What happens to vacuums

Sunday 1 November
Barack Obama is finding that winning the Nobel Peace prize is easier than actually winning the peace. When he arrived in office he made peace in the Middle East a priority. Unlike many others who had occupied the White House, he put his focus on the region right at the start rather than wait until his final year in office, hoping for a win that would secure that all-important issue for presidents, a legacy.
     But 10 months in, he's finding out why every other attempt to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians has failed. His attempts to get both sides around the table have failed. Hillary Clinton in Jerusalem has urged both sides to restart talks 'as soon as possible'. If that's the best the US can do, it's going to be a long winter.
     The Palestinians say there can be no talks until the Israelis stop building settlements as demanded by the international community. The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that's just a 'pretext and an obstacle' to prevent new talks. The Americans are trying to talk up the prospect of progress. Remember, when Barack Obama took office, he called on Israel to stop building settlements on what international law regards as occupied territory. Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted, and now Mrs Clinton says what is being offered by the Israelis on restraints on settlements is 'unprecedented'. What this boils down to is that the Israelis said no to halting the building and the Americans have accepted it.
     With the Palestinians' refusal to sit around the table until the issue is addressed, it means substantive peace talks are as far away as they ever were. What the politicians must know is that doing nothing is not an option. In the Middle East vacuums are often filled with violence and bloodshed.

Monday 2 November
Hamid Karzai has been re-elected Afghan president. The second round of voting has been scrapped after the sole challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out of the race, claiming the new poll would not have been fair. The Independent Election Commission said that as President Karzai was the only candidate left, he had been elected president.
     For the US and its NATO allies, it's good news and bad news. The good news is that a new poll, with all the security risks that would bring is now no longer needed. Conditions in many parts of the country are already deteriorating with the arrival of winter and turnout would have been seriously affected.
     Hamid Karzai – who was first elected in 2004 – has been the long-time favourite and was always likely to win the poll. But the allegations of ballot-stuffing by his supporters have damaged him greatly. As America is considering whether to send another 40,000 troops to the country, there are huge arguments against helping such a flawed figure whose legitimacy is in question and whose government may struggle to be genuinely effective.
     In the end America is likely to send the troops. Afghanistan may be the war it no longer wants – but it is also the war it cannot lose.

Tuesday 3 November
Radovan Karadzic will finally appear at his trial in The Hague where he is accused of genocide and war crimes. The former leader of the Bosnian Serbs boycotted the beginning of his trial last week, claiming he needed more time to prepare his defence. He will appear later today at a procedural hearing to discuss his trial. The 64-year-old is representing himself.
     As the president of the Republika Srpska during the early 1990s he's accused of two charges of genocide and nine more of war crimes during the wars in the Balkans. He has protested his innocence and refused to enter any formal pleas. He has asked for a fair and speedy trial, which his accusers claim is more than he ever offered his thousands of victims.

Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent