The BBC is reporting on a leaked NATO report claiming that elements of Pakistani intelligence are directly aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan even as the U.S.-led NATO forces are fighting them:

The Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services, according to a secret Nato report seen by the BBC.

The leaked report, derived from thousands of interrogations, claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people.

A BBC correspondent says the report is painful reading for international forces and the Afghan government.

(…)

The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville in Kabul says the report – on the state of the Taliban – fully exposes for the first time the relationship between the ISI and the Taliban.

The report is based on material from 27,000 interrogations with more than 4,000 captured Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters and civilians.

It notes: “Pakistan’s manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly”.

It says that Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

“Senior Taliban representatives, such as Nasiruddin Haqqani, maintain residences in the immediate vicinity of ISI headquarters in Islamabad,” it said.

It quotes a senior al-Qaeda detainee as saying: “Pakistan knows everything. They control everything. I can’t [expletive] on a tree in Kunar without them watching.”

“The Taliban are not Islam. The Taliban are Islamabad.”

Pakistani official are not surprisingly dismissing the report as “old wine in an even older bottle”:

“We can disregard this as a potentially strategic leak,” [Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar] said, adding that Pakistan and Afghanistan should stop blaming each other for cross-border problems.

“These claims have been made many, many times. Pakistan stands behind any initiative that the Afghan government takes for peace,” she said. “We have no hidden agenda in Afghanistan.

“We consider any threat to Afghanistan’s independence and sovereignty as a threat to Pakistan’s existence.”

For their part, NATO officials are saying that conclusions should not be drawn from the report given that the source of much of the information contained therein came from highly motivated extremists:

KABUL, Afghanistan — A spokesman for the NATO-led coalition on Wednesday confirmed the existence of a report that summarizes the views of Taliban detainees, who claim that they are winning the war thanks to cooperation from some Afghan government officials and soldiers and who say their movement is controlled by Pakistan’s intelligence service.

But the official, Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings of the International Security Assistance Force, disputed accounts of the NATO report that suggested the alliance’s analysts accepted the Taliban views as valid.

“This document aggregates the comments of Taliban detainees in a captive environment without considering the validity of or motivation behind their reflections,” Colonel Cummings said, in an unusually detailed rebuttal of accounts of the classified report’s contents. “Any conclusions drawn from this would be questionable at best.”

(…)

NATO’s response indicated it was more concerned at suggestions that Afghan officials and soldiers were demoralized and expected a Taliban victory once coalition troops pull out than about the claims of Pakistani collaboration.

“It is important not to draw conclusions based on Taliban comments or musings,” Colonel Cummings said. “These detainees include some of the most motivated and ruthless of the insurgents who are inspired to play up their success. It is what they want us to believe they think.”

“We also dispute the idea that somehow the Afghan national security forces might be working with the Taliban. Many dedicated patriotic Afghan security force members have lost their lives defending Afghanistan from insurgents.”

This is all well-taken, of course. However, given the other evidence we’ve seen over the years linking Pakistani actors to the Taliban and apparently al Qaeda, would it really be all that surprising if this was true?

The well-respected aid group Doctors Without Borders is suspending its work in the jails in the city of Mistrata based on what it calls evidence of widespread torture taking place right under the new regimes nose:

BENGHAZI, Libya — Doctors Without Borders has suspended its work in prisons in the Libyan city of Misrata because it said torture was so rampant that some detainees were brought for care only to make them fit for further interrogation, the group said Thursday.

The announcement was compounded by a statement from Amnesty International saying it has recorded widespread prisoner abuse in other cities as well, leading to the death of several inmates.

The allegations, which come more than three months after former leader Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed, were an embarrassment to the governing National Transitional Council, which is struggling to establish its authority in the divided nation.

Doctors Without Borders said that since August, its medical teams have treated 115 people in Misrata who bore torture-related wounds, including cigarette burns, heavy bruising, bone fractures, tissue burns from electric shocks and kidney failure from beatings. Two detainees died after being interrogated, the group’s general director said.

“Patients were brought to us in the middle of interrogation for medical care, in order to make them fit for further interrogation. This is unacceptable,” MSF general director Christopher Stokes said in a statement. “Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.”

Libya’s Western-backed leadership, which has sought to assure the world of its commitment to democracy and human rights, has acknowledged that some prisoners held by revolutionary forces have been abused. It insisted the mistreatment was not systematic and pledged to tackle the problem.

But the transitional government has been unable to rein in the dozens of militias that arose during the war and have been reluctant to disband or submit to central authority.

Amnesty International said in a statement issued Thursday that it has met with a number of detainees in Tripoli, Misrata, and Gharyan who showed visible marks indicating torture, including open wounds on the head, limbs, back and other parts of the body. A number of detainees spoke to Amnesty about beatings with electric cables and metal chains, and they reported being suspended in contorted positions and given electric shocks.

The London-based group said the torture and mistreatment, mostly against suspected Gadhafi loyalists and sometimes foreign nationals from sub-Saharan African countries, is carried out by officially recognized military and security bodies as well as by a number of armed militias operating outside any legal framework. The group said several detainees died in custody from torture, detailing the death of at least two detainees.

Britain, which played a key role in the NATO-led air campaign that helped revolutionary forces overthrow Gadhafi, urged the new regime to “live up to the high standards they have set themselves.”

“They need to ensure a zero tolerance policy on abuse. We are concerned about these reports and are taking them up with the Libyans as a matter of urgency,” British Prime Minister David Cameron’s office said in a statement.

We heard reports like this in the immediate aftermath of the final collapse of the Gadhafi regime, of course, and while it doesn’t appear to have become a systemic problem (yet) it’s nonetheless something to be concerned about. The biggest problem the new Libya would seem to have, in addition to the fact that 40+ years of one-man rule essentially means that they have very little of a civil structure to build upon, is the fact that the rebellion itself was in some cases united only by the desire to overthrow Gadhafi. As time goes on any parties begin to pursue their own agendas, retributions like this against former Gadhafi supporters, or against the black African military that were brought into the northern part of the country to control the population and eventually fight the civil war, are likely to become more common. Unless the central government, to the extent there even is one, can gain control of these factions, things could get quite messy indeed.

H/T; Regular commenter Michael Reynolds

The White House completely miscalculated in Egypt, as it did in Gaza. It seemed only to care for the mechanics of the electoral process rather than the meaning of the results. Washington vacillated on who its Egyptian allies really are. We had long shared with the Egyptian military understandings on national security, ours with an eye to maintaining peace in the region. That relationship is now pretty much lost.

Americans, in their perennial innocence, have demanded that the generals turn over power to the civilians whomever they may be, just as they did to the Persian shah, just as they did after Israel’s pullout from Gaza when they hadn’t a clue about the danger posed by Hamas.

The main error here is twofold:  1)  that the US was the primary reason the Mubarak was ousted, and 2) that the ouster of Mubarak equaled the ouster of the military.

While I have no doubt that the call from the White House for Mubarak to step down helped hasten his exit, let’s not forget that the main motivating factor for his removal.  The Egyptian government had to address rather effective street protests in Egypt that had created a situation in which the military had to make a choice:  crack down or find some way of placating the mobs.  It is clear that the state had decided that it could not afford (or simply did not want) a crackdown.  As such, the chief bone that could be throw in the direction of Tahrir Square was Mubarak’s resignation. What that resignation meant, as I noted at the time, was that the military both a) suspended the constitution pending review, and b) remained in power (a fact that I re-iterated last June and last November).  The military remain in power now.  And, by the way, unless real constitutional reform is allowed to take place, they will remain in power even after the bizarre slow-motion parliamentary elections.

It strikes me as typical American hubris on Zukerman’s part to assume that the US was in control of the entire situation as if Mubarak would only have been ousted at the White House’s behest and that the consequent results of the events of last Spring are somehow in the US’ hands.  Note to Zuckerman:  the world is not a Choose Your Own Adventure novel* wherein the US chooses to turn to page 23 or 76.

As such, he actually misses the more important lesson of his own admonition:

The United States forgot the lessons of Iraq, namely, that it is easier to remove an Arab-state dictator by military means than it is to alter the internal balance of power and create a solid foundation for human rights.

I would point out before continuing that the ouster of Saddam and that of Mubarak are radically different events.  One required a military invasion by a foreign power and the destruction of the Iraqi state.  The other required the decision of the domestic military command and a plane ride to Sharm el-Sheikh*  Say what else one may about Egypt, but the state remains intact.  There is a difference between a military invasion of by a foreign power to remove a regime and bloodless military coup which leaves the major institutions of the state in place.  Both do use “military” as an adjective, I will grant, but they are otherwise substantially different actions.

Beyond all of that, he is right in the following sense:  it is difficult to predict the impact of major actions.  Likewise, we cannot predict what might have happened had the military no chosen to toss Mubarak overboard.

And yes, by the way, Zuckerman identifies a number of troubling incidences in Egypt of late, but rather than being the direct result of Mubarak’s ouster, or Washington’s rhetoric, they are part of the ongoing social unrest that spontaneously started just under a year ago.  The degree to which Mubarak’s ouster has fostered these actions is unclear.

Indeed, speaking of choosing our own adventures, let’s consider the options that were on the table last year:

A. Placate the protesters by promising deep constitutional reform leading to real regime change.

B.  Placate the protesters by ousting Mubarak and promising constitutional reform and elections (all of which under the control of the military high command).

C.  Crackdown on the protests

D.  Maintain the status quo (i.e., no offers of reform, no ouster of Mubarak, no crackdown).

Option A never appeared to be a real option and we know that the military chose AB.  They had already seemingly rejected C for whatever reason.

Now, “D” could have led to roughly three outcomes:

D1.  The protests could have continued at the existing rates.

D2.  The protests could have gotten worse.

D3.  The protests could have died of inertia (call it the OWS option).

Now, it was likely that D1 was going to continue for a while (they had demonstrated their ability to continue for the foreseeable future, meaning D3 seemed unlikely in the short term).  This was creating a substantial economic hardship, a fact that cannot be discounted.  D2 was a real risk.   D2 could have lead to violence and a less controlled situation for the state to manage.  It could have led to bloodshed, like in Syria (i.e., forcing the state into option C, which, again, they had consciously eschewed), or to a less controlled regime change.

As such, it not only not a surprise that the military took route B, but it underscores that that decisions were driven far more by the internal logic of the situation rather than what the US President had to say.  Were outside factors an issue (from what happened in Algeria, to what was happening at the time in other Arab Spring protests, to the disposition of DC)?  Of course, but one had to consider the relative significant of the variables.  Internal considerations in Egypt were, and remain, paramount to understanding outcomes.

To restate my fundamental objection to his reasoning: the US was never in charge of the events in Egypt. We, as a country, need to understand that while yes, the US is influential.  We do not hold levers that allow us to move events this way or that (and yet, as the GOP debates underscore, we tend to persist in the fantasy that we do). Indeed, that should be the main lesson of Iraq: that despite immense power, our ability to simply make things happen is limited.

And, really, the column fits into a broader problem with most discussions of Egypt which treat the choices as if they were dichotomous:  the Mubarak status quo or democracy of some sort, when, in fact the situation was substantially more complex than that.

Mr ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, said he had taken his decision in protest at the way Egypt’s military rulers governed "as though no revolution had taken place".

[...]

"My conscience does not permit me to run for the presidency or any other official position unless it is within a democratic framework," he said.

[...]

Mr ElBaradei had wanted a new constitution to be drawn up from scratch before any elections took place.

However, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) opted to go ahead with parliamentary elections first.

Now, as the piece notes, El Baradei’s odds of winning were probably small to begin with.

However, this situation does underscore what has been my concern from the beginning:  that the ouster of Mubarak has not led to actual regime change (and more specifically that did not remove the military from power) and that the lack of serious constitutional reform is a major signal that democracy has not come, and may not be coming, to post-Mubarak Egypt.

The last major holdout from the Ghadafi regime was captured today in Libya:

TRIPOLI, Libya – Muammar Qadhafi’s son Seif al-Islam was captured in a southern Libyan city along with two of his aides who were trying to smuggle him out of the country, a militia commander said on Saturday.

Bashir al-Tlayeb of the Zintan brigades said that Seif al-Islam was caught in the desert town of Obari, near the southern city of Sabha about 400 miles south of Tripoli.

He didn’t elaborate on how Seif al-Islam was captured, but said that he was brought to the city of Zintan, the home of one of the largest revolutionary brigades in Libya.

Al-Tlayeb said that it would be up to the Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council to decide on where the former Libyan leader would be tried.

He also said that there was still no information about wanted former intelligence director Abdullah Senoussi or where he is located.

Seif al-Islam is the last of Qadhafi’s sons to remain unaccounted for.

Born in 1972, Seif al-Islam Qadhafi is the oldest of seven children.

One hopes they’ll at least follow a semblance of the Rule Of Law this time.

This interview between Herman Cain and the editors of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is even more painful to watch than Rick Perry’s 53 second “Ooops”:

No debate formats, no moderators, no time limits. And this is what Herman Cain gives us. Pathetic.

Update: NBC’s Chuck Todd posted this on Twitter:

Campaig[n] says Cain was on 4 hrs sleep: “Didn’t say anything wrong or in accurate, it just took him a while to recall the specifics of Libya.”

First of all, taken as a whole Cain’s answer was still a muddle of incoherent nonsense so, the last part of the statement is pure puffery. If the first part is true, then the campaign was wrong for letting the candidate go into an important interview, that was being recorded on video, unprepared and exhausted. Either way, this make Cain look incompetent and foolish.

Libya’s ruling National Transition Council pledged on Thursday to bring the killers of deposed leader Muammar Qaddafi to trial, Al Arabiya TV said.

“With regards to Qaddafi, we do not wait for anybody to tell us [what to do],” NTC vice chairman Abdel Hafiz Ghoga.

“We had already launched an investigation. We have issued a code of ethics in handling of prisoners of war. I am sure that was an individual act and not an act of revolutionaries or the national army,” the top interim official said.

“Whoever is responsible for that (Qaddafi’s killing) will be judged and given a fair trial.”

Global disquiet has grown over how Qaddafi met his end at the hands of NTC fighters who hauled him out of a culvert where he was hiding following a NATO air strike on Oct. 20.

Mobile phone videos show him alive at the time of his capture.

In addition to Qaddafi’s killing by his capturers, there are videos on YouTube that indicate that the former leader may have been sodomized.

Another video shows Qaddafi’s son, Mutassim, captured, still alive and smoking a cigarette before his killing.

