in the group. One is the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), which rarely makes the Western press despite representing more than 50 nations and promoting Muslim solidarity worldwide. The OIC wasn't present at the first Contact Group meeting held in Rome last week.

The second invitee, however, was. That country is Iran.

It is one of the great ironies in the history of American domestic politics and foreign policy: the champion of the START (Strategic Arms Reduction) Treaty, which heralded the formal nuclear disarmament process between the US and the USSR, was none other than Republican President Ronald Reagan.

By the time the START Treaty was implemented late in 2001, over 80 percent of the nuclear weapons that existed when it was signed were eliminated. It remains the largest disarmament treaty ever put into effect, and for this reason alone Reagan deserves a special place in the history of peace, regardless of what his detractors or devotees think of him and his self-titled ideology. Recognizing and continuing the decades of work of anti-nuclear activists in the U.S. and abroad, without whose vigilance and pressure START wouldn't have been initiated, is also in order.

But we cannot give the same praise to Reagan's presidential or political party successors, and if nothing is done soon the world is likely to witness the end of the START Treaty - the single greatest instrument of nuclear disarmament in the world - and with it a golden opportunity to reduce the country's balloooning national deficit and high-strung international tensions.

First the Koran-burning scandal shook already dangerously volatile global Muslim/non-Muslim relations, leading to U.N. consideration of an international approach to curbing Islamophobia.

Now, some radicals in the American Tea Party movement are starting to build ties with even more radical anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim groups in the U.K. and their continental European counterparts, creating a transnational hate movement symptomatic of our polarized times.

The British English Defence Leaugue (EDL), whose members literally wear painted masks reminiscent of the Friday the 13th horror flicks, are vehemently against what they see as the "Islamification" of Europe, a paranoia akin to some of the punditry on the U.S.-based Fox News.

But do not mistake this for a Halloween gag. EDL radicals are serious, so serious in fact that that in a broad effort to build transnational ties their leaders have reached out to others in continental Europe, notably to globally infamous Dutch anti-Islam leaders; to Pamela Geller, a prominent U.S. activist who leads Stop Islamization of America; and to Rabbi Nachum Shifren, a Tea Party speaker and candidate for the California legislature. They have also reached out to domestic Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Sikh sympathizers. "It's a grass roots social movement," says Guramit Singh, an EDL spokesman.

Paul Rieckhoff is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. He is the Founder and Executive Director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and the author of Chasing Ghosts.

After nearly a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, over 2 million Americans have served and a trillion dollars have been spent. Yet only 3 percent of Americans have war on their radar this election.

And where’s Congress? Spinning on the campaign trail, scrambling for last-minute endorsements and as Tom Brokaw rightly noted in The New York Times this week, still doing nothing to wake up the country about the surge of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama's people call it "going dark."

As the Internet's primacy over telephones as the world's preferred communications platform continues to grow, U.S. anti-terrorism officials face an increasingly hard time intercepting communications. So much so that the Obama administration, in conjunction with the major intelligence and law enforcement agencies, is preparing a sweeping overhaul of regulations controlling how the U.S. government can access online information and what it can do with it.

Lawfully monitoring suspected terrorists with judicial authorization and intervening when there is just cause to do so is one thing. But it's wholly another to be able to wiretap the Internet as a whole, putting the Constitutionally-protected privacy of citizens and residents at risk in the name of catching a few fish in a huge net with gaping holes.