Word: missionizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their nation's role was solely humanitarian. Then in September, German forces called in a U.S. air strike in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan to destroy oil tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban. Some 140 people were killed, many of them civilians. That changed the perception of the mission among the German public and politicians alike. Franz Josef Jung, who was Defense Minister at the time of the bombing, resigned over the controversy, but other German officials declared that the event galvanized the country's commitment to being a full partner in the conflict, despite the inherent brutality...
That view did not go down well at home. Most Germans - 69% in a recent poll - want their troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. Merkel is now under growing pressure from Washington and other contributors to the Afghanistan mission to boost the German presence as part of Barack Obama's surge strategy. As a genuine Atlanticist, she will not want to snub the U.S. call for help. But as an arch-pragmatist, she knows that public opinion in Germany will not blithely countenance a significant increase. She refuses to comment on her plans until she attends an international...
...report found that the "all-source analysts" at the CIA and NCTC had enough information to disrupt the attack, but the dots were never connected. "[In] both cases, the mission to 'connect the dots' did not produce the result that, in hindsight, it could have," it said. In the analysts' defense, the report notes that the information "was fragmentary and embedded in a large volume of other data...
Last week's suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers in Khost, Afghanistan, underscores just how difficult a mission the agency - and the U.S. as a whole - faces in the country. Given the size of the CIA, the loss it suffered when a Jordanian assumed to have been an asset penetrating al-Qaeda instead detonated an explosives belt at a gathering of agency personnel, was the equivalent of the Army losing a battalion. It was a major setback for the CIA after eight years at war, not to mention the fact that it coincided with a moment when the Agency...
...Tehran immediately dismissed the report as rumor, calling it part of the "psychological war" being waged against Iran by the West. "The report is baseless. A diplomat returns to the country when his mission is finished in another country," Ramin Mehmanparast, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, told the Reuters news agency. "Sometimes they stay longer in the country where they served as diplomats for various reasons, including waiting for the end of the school semesters for their children...