On a hilltop in central Kabul, the relics of Soviet armoured vehicles sit in the shadow of an incongruously vast and empty swimming pool. A tower of diving boards looks down into the concrete carcass built by the Russians. Boys play football there and on Fridays the basin is used for dog fights; combat is the only option for the canine gladiators, as they cannot climb up the sheer, steep sides. From the vantage point you can see the city's graveyards, its bright new mosques, the narco-palaces of drug-funded business potentates and the spread of modest brick homes where most Kabulis live. It's a favourite spot for reporters when they need to escape the press of urgent events and get cleaner air in their lungs. 

For years journalists have sought to tell stories that go beyond the conflict in Afghanistan. We've tried to portray this country - the crossroads of central Asia, the summer home of Moghul emperors, the cockpit of clashing empires - as more than a place of blood, deprivation and extremism. Amid the dust and the heat it has its oases of tranquility, its laughter and its charms. From the market stalls of sweet pomengranates that line the road in autumn to the rose gardens newly planted in central Kabul, Afghanistan is a place of thorny history, cultural complexity and spartan beauty.

Alas, we cannot ignore the warfare. Great journalistic energy has to go into counting the casualties, explaining the violence and charting the shifting strategies of the combatants. It's a conflict whose outcome is uncertain. The bullets and bombs tear through the flesh of ordinary Afghans, fanatical insurgents and Western soldiers with equal awfulness. A blast takes the life of a child, deprives a wife of a husband and faintly furthers some cause. The impact is immediate and local, but it reverberates harshly in Washington, Delhi, London or Paris.

Can we weave together the warp of war and the weft of daily life in Afghanistan? Yes, in this blog, we hope is the answer. In the tradition of the region's richly patterned carpets, it will be both intricate and stoutly structured, minutely detailed and expansive in scale.

It will gather the impressions, observations and thoughts of our correspondents, video journalists and photographers in Afghanistan, whether they be in Kabul, on embedded assignments with different military units or travelling independently. Infrequent visitors like myself, just returned from Kabul, will contribute. I went to assess the mood, interview officials and see how our large journalistic operation is run. The blog will link our teams in Washington, London, Brussels, Delhi and Islamabad, bringing to bear a unique array of perspectives on the Afghan story.

It should be an intelligent, lively and useful addition to the words, images and video that Reuters already produces to illustrate this dynamic, significant and absorbing story. The blog won't be complete without your views. Please contribute your comments and become part of the debate on the future of Afghanistan. Be partisan if you wish, but kindly remain pleasant.

Welcome to 'The Afghan Journal.'

[Reuters pictures of diving boards at an empty Kabul swimming pool,a girl on a street and soldiers passing by another ]

The debate still rages over which side came out of the August 7-12, 2008 war better.

It’s true that Russia crushed Georgia’s army when it stepped in to help South Ossetian rebels but its forceful reaction to the Georgian attempt to retake rebel held areas scared its European partners and isolated the country. Only Nicaragua followed Moscow and recognised both South Ossetia and another breakaway region Abkhazia as independent states after the war.

And despite an overwhelming military victory, the war also showed up technological and organisational deficiencies in Russia’s army.

For Georgia, the unsuccessful war dented its reputation as a reliable and steady ally for the West in the notoriously unstable South Caucasus. It also slowed President Mikheil Saakashvili’s NATO ambitions and undermined his popularity at home.

Both countries present starkly different versions of the war and who started it. A commission headed by a Swiss diplomat hopes to provide some answers later this year.

In the meantime the peace remains fragile, an estimated 30,000 displaced Georgians still live in temporary accommodation and relatives of those killed — Georgians, South Ossetians and Russians — will mark the anniversary.

Click for more stories on the Georgia-Russia 2008 war from Reuters AlertNet.

Breaking into the summer holiday lull, Austrian politics has gotten into a lather over a far-right populist’s call for a referendum on whether a mainly German-speaking region of northern Italy should rejoin Austria.

No matter how far-fetched, his proposal raised a hue and cry by challenging the taboo of old unreconstructed nationalism in a country restlessly determined to live down its Nazi past.

South Tyrol - Alto Adige in Italian - is an autonomous, Alpine province of Italy bordering Austria. It was annexed by Italy from defeated Austria-Hungary at the end of World War One.

Italy granted increasing self-government to South Tyrol in the decades after World War Two, defusing separatist unrest by Austro-German speakers. It is now among Italy’s richest regions, with an open border to Austria thanks to EU integration.

But Martin Graf, a rightist deputy speaker of Austria’s parliament, declared on Sunday that South Tyrol was actually “part of overall Tyrol”, and only “currently” within Italy.

The universal right of self-determination should apply for all “the German people” in Europe - just as those in old Communist East Germany got their wish to merge into one Germany at the end of the Cold War in 1990. “It’s time to ask the people if there should be one Tyrol,” Graf said.

Graf owes his parliamentary post due to the fact that his far-right Freedom Party replaced the Greens as Austria’s No. 3 party in last year’s parliamentary election.

Some Freedom members have called into question an Austrian law that prohibits neo-Nazi activities. Graf has links to a rightist fraternity, Olympia, that nurses old German nationalist causes and has acted as a platform for Holocaust deniers.

So his South Tyrol remarks were unsettling and drew swift fire from mainstream conservative and centre-left politicians protective of Austria’s delicate democratic reputation.

Some pointed out what they deemed the absurdity and danger of redrawing borders or re-championing national differences in a 21st century European Union that has largely done away with frontier barriers in a spirit of common peace and prosperity.

“(Graf) should avoid such ill-considered and unrealistic statements,” said Guenther Platter, conservative People’s Party governor of Austria’s (North) Tyrol province. “Borders have long since fallen and we live today in the heart of a common Europe. Cooperation between (the two Tyrols) is better than ever.”

Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger said Graf’s “radical, unrealistic” comments were at odds with good neighbourly relations with Italy and invited misunderstanding.

Social Democratic party general secretary Laura Rudas accused Graf of “political pyromania”.

A defiant Graf retorted: “None of my attackers are in the position to explain why there should be a self-determination right for Tibetans and Kurds, but it is still being withheld from South Tyroleans after 90 years.”

The solid front of criticism was briefly punctured by a statement of support for Graf from the South Tyrol Freedom faction in the provincial assembly in Bolzano (Bozen in German).

Unconvinced, Austrian media sought out the ethnically German governor of South Tyrol, Luis Durnwalder. He said he was convinced that if a vote were held tomorrow, most South Tyroleans would choose to stay as they are now within Italy.

 ”If parties had six months to campaign on this, you might see a small majority for ‘Anschluss’ with Austria,” he told Austrian state television, using the discredited word for Austria’s enthusiastic accession to Nazi Germany in 1938.

“But it wouldn’t be realistic. Italy would never consent. Violence or terror naturally would be no option. And, given existing treaties, we would never get a majority (for rejoining Austria) in the United Nations.”

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said he would try again to have parliament dismiss the rightist from the speaker job over what he called behaviour damaging to Austrian interests.

But Finance Minister Josef Proell said that while Graf’s remarks were “totally unacceptable and scurrilous”, his conservatives would not contribute votes crucial for a two-thirds majority needed to topple Graf.

He said it would be wrong to turn Graf into “a martyr via parliamentary manoeuvre” and he should resign himself.

Graf ruled that out, saying he could not be punished for exercising his right to free speech.

(Photo: Martin Graf drinks beer during a Fraternity Group meeting in Innsbruck June 20, 2009.  REUTERS/Dominic Ebenbichler)

By Patrick Worsnip
    
What’s more important — the right of a sovereign state to manage its affairs free of outside interference or the duty of the international community to intervene when massive human rights violations are being committed in a country?
 
The United Nations — nothing if not a talking shop — has been debating that question this week in the General Assembly. It goes to the heart of what the U.N. is all about.
 
At issue is a declaration issued four years ago by a summit of more than 150 world leaders asserting the “responsibility to protect” — R2P in U.N. jargon — populations threatened with genocide or other mass atrocities. It was a somewhat belated response to widespread criticism of the United Nations for failing to stop massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s.
    
