In the absence of full-scale expansion of international peacekeeping forces within and beyond Kabul, security is deteriorating.
The Palestinians will have to refrain from violence, accept Israel's right to exist in peace within the 1967 borders (modified through negotiations with land swaps), a long-term presence of either U.N. or NATO peacekeeping forces within Palestine, and the right of return of its people to its own lands (with perhaps a token number to Israel).
The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an international peacekeeping mission within the country, also deplored the casualties in Kinshasa.
Within peacekeeping circles, Congo is becoming known as "the African equivalent of Afghanistan," said Annika Hilding-Norberg, a director at the Peace Operations Training Institute in Virginia, because of the conflict's enduring violence and complexity.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan seized the moment and all but ordered Washington to muster a peacekeeping mission, and within days European and African leaders had joined in the chorus.
But the problems are also deep within the peacekeeping structure.
The official said that there had been "a lot of miscommunication" within the peacekeeping mission.
The brigade will be part of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo, within its troop ceiling of 19,815.
Paula Donovan, of Code Blue, which campaigns to highlight how peacekeepers can sexually abuse with "impunity", said: "The system now in place permits almost all the criminal perpetrators within UN peacekeeping missions to escape prosecution".
With Liberians in their besieged capital running out of food and water, and rebel forces breaching key defensive lines, a regional West African group announced today in Senegal that it could send as many as 1,300 Nigerian peacekeeping troops to Liberia within two weeks.
