More bad news from Libya, from Time’s Global Spin colleague Tony Karon:
The reason there’s a well-worn military euphemism – “collateral damage” – to describe incidents like Sunday morning’s air strike in which NATO admits it may have inadvertently killed Libyan civilians in a residential area of Tripoli is that they’re an inevitable
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Steve Sotloff with the latest grim reportfrom the rebel stronghold of Misrata, Libya:
“Where is NATO?” the rebel asks, with no small amount of frustration. It is just after midnight, Friday, June 17, and he is holed up in Dafniyah, a hamlet west of the revolutionary enclave of Misratah on the coast of western Libya. Like all the
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A hat-tip to Defense Secretary Robert Gates for warning of NATO’s “dim, if not dismal future” unless its non-U.S. members starting funding their defenses more robustly. After 11 weeks of attacks on Libya, he noted, the allies are running short on bombs. “The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the …
Henry Kissinger had a sobering op-ed in the Washington Post Tuesday that laid out the reality of the US position in Afghanistan.
First, the fundamental conundrum of “nation building” in a fake state:
But nation-building ran up against the irony that the Afghan nation comes into being primarily in opposition to occupying forces.
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The Pentagon has long had troubles developing an IFF system — a sophisticated electronics box aboard an aircraft that tells the pilot if the blip on her heads-up display represents a friend or foe many miles away (IFF stands for identification friend or foe). Now it seems to be having the same challenge in the wars it’s …
After many weeks of speculation and veiled threats-by-extension from Western government leaders, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced on Monday that he is seeking arrest warrants for Muammar Qaddafi, his son Seif al-Islam Qaddafi and his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Sanousi for systematically targeting citizens …
So last week, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was telling us that everything was going swimmingly in his alliance’s effort to force Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi from power. “We have succeeding in taking out a lot of his capacities, and now you see the opposition is gaining ground,” Rasmussen said Thursday. “We are …
“So did you kill Gaddafi last night?”
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen laughed generously at the temerity of the question. The former Danish prime minister — now chief of the most powerful military alliance in history — unspooled his political answer to an impolitic query. “Let me stress that we do not target …
Late last month the White House hit Syria’s intelligence agency and two relatives of President Bashar al-Assad with sanctions because of Assad’s crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. President Obama did not target Assad himself with those sanctions, nor did Obama call for Assad to step down. A White House aide told Reuters that Obama …
Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared Tuesday that because Muammar Gaddafi’s residential compound serves as a command-and-control node for his military forces, it is a legitimate target for U.S. and NATO aircraft to attack. But the person who actually does the commanding and controlling? Not so much. “We are not targeting him …
A warm first greeting to Battleland readers. Here in London, where I am based, I’ve written for TIME on several occasions about a strange arrangement that means that Belgium, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands are de facto nuclear weapons states. The U.S. stores 200 B-61 thermonuclear gravity bombs in those five European …
For the first time in history, a Russian submarine will be engaging in war games with NATO subs next month. “Apart from honing their skills, the naval rescuers on the games will certainly contribute to mutual confidence between the sides,” Russian analyst Vladimir Yevseyev tells The Voice of Russia news service. “This, in turn, …