The carefully crafted declaration said the responsibility began with the government of the country concerned. If that failed, it foresaw a sliding scale of international action, ranging from advice through mediation to — in a last resort — intervention by force. And such a use of force could only be authorized by the Security Council, meaning the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China would all have to agree.
 
Cautious as it was, the summit document was seen by many advocacy groups as a step on the road to fulfilling their dream that if a government was committing atrocities against its people, the United Nations would march in and stop it.
 
In the real world, U.N. officials say, that is not going to happen, at least under the peacekeeping rules that have applied in recent decades. These do not authorize U.N. forces to go to war against the national army of a sovereign state — a move that would amount to invasion. Witness the six-year-old conflict in Sudan’s western region of Darfur — branded by some as genocide — where a U.N./African Union peacekeeping force is only now being slowly deployed with the consent of the Khartoum government. The only time that R2P has been invoked in practice — and even then retrospectively — was in former U.N. secretary-General Kofi Annan’s mission to mediate in post-election violence in Kenya last year, U.N. officials say.
 
This week’s debate was to take stock of R2P and discuss how to take it forward, although no immediate action is expected. It came against the background of a determined attempt by radicals led by General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto, a former Nicaraguan Sandinista government minister, to kick the issue into the long grass.

For D’Escoto and those who agree with him, R2P is code for an attempt by big Western powers to impose their will on the weak. In a contentious “concept note” issued to all U.N. members he declared that “colonialism and interventionism used ‘responsibility to protect’ arguments.” One member of a panel of experts D’Escoto convened to launch the debate, U.S. academic Noam Chomsky, said R2P-type arguments had been used to justify Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria and Nazi Germany’s pre-World War Two move into Czechoslovakia.
 
While some radical states, such as Venezuela, echoed D’Escoto’s line in the assembly debate, human rights groups expressed relief that most cautiously supported a strictly defined interpretation of R2P and backed proposals by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for developing it. Ban has proposed periodic reviews of how countries have implemented R2P and regular reports by himself on the issue. “To those that argued this week that the U.N. was not ready to make a reality of the commitment to end mass atrocities, the majority of the General Assembly gave its answer: you are wrong,” said Monica  Serrano of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Despite that, there have been clear signs of concern among developing countries that unless tightly controlled, R2P could be used in support of future Iraq-style invasions of countries that have angered the big powers.
 
What’s your view?

Germany’s defence minister gets his tongue in a twist every time he tries to explain why the German army is not in a “war” in Afghanistan, even though more and more German soldiers are coming home in coffins.

“If we were to speak of ‘war’ then we would only be focusing on the military aspect in the region and that would be a mistake,” Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung said after three more German soldiers were killed on Tuesday, raising the total to 35.

“The goal of the German army is, alongside providing security, to help the country rebuild and with its development. We are not occupiers. Unfortunately there are situations where our soldiers have to fight. But we’re not looking for fights.”

Jung sounded even more opposed to the term “war” in a television interview: “That is not war. In a war you don’t build schools, you don’t set up the water and power supplies and you don’t build kindergartens and hospitals and you don’t train the military and the police.”

Jung is not in an enviable position as the conservative defence minister of a deeply pacifist country that has had to jump over some very long shadows of its troubled past before it was able to send troops abroad as part of international peacekeeping operations. That Germany is even part of a military deployment abroad and getting involved in combat despite the ghosts of its past is something that I could not possibly have imagined when I first came to the country in 1989.

Yet Germany has the third-largest contingent of NATO forces in Afghanistan — 3,720 soldiers concentrated in the north — even if the German forces are not allowed to shoot unless fired upon first and their Tornado aircraft are restricted to unarmed reconnaissance flights.

Public opinion is nevertheless overwhelmingly against Germany’s involvement in the NATO mission in Afghanistan — even though West Germany was a prime beneficiary of NATO’s unyielding support during the Cold War. With their post-World War Two indoctrination against war on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, it is hard to underestimate the deep anti-war sentiment throughout Germany — they are weaned on the notion of Nie Wieder Krieg! (War never again!). And Jung’s party, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, is eager to win the parliamentary elections in three months — and does not want any turbulence or a national debate about Afghanistan to get in the way.