If this happens I’d actually consider it a positive step. Whether they can actually ever track the people responsible down is, of course, another story.

North Korea has banned its own citizens working in Libya from returning home, apparently out of fear that they will reveal the extent – and final outcomes – of the revolutions that have shaken the Arab world.

Pyongyang had a close working relationship with the regime of Moammar Gaddafi before the popular uprising that unseated him. That revolution was completed with Gaddafi’s death at the hands of insurgents last week – leaving Kim Jong-Il as one of a dwindling band of old-fashioned dictators on the planet.

An estimated 200 North Korean nationals are in Libya and previously worked as doctors, nurses and construction workers, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. They had been dispatched to the country in order to earn the hard currency that Pyongyang requires to fund its missile and nuclear weapons programmes.

Yonhap reported that the North Korean nationals have been left in limbo, joining their compatriots who are stuck in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries with orders not to return home.

North Korean media has so far failed to report that Gaddafi is dead and the government has made no moves to officially recognise Libya’s National Transitional Council as the legitimate governing authority of the country.

The decision to ban its own nationals from returning indicates just how concerned the North Korean regime is of the news leaking out to its subjugated people.

An editorial in The Korea Herald stated that the one per cent of North Koreans who are aware of the Arab Spring uprisings will be top-level party and administration officials, as well as the trusted few who are permitted to travel to China on business.

“Pyongyang’s silence about the fall of the dictators in Tunisia and Egypt and the bloody death of Gaddafi reveals Kim Jong-il’s awareness of the vulnerability of his regime in the process of a third-generation dynastic succession of power,” the paper said.

“Despite their boasting of the perfect loyalty of the 23 million people to the party and the leader, the ruling elite are afraid of what effect the information on the fates of the overseas dictatorships will have on the oppressed people of the country.”

For obvious reasons, I think.

The first statements to come out of what is effectively the new Government of Libya are not encouraging:

BENGHAZI, Libya — Libya’s top leader declared the country officially “liberated” Sunday from the four-decade rule of Moammar Gaddafi, pledging to replace his dictatorship with a more democratic but also a more strictly Islamic system.

In a speech to a cheering, flag-waving crowd, Mustafa Abdel Ja­lil, head of the Transitional National Council, promised to ban interest on housing loans and scrap other laws that didn’t conform to Islamic jurisprudence.

Although he lacks the power to make such changes himself, his comments, on such a symbolically significant day, suggested that Islam could play a greater role in public life in the new Libya. They also heightened an already intense debate over the role of Islam in the countries transformed by the Arab Spring.

Tens of thousands of Libyans poured into Keish square in Benghazi, the eastern city that was the cradle of the revolution, to celebrate the defeat of Gaddafi in a U.S.-backed eight-month struggle. For a population that had not known freedom of speech or real elections for decades, it marked a dream. Few were bothered by the spectacle hundreds of miles away in the northwestern city of Misurata, where Gaddafi’s body was on public display in a frozen-food locker for the third straight day.

“Lift your head, you are a proud Libyan,” chanted the crowd in Benghazi, as balloons in the colors of the new flag — red, black and green — floated overhead. Some people waved the flags of France and the United States, both of which were part of an alliance that helped the anti­-Gaddafi forces in their struggle.

The new government faces daunting challenges, including persuading scores of militias across the country to lay down their weapons and integrate into a new military and justice system.

“Toppling Gaddafi was the unifying force. Now that he’s gone, will they be able to hold it together?” said a Western diplomat attending the ceremony, speaking to a reporter on the condition of anonymity to be frank.

A first test for the authorities will be putting together a new interim cabinet to take the country to elections in eight months. Under a timeline set by the governing council, the new prime minister and cabinet are to be in place within 30 days. But some observers say it could take longer as regions that felt neglected by Gaddafi — such as Benghazi — press for more power.

Tensions have arisen on the Transitional National Council between Islamists and secularists and between former Gaddafi officials and his longtime foes.

Abdel Jalil, a slight and balding former justice minister, paid homage Sunday to those who lost their lives in the civil war. “This revolution started as peaceful, to demand the minimum. But Gaddafi started killing people with heavy weapons,” he said. Dozens of people in the crowd hoisted gold-framed pictures of relatives who had been killed.

In what surprised some in attendance, Abdel Jalil gave prominence to the role of Islamic law in the new Libya. “We are an Islamic state,” he said, and he pledged to get rid of regulations that didn’t conform to Islamic law.

Among them would be charging interest, he said. “The interest [on loans] will be ruled out. You will not pay it anymore,” he said, to thunderous applause from the crowd. The Islamic banking system prohibits charging interest, which is regarded as usury.

But Islamic law encompasses a wide range of approaches to governance, and senior Libyan officials played down the changes Abdel Jalil was proposing, saying that he wanted to outlaw interest on housing and personal loans, but not on business loans. He also envisioned changing marriage laws to make it easier for men to take a second wife, they said.

