Before it is dark and when there is no communication with the world, wrote Dr Eyad Sarraj, a prominent human rights advocate, from Gaza last Tuesday night, “I want to tell you that the current Israeli policy of squeezing has the aim of pushing Egypt to open its borders with Gaza and bring the situation prior to 1967.“
He went on, “Israel will then close its borders with Gaza, separate the [Gaza] Strip from the West Bank and destroy the peace proposals of one or two states. In short, Israel is fulfilling the [Ariel] Sharon unilateral withdrawal strategy.
If Egypt fails to open its borders with Gaza, Israel will push us through Rafah towards the Sinai Desert. Wait for the exodus.“
Understandably, the Palestinian psychiatrist, like the million-and-a-half fellow residents in the Gaza Strip, may have sounded desperate and frantic. After all, his stepson, for one, his e-mail explained, is on a “ventilator for asthma every night. What will happen to him when our generator is not running any more?“
More so, he continued, “what will happen to hospitals, vaccines and blood banks? What will happen to patients on dialysis machines, and to babies in incubators?“
But he is not very far off from what Israel may succeed in doing (as it has done in the past), thanks to the silence of the lambs in the Arab world and among its influential supporters in the West in yet again failing to immediately confront Israel.
Hardly had President George W. Bush ended his visit to five Arab countries, the Palestinian territories and Israel when the latter’s wrath descended on the “enemy territory“, as the Gaza Strip was described in a Cabinet decision last September.
This gave rise to suspicions in the Arab world that the reprehensible Israeli action had been cleared with Bush before he returned home from his historic and not very fruitful Mideast tour.
The Israeli measures, however, came on the heels of an ill-timed Bush administration request, voiced publicly during the trip of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that the Arab countries must do more to reach out to Israel as a way to do their part to nudge the Mideast peace process. Rice must then have had a memory lapse, forgetting the Arab peace plan, which has been sidetracked by Israel.
The merciless Israeli blockade imposed on Gaza Strip began six months ago after the regrettable division among the Palestinians, particularly between the Fatah group led by President Mahmoud Abbas, who is based in Ramallah, on the West Bank, and Hamas, the Islamic group, which had won the parliamentary elections and nowadays is in control of Gaza Strip. The unexpected results of the elections, which were monitored by international observers, including former president Jimmy Carter, paved the way for the split in Palestinian ranks.
By all accounts, the West-supported Israeli siege has ruined the Palestinian economy. A CNN reporter, Ben Wedeman, described Gaza as a “wasteland“, pointing out that “four out of five Palestinians depend on international aid... the economy has come to a standstill“.
An intensified economic embargo was imposed last Thursday when all entrances to the strip were closed and fuel supplies were stopped, all in the hope of dethroning Hamas and in a shortsighted response to continued shelling by Arab militants of Israeli towns in the border areas.
In reaction to the gas-deprived situation, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said contemptuously that as far as he is concerned, “all the residents of Gaza can walk“. A UN spokesman said that “collective penalties“ for an entire population were illegal under international law.
Israeli incursions and air raids killed 810 Palestinians in the past two years, including 19 in one day last week.
“Has the daily mass killing in Gaza improved the [Israeli] security situation?“ asked Gideon Levy, a columnist with the Israeli paper Haaretz. “No, it has only made it worse,“ he added, pointing out that as long as Bush was in the region, “Israel refrained from liquidations“, but when he left, “we resumed the killing“.
His conclusion: the “continued killing in Gaza... will not weaken the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom and will not bring security for Israel“.
What all this should mean for Israel and the West is that the Palestinian question cannot be solved militarily but through negotiations.
Dividing the Palestinians or taking advantage of a divided Palestine will not bring security to Israel or the Arab world.
As the heads of churches in Beit-ul-Moqaddas and the Holy Land said in a statement, “we pray for the day when the people of Gaza will be free from occupation, from political differences, from violence and from despair... [and] only bold steps towards just peace and ending the violence will protect human life and the dignity of both [Palestinians and Israelis]“. JORDANTIMES.COM