Military leaders have quietly grumbled about how Merkel has largely avoided the whole Afghanistan complex and left Jung on his own to take the heat.

So that is why Jung, who last year was at the centre of a similar semantics debate about his reluctance to use the military-sounding term “fallen” (”Gefallene”) when talking about troops killed, is now soldiering on for his party and is forced to perform semantic backflips to avoid uttering the word “Krieg”. He repeatedly rejects any suggestion that German troops are involved in “war” even though his long answers to the simple question — “Is Germany at war?” — only invite more journalists to press him again and again for a clear answer.

The centre-left Social Democrats, partners in Merkel’s ruling grand coalition, are growing tired of Jung’s verbal gyrations. “The chancellor has to come out and explain to the people of Germany: this is a deployment in which people could get killed and we are in a war against terror,” said Peter Struck of the SPD, who leads the SPD’s parliamentary group and was a highly popular Defence Minister before Jung took over in 2005.

And the SPD’s Reinhold Robbe, parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, indirectly criticised Jung’s avoiding the term “war” once again this week. “It’s still being denied that the German army is fighting a war in the Hindukush,” Robbe said. “We’ve got to stop turning a blind eye to the facts.”
(Additional reporting by Dave Cutler in London)
PHOTO - Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung attends a session of the German lower house of parliament Bundestag in Berlin, June 18, 2009. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

- Luke Baker is a political and general news correspondent at Reuters. -

The mountains and deserts of southern Afghanistan are far removed from the elegant charms of Trieste in northern Italy, but there will be a link between the two this weekend.

Foreign ministers from the Group of Eight nations meet in the Italian city on the Adriatic on Thursday for three days of talks, with the state of play in Afghanistan, as well as developments in Iran and the Middle East, front and centre of their agenda.

Nearly eight years and tens of billions of dollars on from the U.S.-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban, the United States and its allies appear no closer to bringing long-term stability to the country, with the Taliban resurgent throughout the south and west and the instability expanding across the border into Pakistan.

One of the major areas of unrest is Helmand, a vast desert and mountain province in the far south where around 8,000 British troops have been deployed for 3-1/2 years and 10,000 U.S. Marines are steadily being sent in as reinforcements.

While 18,000 troops backed by helicopters, jets, Predator drones, armoured vehicles and endless advanced weaponry may sound like more than enough of a match for bands of bearded militants who usually aren't armed with much more than a Kalashnikov rifle, it's not always the case.

Helmand, split down the middle by the Helmand river, is larger than Switzerland and has a daunting mix of terrain that the Taliban and their followers are far more familiar with than foreign troops sweating in heavy, cumbersome combat gear. And it's not just the challenges of the topography, it's the sheer size of the area that stretches any army's capability.

When I was in Helmand late last year, British troops at a Forward Operating Base in the far north of the province told me that they didn't have enough troops or back-up to venture any further than three kilometres from their small fortified camp to take on the enemy.

"The Taliban know it. If we attack them, they go just over three kilometres away and we have to come back to base," an officer at the remote outpost told me.

The absurdity of that situation partly explains why Britain and the United States have acknowledged that Helmand is currently in a "stalemate", a position they hope will be broken with a new strategy and the increase in troops in the coming months.

But the deadlock in fighting and the need for more manpower-- there are 90,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 50 percent less than in now relatively more stable  Iraq -- is not the only concern on the agenda for the G8 foreign ministers.

As well as trying to agree amongst themselves how they can best support the U.S.- and NATO-driven effort, they need to assess the implications of non-cooperation from Iran, on Afghanistan's western border, and the widening instability in the Pakistan tribal areas on Afghanistan's eastern border. Iran was due to send a delegation to the G8 meeting, but in the wake of international condemnation of the fallout from its disputed presidential election, it has cancelled its participation.

Afghanistan's election in August, when President Hamid Karzai will seek reelection despite broad unpopularity in the country and among some of his Western backers, will also be a focus of discussion. Karzai's high-profile makes him stand out among the 41candidates registered for the Aug. 20 poll. That greater degree of visibility is likely to secure him enough votes for reelection, according to some opinion polls, even if many Afghans express frustration at the scare progress made during his past 5 years in power.