“A lot of young ladies lost their husbands in the battle” and want to find new partners, said Farage Sayeh, the minister of capacity-building in the temporary cabinet that stepped down Sunday. Under current Libyan law, a man seeking a second wife must receive his first wife’s permission and appear before a judge.

If the people of Libya have shucked off the chains of one dictator only to replace them with another, that’s going to make the tens of thousands of lives lost in this civil war seem like a total waste. Not to mention what it says about the allied intervention on behalf of the rebels.

Jonathan Turley is seemingly outraged over the world’s reaction to the videos depicting the events that led to the death of Muammar Gaddafi:

What I find rather disconcerting is the treatment of this video by the media, which covered the “joy” and “celebration” of the event while ignoring the shocking abuse of a wounded man and then the parading and stripping of this corpse. We were appalled when militants paraded the bodies of Americans in Somalia and Iraq. Yet, when it is someone we hate, it barely draws mention while newspapers taunt the dead man as being pulled “from a stinking drain.”

Following the killing, President Obama took to the air to herald the victory and a “future . . . of dignity.”

We long denounced Gadhafi on this blog. However, the treatment of Gadhafi below should shock the conscience. Only this morning did I see a brief story on CNN interviewing a man on how he felt about the way Gadhafi died. The thrust however was not about the abuse but the lost opportunity of a trial.

Instead of addressing the abuse of a wounded man and later a corpse, CNN and other outlets simply warned about graphic images and focused on Libyans firing weapons (including heavy machine guns) into the air (a moronic form of celebration that led to the wounding of various civilians).

(…)

This video should shock the conscience and the story should be not the celebration but the crime depicted in this video.

As some kind of abstract level, I suppose that Turley has a point. In a just world, Gaddafi would have been captured and put on trial for his four decades of crimes against the people of Libya and the people of the world, much as Saddam Hussein was when he was finally captured hiding out in a hole in the ground. He would have had legal representation and he would have been forced to sit in a courtroom somewhere and listen to the tales of what he did and the pain and misery he caused. Then, he would have been put to death.

Perhaps that would have been the idea outcome, but we do not live in an ideal world. Gaddaffi was caught trying to escape from the fall of Sirte, where he had apparently been hiding since disappearing from Tripoli in August, apparently with the intention of continuing his guerrilla campaign from some other redoubt in Libya.  Previously, he had said repeatedly that he intended to die on Libyan soil rather than surrendering, thus making the possibility of surrender pretty much non-existent. More importantly, he was captured in the middle of a civil war in a country that hasn’t known anything resembling the Rule Of Law for four decades. Expecting the people of Libya to live up to the legal standards of George Washington University Law School strikes me as pretty unrealistic.

It strikes me that Turley is likely pretty much alone in his reaction to the death of Gaddafi, even liberal groups like the Center for American Progress are cheering it:

Moammar Qaddafi’s demise today represents a measure of justice for the countless individuals he and his regime terrorized in Libya and around the world during his 40-year rule. … His death creates hope for a truly new Libya that can be responsive to its people and responsible in the world.

Of course, it’s interesting to note that CAP’s reaction to the death of Saddam Hussein, which occurred after a trial in which he was represented by counsel, was quite different. Back then, they approvingly quoted a statement by Tom Brokaw in which he compared Hussein’s hanging to a the worst excesses of the Old West. So according to CAP, beating a dictator to death in the street is okay, executing him after a trial isn’t.

Patrick at Popehat reacts to the video quite differently from Turley:

That’s a lynching. A well-deserved lynching, to be sure. But it evokes none of the tut-tutting of frontier justice, of barbarism, of western disdain for savages asthey take their revenge on the future martyr. Instead, we get Hillary Clinton cracking a joke so lame it would have been rejected by the writing team on an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie.  (They’d have given it to Steven Seagal.)

As citizens of a democratic republic, we should all cheer when a tyrant gets his just deserts.  So I’ll join the Center for American Progress in celebrating this long delayed justice, and congratulate them on their change of heart.

And in years to come I’ll look forward to celebrating the deaths of Kim Jong Il and Bashar Assad with them.  Regardless of who occupies the White House.

Earlier today, I compared Gaddafi’s death to the deaths of Benito Mussolini in the waning months of World War II and Nicolae Ceausescu during the Romanian Revolution in December 1989. They were quick, brutal, and nasty deaths. But they were also entirely understandable, as is Gaddafi’s. After 40 years of brutal dictatorship and a civil war in which tens of thousands of people are believed to have died, it’s difficult to expect the Libyan people to be calm and collected when the man who had been brutalizing them for so long is finally in their grasp. The phrase Sic Semper Tyrannis comes to mind. It’s the State Motto of Virginia, and it means thus always to tyrants. The rage against a brutal dictator is primal, and it’s totally justified. From a distance, we can tut-tut about the violence of actions like this, but until you’ve walked in the shoes of a person who’s been ruled by one of these men, I don’t think it’s really possible to understand the way they feel. I’m not going to judge them, and I’m not going to mourn for Muammar Gaddafi.

