Robert Gates

NEW DELHI: Noting that India needed an anti-missile defence, the US today talked about the possibility of cooperation in developing such a shield. "We understand India's needs for an anti-missile shield," visiting Defence Secretary Robert Gates said he held talks with his counterpart A K Antony.

The United States has urged European leaders as well as the public to be more supportive of NATO-led mission in Afghanistan, a cornerstone of the US war on terror, or the alliance will be "effectively destroyed" by a failure in the central Asian country.

As the US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, was recently visiting American forces in Djibouti, the Washington Post was reporting how the Pentagon has been spearheading a seemingly dicey initiative to pressure Washington into recognizing the secessionist northwestern region of Somalia known as “Somaliland” as an independent state.

George Santayana rightly said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” It is we who will suffer if we do not learn from history. The global monopoly men who make our leaders dance like marionettes ‘swaying to the symphony of destruction’ understand history cunningly and will benefit from it. It is these death merchants who funded and trained the Mujahedeen i.e. ‘those who fight’ to fight a proxy war that the soviets had no chance of winning. The Afghani fighters were trained by CIA and SaS who provided aid and comfort to some of the most malignant thugs known in that region.

The Bush administration's plan to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps by 92,000 troops over the next five years is running into trouble. In January, Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed adding 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines to bring the Army's total to 547,000 troops and the Marines' to 202,000. The idea was to relieve pressure on today's overstressed ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and to better equip the military to deal with similar unconventional wars in the future. The move, designed to provide six more combat brigade teams and their support units, complements President Bush's order late last year to boost U.S. troop strength temporarily for the current "surge" in Iraq.

At Speicher base in Iraq, U.S. Army Spec. Jeremy Hall got permission from a chaplain in August to post fliers announcing a meeting for atheists and other nonbelievers. When the group gathered, Specialist Hall alleges, his Army major supervisor disrupted the meeting and threatened to retaliate against him, including blocking his reenlistment in the Army.

A Chinese company with ties to Beijing's military and past links to Saddam Hussein's army in Iraq and the Taliban will gain access to U.S. defense-network technology under a proposed merger, Pentagon officials say.

"We are having trouble generating forces for all the missions that NATO, the EU, the UN and others need for missions around the world," said James Appathurai, the alliance's spokesman. The scope and size of the NATO response force would be reassessed, he said.

An intelligence officer noted that the US military had "two major contingency plans" for air strikes on Iran. "One is to bomb only the nuclear facilities. The second option is for a much bigger strike that would - over two or three days - hit all of the significant military sites as well. This plan involves more than 2,000 targets."

The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American ­officials. The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack. Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.