Politically, socially and militarily, Afghanistan remains hugely in flux nearly eight years on from the Taliban's overthrow. While army commanders admit there can be no military solution to the conflict, diplomats and development experts are struggling to find a political way forward either.

Three days of talks among eight foreign ministers in Trieste is unlikely to go very far in resolving what is becoming an ever more intractable conflict 5,000 kilometres away.

 For many, Vietnam has always been two things - a war and a country. Since probably the mid-1990s, though, when Washington and Hanoi established diplomatic relations, the balance — in terms of headlines at least — started to tip decisively toward “Vietnam the country”.

Vietnam’s economic transition and integration with the world has, indeed, made for some decent reading. So it’s been interesting to note since moving to Hanoi a few months ago the strong comeback that “Vietnam the war” has made in the form of articles about Afghanistan and the Obama presidency.

 In February, Newsweek ran a cover story called Afghanistan “Obama’s Vietnam“. Other examples are plentiful.

This is not a new phenomenon. Pundits slapped the Vietnam label on the Soviet Union’s fateful foray into Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s. The Wall Street Journal recently (and with some sarcasm, one suspects) labeled it “reductio ad Vietnam” - “That’s the view that every U.S. military action lasting more than the flight time of a cruise missile is likely to descend into a bloody, stalemated, morally and politically intolerable Sartrean nightmare”.

The Vietnam parallel, it noted, has been deployed to describe military interventions in Lebanon, the Falklands (for Britain), Nicaragua, Iraq (twice), Somalia and the Balkans.

As far as I can tell, the state-run Vietnamese press has avoided drawing the parallel, and the discussion hasn’t really permeated the blogosphere here either.

Hanoi-based journalist Matt Steinglass, writing in the GlobalPost, quotes a former North Vietnamese army colonel as saying the U.S. was making the same mistake in Afghanistan  that it made in Vietnam. Nguyen Huu Nguyen, now a military historian, said additional U.S. troop deployments will not accomplish anything. If anything,  it will only sink deeper into a quagmire.

I suspect that most Vietnamese just aren’t that interested, even if there are some similarities. The Vietnamese are often lauded for their ability to focus on the future rather than dwell on their country’s war-torn past. The Communist Party’s media censors may also be doing their part to avoid offending a one-time foe who is now an important economic and strategic partner.

{Reuters photo of a worker at a construction site in Hanoi]

The overthrow of Madagascar’s leader may have had nothing to do with events elsewhere in Africa, but after four violent changes of power within eight months the question is bound to arise as to whether the continent is returning to old ways.

Three years without coups between 2005 and last year had appeared to some, including foreign investors, to have indicated a fundamental change from the first turbulent decades after independence. This spate of violent overthrows could now be another reason for investors to tread more warily again, particularly as Africa feels the impact of the global financial crisis.

"Although I don't think these instances of instability in Africa are related to each other or part of a pattern, I think there's no doubt external constituents and businesspeople around the world will assume there is a pattern," said Tom Cargill, Africa Programme Coordinator at London thinktank Chatham House.

The fact that coup makers have succeeded without being forced to step down or even face major censure could also embolden those who might be tempted to take power in bigger countries, where falling growth is encouraging disaffection.

"Look at ... other African countries, so-called pivotal states: Nigeria is in a terrible state, so is Egypt, so is Kenya, all these so-called big countries," said Hussein Solomon, a political science professor at the University of Pretoria.

Although there can be a tendency to group very diverse African states together, the picture is far from uniform - Ghana's presidential election two months ago was one of Africa's closest, but avoided major violence, reassuring investors despite an acute fiscal crisis.

But social pressures are growing across Africa as a result of the world economic crisis.

The dramatic U-turn by rich countries as they bail out or buy up failing industries is also prompting a reassessment of the model sold to Africa by Western donors since the Cold War -- a combination of market capitalism and multiparty democracy.

Cargill said factors were both the financial crisis and the rise of one-party state China, an increasingly important source of investment and trade for Africa.