Not surprisingly, the death of Muammar Gaddafi has led many in the media to claim that this somehow proves that the President was right when he made the decision, without consulting or seeking approval from Congress, to commit American military forces to Libya. Markos Moutsalis even when so far as to say this:

Tim Carney comments over at the Examiner:

The implication: If you objected to the President for illegally entering a war where vital U.S. interests were not at stake, you were wrong, because we killed Gadafhi. More briefly: Might makes right.

The liberal Center for American Progress made the same unliberal argument in August when Gadhafi lost control of the country, asking on twitter: “Does John Boehner still believe U.S. military operations in Libya are illegal?”

This disregard for the rule of law is particularly audacious because Kos and CAP helped bring Democrats to power by attacking Bush for his cowboy foreign policy.

Aside from the legal question, there’s the nation-building question. Kos and CAP have effectively shouted “Mission Accomplished” and flippantly dismiss the notion that a power vaccuum in Libya might help the terrorists or mire the U.S. in an ugly long-term engagement.

This issue came up back in August when the Gaddafi regime’s control of Tripoli collapsed and many people claimed that this was proof that the President was right to get involved in Libya. At that time, I said:

I’ve made my own opposition to intervention in Libya clear from the start. For one thing, it became eminently clear early on in the mission that the threat of a humanitarian crisis that was used to justify the United Nations Security Council Resolutions that justified the action was more of an excuse than anything else, and that the rebels themselves were likely greatly exaggerating the “abuses” of the Libyan regime in order to gain Western sympathy. More importantly, though, I opposed the action because of the overwhelming reasons to be against it. There was, to put it bluntly, no reason to involve ourselves in yet another military action at a time when our troops are already stretched to the limit thanks to two wars we’ve been fighting for ten years, one of which doesn’t seem to have any geographic limitation at all. There was no reason to spend money we don’t have to come to the rescue of allies who aren’t willing to make the investments necessary to protect our own interests. Most importantly, there was no reason to get involved in a conflict in which our own national interests were not implicated in any manner whatsoever.

Finally, there are the serious legal and Constitutional questions raised by the President’s course of action in Libya. Instead of seeking approval from Congress for the Libya mission, President Obama relied solely on a series of United Nations Security Council Resolutions that authorized force for the sole purpose of protecting civilians. That justification quickly went out the window, though, and it became rather obvious from the start that the United States and NATO were primarily concerned with aiding the rebels, despite their questionable ties, not protecting civilians. While the Administration did notify Congress of the action as required by the War Powers Act, they failed to seek Congressional approval for the same and showed no inclination that they thought they needed to notwithstanding previous statements by the President and the Vice-President to the contrary. When the 60 day WPA time limit approached, they made the absurd argument that the United States was not engaged in “hostilities.” Of course, Congress is partly responsible here as well considering that they failed to take any steps to challenge the President’s clear violation of the law. Nonetheless, the President fought an illegal war, and the fact that it worked doesn’t justify that fact that he acted improperly.

It’s a good thing that Gaddafi is dead, it’s an end he deserved years ago when he authorized the bombing of a Berlin disco in order to kill American soldiers. He deserved it when he authorized the murder of the hundreds of innocent civilians on Pan Am Flight 103. He deserved it for the decades in which his family stole the wealth of his country while the people lived in poverty. From the video and pictures that have come to light in the past 24 hours, it appears that he received the fate of Benito Mussolini and Nicolae Ceausescu, and he deserved that as well.

All of that is different, however, from the question of whether or not the President of the United States acted properly when he committed American military force to Libya in March. The answer to that question was no in March, it was no in August, and it is no today.

Commanders for Libya’s transitional authorities say they have captured ousted leader Col Muammar Gaddafi.

The reports came after transitional forces claimed control of Sirte, Col Gaddafi’s birthplace, following weeks of fierce fighting.

Col Gaddafi is said to be wounded. There is no independent confirmation of the reports.

May it be so.

More as information emerges.

See also, CNN:  Gadhafi captured, says military council on Libyan TV.

The NYT has a report solely on the taking of Surt:  Libyan Fighters Say Qaddafi Stronghold Has Fallen.

Update (Doug Mataconis): Reports now seem to agree that Gadhafi is dead.

TRIPOLI, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former Libyan strongman who fled into hiding after rebels toppled his regime two months ago in the Arab Spring’s most violent uprising, was killed Thursday as fighters battling the vestiges of his loyalist forces wrested control of his hometown of Surt, the interim government announced.

Al-Jazeera television showed what it said was Colonel Qaddafi’s corpse as jubilant fighters in Surt fired automatic weapons in the air, punctuating what appeared to be an emphatic and violent ending to his four decades as the self-proclaimed king of kings of Africa.

