Operations

NATO on Tuesday confirmed Pakistan's participation in next week's summit in Chicago, U.S. Ambassador Ivo Daalder said via Twitter.

Last week, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen threatened to exclude Pakistan from the summit on the future of its neighbor, Afghanistan, if Pakistan did not reopen supply routes that have been closed since U.S. troops accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November. Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said Monday that the supply routes could be reopened now that Pakistan had “made a point.”

“Now we can move on,” she told reporters in Islamabad, according to The Associated Press.

Tensions between Pakistan and the United States remain high, however. Pakistan has asked President Obama to apologize for last year's incident, but the U.S. president has so far refused to do so.

NATO has failed to investigate — or even acknowledge — the deaths of dozens of civilians in questionable air strikes during the 2011 campaign in Libya, Human Rights Watch asserted in a new report Monday.

The New York-based group examined in detail eight air strikes that killed 72 civilians, including 20 women and 24 children. It concludes that the apparent absence of a clear military target in seven of the strikes raises concerns of possible laws-of-war violations that should be investigated, and calls for victims' families to be compensated.

“We do know that the CIA was trying to stop the story," said the House Intelligence chairman who is ordering an investigation.

There have been more than a dozen instances of Afghan commanders refusing to act on U.S. intelligence to go after high-value targets in night raids, The Washington Post reported.

U.S. forces shifted control of night-raid operations to the Afghans as one part of the deal that led to the strategic partnership agreement announced by President Obama this month.

Night raids, which have been used to pinpoint enemy targets, have been unpopular among civilians in Afghanistan due to civilian casualties, something U.S. officials have argued does not occur in most raids.

As the war on al Qaeda's Yemen terror cell heats up, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday rules out any possibility of sending American troops to the Middle Eastern country. 

Obama said the American intelligence community is now "learning lessons" from the intercepted explosive device.

Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) made an unsuccessful attempt Wednesday to tie half of the procurement funds for the F-35 fighter to the Defense Department providing a date when the fighter would be operational.

But Akin’s amendment faced apparent unanimous opposition on the House Armed Services Committee at its markup, and a substitute amendment from ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) was instead adopted.

The amendment blocks using funds in the Defense authorization bill "to propose, plan for, or execute an additional BRAC round."

The double agent also provided information for the drone strike that killed the terrorist suspected of the USS Cole bombing.

Rep. Judy Chu and several Democrats introduced legislation Monday that would call for a new hazing definition in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and create a national database to track incidents of military hazing.

Chu has pushed Congress and the military to do more to stop military hazing after her nephew, Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, committed suicide in Afghanistan last year after a hazing incident.