"I think in future the whole idea of the democratic capitalist system will be tested and questioned, and there will be some who take advantage of its being questioned for their own private ends to launch their own bids for power," he said.

That debate is already taking place at the African Union, whose rules ban unconstitutional seizures of power but whose chairman for the next year, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, opposes what he says are foreign democratic structures imposed on Africa.

The AU has told Madagascar that any seizure of power by unconstitutional means would be considered a coup d'etat, punishable by AU sanctions or suspension.

But that sits uneasily with Gaddafi's rebuke last week of Mauritania's first democratically elected leader, largely confined to his village after being deposed in a coup last year.

"He must accept the fact,” said Gaddafi, who seized power in 1969 “He is not the first head of state to be overthrown.”

Is Africa returning to the old ways or did it never really leave them behind? Will a reassessment of the financial model pushed by Western donors also mean a new look at the multiparty democracy?

For months U.S. commanders in Afghanistan have been asking for more troops and Washington has been increasingly receptive. Today, we turned the spotlight on the skeptics in this story.

How much heed should President Barack Obama pay to their concerns? As a presidential candidate, he promised to send more troops to Afghanistan and he has made the war there the top U.S. military priority. But are more U.S. forces the answer to Afghanistan’s worsening violence? If so, how many more?

Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to make a recommendation to the president on Afghanistan in the coming days.  But Gates has already publicly supported a request by General David McKiernan, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, for up to 30,000 more troops.

Opponents of a big buildup of forces have some alternative proposals:

– pay tribal leaders or warlords to keep al Qaeda out of their areas.

– focus international efforts on improving infrastructure and providing humanitarian aid.

– send a smaller number of troops to accomplish clearly defined missions, rather than large brigades of more than 3,000 which run more risk of alienating local people.

Do the skeptics have a point? Are any of their ideas worth considering? Or should Obama deploy thousands more troops soon, as President George W. Bush did in 2007 with the “surge” in Iraq, to make clear that America will not quit?

Photo credit: Reuters/Bob Strong  A soldier with the U.S. Army’s 6-4 Cavalry makes his way down a mountain path during a patrol near Combat Outpost Keating in eastern Afghanistan Jan.24, 2009.

Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?

It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.

As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.

For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.

The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.

Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above  – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.

Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.

The media strategy has been backed up by zero tolerance within the military and security establishment for anyone going “off message” - field commanders or political insiders who seemed to relish leaking tid-bits to their favoured reporters in 2006 are now keeping mum.

And while the virtual media war has raged – with pro-Palestinian websites like electronicintifada.net or Hamas’ own website http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/ ratcheting up the rhetoric alongside their Israeli foes – many in the traditional media (or dare I say MSM) complain that they have been totally defeated by Israel’s media strategy which has prevented them from entering Gaza or a ‘closed military zone’ neighbouring Gaza.

The world’s press has been herded on to a hill-top 2 kilometres from the Gaza Strip - where Israeli political and military spokespeople wander among the satellite trucks and live positions ‘briefing’ journalists with the official view of what’s going on inside Gaza.

As much as the protagonists have been duking it out in the virtual world - online media now has the clout to shape the way war stories are told and delivered.

The most surreal example of this is probably Joe the Plumber - yes, that Joe the Plumber of US election campaign fame - who has been engaged by pro-Israeli US website Pajamas Media to file reports from Israeli towns under Hamas rocket fire.

Joe’s basic premise seems to be that the media is inherently biased against Israel and journalists have no business being in the war zone anyway.

While you might not agree with his point-of-view - Joe is an example of the sort of do-it-yourself journalism with a strong voice that has been empowered by the Internet.

Read these two accounts - one from my colleague Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and this one from another Gaza journalist - and I think you’ll agree that reporting from inside a warzone is important, journalists should be there and the combatants should facilitate rather than threaten this effort.

And by the way - in case you were wondering - a GoogleBattle between Israel and Palestine gives Israel a decisive victory. IDF vs. Hamas, though, has Hamas edging it.

PHOTO CREDITS

Photgraphers take pictures of Israeli tanks. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Massive explosion in southern Gaza town of Rafah. REUTERS/Ibrahim abu-Mustafa