Libyans rejoiced as news of his death spread. Car horns blared in Tripoli as residents poured into the streets to celebrate.

Mahmoud Shammam, the chief spokesman of the Transitional National Council, the interim government that replaced Colonel Qaddafi’s regime after he fled Tripoli in late August, confirmed that Colonel Qaddafi was killed, though he did not provide other details.

“A new Libya is born today,” he said.  “This is the day of real liberation. We were serious about giving him a fair trial.  It seems God has some other wish.”

Abdul Hakim Belhaj, the leader of the Tripoli military council, said on Al Jazeera that anti-Qaddafi forces had Colonel Qaddafi’s body.

It was not clear precisely how he died. Some reports, which could not be verified, recounted that Colonel Qaddafi was arrested, wounded by gunshots and died in custody.

Libya’s interim leaders had said they believed that some Qaddafi family members including the colonel himself and some of his sons had been hiding in Surt or in Bani Walid, another loyalist bastion that the anti-Qaddafi forces captured earlier this week.

There was no immediate comment on the news of his death from American officials or from NATO, which conducted a prolonged bombing campaign against Colonel Qaddafi’s military during the uprising that led to his downfall.

And from al-Jazeera English:

Colonel Ahmed Bani, the military spokesman of the National Transition Council, has confirmed to Al Jazeera that Muammar Gaddafi has been killed.

Abdul Hakim Belhaj, an NTC military chief, said Gaddafi had died of his wounds after being captured near his hometown Sirte.

The body of the former Libyan leader was taken to a location which is being kept secret for security reasons, an NTC official said.

“Gaddafi’s body is with our unit in a car and we are taking the body to a secret place for security reasons,” Mohamed Abdel Kafi, an NTC official in the city of Misrata, told Reuters.

Earlier, Abdel Majid, another NTC official, said the toppled leader had been wounded in both legs.

A photograph taken on a mobile phone appeared to show Gaddafi heavily bloodied, but it was not possible to confirm the authenticity of the picture.

The news came shortly after the NTC captured Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown, after weeks of fighting.

“Thank God they have caught this person. In one hour, Sirte was liberated,” a fighter in the town said.

There is a photo out purporting to be a cell phone picture of what appears to be a dead person that at least resembles the former Libyan leader. The unanswered question right now appears to be the manner of death. One report says that Gaddafi was discovered hiding by Libyan rebels and died of injuries sustained in a firefight. Another story is that he was killed when a convoy fleeing Sirte was hit from the air by NATO aircraft. Obviously, the Libyan rebels would prefer if the story turned out to be the he was killed by his own people.

Friday’s announcement that President Obama was trending troops to fight the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa was meant with a near-universal Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. As the dust settles, however, this is looking less crazy, less sudden, and less an exercise in presidential whimsy than first met the eye.

My Atlantic Council colleague Peter Pham has a superb analysis of the background (“Assessing the Hunt for the LRA“) over at New Atlanticist. While expressing some reservations about the wisdom of the intervention and stating categorically that “The LRA has no capacity to pose a direct security threat to the American homeland or even the nearest US forces,” he nonetheless makes a strong case that this is not simply some fool’s errand.

First, while the LRA may not pose a real threat to the United States, it has wreaked havoc with some of America’s closest African partners, including Uganda, the main contributor to the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) which is the only thing standing between that country’s weak interim authority and its total defeat at the hands of the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab insurgents, and South Sudan, the continent’s newest state which came into being earlier this year largely through US and European diplomatic persistence. These countries have appealed for assistance. While the United States itself has provided over $40 million in logistical support, equipment, and training since 2008 to assist regional militaries in their operations against the LRA operations, this has not been sufficient to end the rebels’ depredations. In June, the African Union appealed for external support for a regional task force to tackle the challenge.

Second, not only are the African countries bearing the brunt of the LRA’s violence allies, but they also are rich in natural resources which cannot be developed to their benefit or that of their trading partners because of the conflict. South Sudan sits on top of Africa’s fifth largest proved petroleum reserves, while Uganda is on the cusp of production of oil along its border with the DRC. The latter country has the world’s largest reserves of cobalt and vast quantities of diamonds, gold, copper, uranium, and other minerals, while the CAR has also significant, but mainly unexploited, deposits of many of the same.

Much more at the link but the bottom line is that there are strategic interests for the United States and our European allies to care about the region in general and the LRA in particular. Ultimately, he concludes,

[I]t will be the right choice as long the mission remains focused on the goals outlined by the president and limited in its scope to those highly specialized tasks that Special Operations Forces are so expert while leaving the principal operational responsibilities on the host militaries—and there is every reason to think such will be the case given that that Special Operations Command Africa is nowadays headed by Rear Admiral Brian Losey, a Navy SEAL who previously commanded CJTF-HOA and thus not only knows the region well, but also that what is needed there is a very light American footprint and more enhanced African capacity. If such proves to be case, ending this bush war and all the suffering it has caused will not only be consonant with humanitarian ideals, but will also advance some very real strategic interests.