The law of diminishing options and assets has set in for the LTTE. There is no need to feel concerned over its self-created predicament, and its ultimate fate. But one has to feel concerned over the fate of the Sri Lankan Tamil cause.
The termination of the 2002 cease-fire agreement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and of the role of the foreign cease-fire monitors and facilitators underlines the determination of the government not to let anything stand in the way of its military operations against the LTTE reaching their logical conclusion.
In its objective, such a logical conclusion would be the disruption, if not the destruction, beyond recovery of the command and control of the LTTE and the re-enforcement of the writ of the government over the areas in the Northern Province, which are still under the control of the LTTE. Nobody can quarrel with this objective.
This objective is sought to be achieved through a two-pronged action-- intensified air strikes against the LTTE’s command and control in the Wanni region and graduated ground operations, which are initially focussed more on a decimation of the LTTE’s rank and file than on recovery of territory. If and when the rank and file is weakened substantially, the focus would turn to the recovery of territory presently under the LTTE’s control.
The more the command and control is disrupted by the Sri Lankan Air Force (SLAF), the easier will be the ground operations.
The longer the command and control remains intact, the slower will be the progress of the ground operations.
Unlike Al Qaeda, which is a decentralised organisation with its operatives capable of autonomous operations for a long time even in the absence of a centralised command and control, the LTTE is a very rigid and centralised organisation. Its operatives do not seem to have the same capability as the operatives of Al Qaeda for autonomous action. The disruption of the command and control could have a debilitating effect on the organisation.
The LTTE has a very narrow pyramid at the top. Its command and control is concentrated in the hands of essentially three persons--Prabakaran, its leader, Pottu Amman, the chief of its intelligence wing, and Soosai, the chief of the Sea Tigers.
If the air strikes can eliminate these three persons, that could mark the beginning of the end of the LTTE as it is constituted today and the ground operations could achieve their objective without large-scale civilian casualties.
The law of diminishing options and assets has set in for the LTTE. The law is already operating inexorably. It has very little option for offensive ground action of the guerilla type not amounting to terrorism. It has been reduced to fighting one defensive action after another against a harassing army in order to retain control of the territory and retard the advance of the Army towards Wanni. A guerilla force without offensive options slowly bleeds to death.
It still has the option of the card of terrorism in areas outside the Tamil belt. It has already been using this card, killing innocent civilians without minding about the impact of its acts of terrorism on the international community.
It has already lost considerable international support and understanding for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause.
The more it resorts to terrorism against soft targets, the more will be the loss of international support and the ultimate casualty will be that of the Tamil cause.
It has still two options left for it to use--a successful ground strike to destroy the fighter planes of the SLAF and a successful attack on an economic target of considerable strategic significance for the government.
To use these options, it needs assets--human and material.
Its human assets are still well-motivated and capable of turning the tide in its favour. But, its material assets are diminishing due to the disruption of its supply channels from abroad and its inability to mount successful offensive operations against the Army, which could replenish its stocks of arms, ammunition and explosives.
Human assets alone, however top grade, cannot produce miracles without adequate material assets.
Internationally, the LTTE finds itself more and more isolated.
A series of political blunders by Prabakaran like the brutal assassinations of Rajiv Gandhi, Premadasa and Laxman Kadirgamar and the unsuccessful attempt to kill Mrs. Chandrika Kumaratunge, when she was the President, and its frequent resort to terrorism against Sri Lankan Tamil leaders disliked by Prabakaran and other innocent civilians have severely damaged this goodwill.
OUTLOOKINDIA.COM

Afghan farmers work in a poppy field outside the southern city of Kandahar.

The opium poppy seedlings are already sprouting in Helmand province and all the predictions point to another record-breaking crop this year.
Farmers have irrigated extra patches of land, reclaiming desert to grow the plants which produce the raw materials for heroin.
With the Taleban insurgency still raging, the British counter-narcotics team in Afghanistan is unable to make any impact on the poppy problem in the south.
The farmers are weeding the fields at the moment in Helmand. It is a family business, and they insist there is no alternative.
“I only have a small area of land and 10 people in my family,“ one farmer says angrily.
“I can only grow enough wheat to last two months on this land, so the only way to feed them is growing poppies.“
It is very fertile land, but the farmers complain the cost of fuel to pump irrigation water and the lack of markets and infrastructure makes anything else untenable.
Another man had his poppy crop eradicated last year, but it will not stop him trying again.
“I lost my poppies, but those grown by the rich and the powerful aren’t touched. So why should I stop growing them?“ he asks.
The security situation is the biggest factor, but the lack of law and order and corruption are major problems in Helmand.
There is an eradication force which spends months cutting down the crops, but the richer growers or landowners pay them bribes to stay away and so far little has been achieved.
“There’s a correlation between instability and increased production,“ says David Belgrove, who heads the British counter-narcotics team in Afghanistan.
“To stop poppy production [requires] more than just law enforcement. It’s a complex thing of establishing the rule of law, building alternative livelihoods, building access to markets, education - and all of these things are very difficult to deliver in an unstable environment.“
But 13 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces are categorised by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime as “poppy free“ and they are hoping the lure of development money rewards will have helped even more governors achieve that status for their provinces this year.
One of these is Balkh up in the north where the Uzbek border meets Afghanistan.
Its capital, Mazar-e-Sharif is a bustling and largely secure city.
Much of this is down to Governor Atta, who has led a campaign against poppies and owes his success to good strong governance and maintaining law and order.
“Every achievement depends on good leadership and strong management,“ he says.
“We had a clear plan, we were serious and had a team that was not corrupt.“
He has even produced a glossy brochure which he hands to visitors explaining his tactics for success, but he complains he has seen none of the development incentives promised.
That smuggling still goes on is not in doubt. It is a multi-million-dollar business and drugs come through Balkh north to Central Asia or west to Iran.
After meeting and drinking tea with a number of contacts in different homes outside Mazar, a bearded, cheerful drug dealer took us to a place where they displayed plastic bags of liquid opium.
He explained how the traffickers would come round to all the villages, buying what they had before taking it out of the country.
“Ordinary people like you and I can’t take drugs out of the country,“ he explained.
“Only the foreigners and the big men with contacts can do it. They are stopped at police checkpoints, but they call the police chief, or a minister or the governor and they are allowed to pass.“
The governor laughs off these suggestions as ridiculous: “It’s just propaganda against me. I have done a great deal to prevent smuggling, there is evidence.“
There is a lot of talk of corruption at the higher levels, but the dealers do say they will not grow poppies as they fear retribution.
And although they have lost a profitable crop, for now another alternative is bridging the gap.
In a mud compound a short walk away another man goes through the process of stripping the buds off giant cannabis stalks.
In the autumn vast forests of marijuana plants scatter the landscape.
It is something that has always been done here, but the price has gone up by a factor of four in just a year.
But unless help can be given to provide a viable and legal alternative, the opium poppies will be back as people struggle with poverty.
BBC.CO.UK