Despite the early reporting when the news broke Friday, this looks very much like a limited military advisor mission rather than a “kinetic” foray into warlord hunting a’la the bad old days of Somalia. Yes, America’s involvement in Vietnam started that way. But Peter’s right: there’s no reason to think that this will escalate.

Additionally, it’s worth noting, as Scott Lemieux does this morning, that with the LRA Disarmament & Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, Congress “unambiguously authorized” this action.

…providing political, economic, military, and intelligence support for viable multilateral efforts to protect civilians from the Lord’s Resistance Army, to apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield in the continued absence of a negotiated solution, and to disarm and demobilize the remaining Lord’s Resistance Army fighters

That few of us were aware of this law and that many Members now say they didn’t think it would lead to this particular action (sound familiar?) really doesn’t matter.

I’m still not at all sure this was a good idea. But it now seems to be a very limited action that has been contemplated for at least two years and at least tacitly approved by Congress, rather than some out-of-the-blue, knee-jerk action by the president.

However, one thing is clear if one knows anything about the LRA (and I was aware of them prior to today, so this is not the results of flash research) and it is this:  do not try use the group as a means to score cheap political points (as I have already seen in comment threads here at OTB (for example) and as Rush Limbaugh did today on the radio).  Anyone who tries to make this into Obama going after the LRA because the LRA self-identifies as Christian in some weird counterbalance to Islamic extremism (or whatever theory is being preferred) is acting the fool.

The. Fool.

Please note:  anyone who regularly reads my writings knows that I am not prone to be so strident, but sometimes direct is the only way to go.

Here’s all you need to know (as I noted in the last post):  Jospeh Kony and the LRA have made it a common practice to raid villages, kidnap the children therein, and force the children that they abduct to kill their own parents.  This is done so that the children have no home to which to return, making escape a fruitless path.  It further has the effect of making the child a criminal and also beholdens them in a truly perverse way to the very persons who forced them into the heinous act in the first place.

Perhaps it is because I am a father or because I am a son, but this has to rank as one of the most horrible realities of which I can conceive.  It is hellish.

It is hardly hyperbole to call this evil.  Indeed, it is a tactic that defines the LRA as one of the worst militant groups in the world if we are to judge them by their actions.

One can, by the way, also include in the group’s list of crimes against humanity, mass rape and the sexual enslavement of the female children that it kidnaps.

It behooves us all to remember that true understanding of global politics needs to take place outside of the petty lens of partisan American politics.

It should be clear that the LRA is not the the kind of thing that talk radio host and flippant partisans ought to be trying to be clever about.

Period.

In basic terms, the LRA is a militant (guerrilla/terrorist/etc.) group in Uganda led by Joseph Kony.  Kony claims to be led by the Holy Spirit in a quest to bring the rule of the Ten Commandments to Uganda (amongst other things).   The group has been in operation since 1987 and emerged from a similarly oriented group, the so-called Holy Spirit Movement led by Kony’s aunt (or cousin, depending on reports), Alice Lakewenya, that was formed in 1986.  The groups in question are also linked to ethnic divisions within Uganda (specifically, the LRA claims to protect the Acholi people).

A BBC profile of Kony describes him thusly:

A former Catholic altar boy from northern Uganda, Joseph Kony has waged war against the government of President Yoweri Museveni for almost two decades.

[...]

Born in the early 1960s in Odek, a village east of Gulu, Mr Kony is remembered as an amiable boy.

“He played football and was a brilliant dancer,” one of his former classmates said, recalling the rebel leader’s days at Odek primary.

He is thought to be the cousin of Alice Lakwena, a former prostitute who formed the Holy Spirit Movement in 1986.

This group represented the Acholi people who felt excluded from power after the overthrow of the northern leader, Milton Obote, by Mr Museveni.

[...]

Mr Kony himself is thought to have at least 60 wives, as he and his senior commanders take the pick of the girls they capture.

In regards to how Kony and the LRA operate, one of the many crimes of which they are accused are the forced recruitment and deployment of child soldiers.  Again, the BBC (from a 2004 profile):

Twenty-thousand children have been abducted – often forced to kill their own parents so they have no way back.

They are used as expendable troops – frequently not even given guns to fight with.

And, a write-up from Global Security:

In particular, the LRA abducted numerous children and, at clandestine bases, terrorized them into virtual slavery as guards, concubines, and soldiers. In addition to being beaten, raped, and forced to march until exhausted, abducted children were forced to participate in the killing of other children who had attempted to escape. Amnesty International reported that without child abductions, the LRA would have few combatants. More than 6,000 children were abducted during 1998, although many of those abducted later escaped or were released. Most human rights NGOs placed the number of abducted children held captive by the LRA at around 3,000, although estimates varied substantially.

This is an especially heinous organization, although precisely why at this moment the US is involving itself in regards to them is unclear.

More from WaPo:  Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army: a primer.