Military Deployment

Three decades after withdrawing as imperial protector in the Persian Gulf region, Britain is struggling to cope with its new role as regional victim. The Foreign Office confirmed on Monday the weekend death of a Briton believed to be the first foreigner killed by Iraqi troops in Kuwait, and it called on all Britons to maintain "very steady nerves."

In the new film "Return," Linda Cardellini plays Kelli, a National Guard soldier just returned to her small hometown from deployment overseas. As she struggles to fit into the routines her husband and two young daughters have established during her absence, she soon falls into a tailspin, bonding with a Vietnam vet she meets in an alcohol education program, then being called back to active duty. The first feature from writer-director Liza Johnson, "Return" isn't a documentary, but it was inspired by real-life events.

As they prepare to roll out a new Afghanistan policy to a skeptical U.S. audience, Obama administration officials are starting to replace their grim public assessments of the battered country with praise for the skills and idealism of its officials and its progress in important areas. The message is aimed in part, officials say, at trying to build domestic support for a troop increase that President Obama is expected to announce Tuesday. Obama's decision comes at a time when most Americans have turned against the mission, and some Democratic leaders in Congress have concluded that it is hopeless.

Torrential downpours caused the rain-swollen Yalu River on the North Korea- China border to overflow Sunday, prompting the evacuation of 5,000 North Koreans who remained "at the crossroads of life and death," according to state-run news media there. In Sinuiju, a North Korean riverside town across from the Chinese city of Dandong, flash floods submerged houses and farms and paralyzed roads as the military was deployed to aid survivors, according to Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency.

The Pentagon on Tuesday announced the latest troop deployment for Afghanistan, a move aimed at ensuring that the bulk of additional forces requested by President Obama will be in place this summer. The Defense Department said 3,100 troops, most from the 4th Combat Aviation Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division based at Ft. Hood, Texas, would deploy to Afghanistan sometime this summer. With the announcement, the Pentagon has issued deployment orders for about 25,000 of the 30,000 additional troops approved in the fall by the Obama administration.

The Australian government plans to nearly double its military deployment to Afghanistan by sending 400 additional soldiers, Prime Minister John Howard said today. The Australian Defense Forces is to add the troops to its contingent of 550 currently in Afghanistan by mid-2007. It is to add an additional 50 by the middle of 2008, bringing the deployment to about 1,000, Howard told reporters. Howard, a staunch ally in the U.S.

Women with spouses on military deployment during their pregnancies face a nearly threefold higher risk for postpartum depression in initial screening tests, researchers reported this week. The findings mean that military wives should be informed of the risk and aggressively screened for depression during their postpartum medical exams, said lead author Dr. Jeffrey Millegan of the Naval Medical Center in San Diego.

In the new film "Return," Linda Cardellini plays Kelli, a National Guard soldier just returned to her small hometown from deployment overseas. As she struggles to fit into the routines her husband and two young daughters have established during her absence, she soon falls into a tailspin, bonding with a Vietnam vet she meets in an alcohol education program, then being called back to active duty. The first feature from writer-director Liza Johnson, "Return" isn't a documentary, but it was inspired by real-life events.

President Bush would like to see the U.S. military provide long-term stability in Iraq as it has in South Korea, where thousands of American troops have been based for more than half a century, the White House said Wednesday. Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, told reporters that Bush believes U.S. forces eventually will end their combat role in Iraq but will continue to be needed in the country to deter threats and to help handle potential crises, as they have done in South Korea.

With drug-related violence growing along the Mexico border, the U.S. is willing to consider deploying troops to the Southwest -- but only as a last resort -- a Department of Homeland Security official told members of Congress on Thursday. Help might come from the National Guard or even the Army if the deadly threat from Mexico's powerful cartels gets so bad that Homeland Security officials cannot secure border towns, Roger Rufe, the department's director of operations, told a House subcommittee.

Looking back, the first sign of trouble was the day Tatum Baugh, 4, refused to come to the phone. Four feet high and 45 pounds, she always held her own against her two brothers in the battle over who got to talk first when Marine Staff Sgt. Tyrone Baugh called home from Iraq. That day, though, she wanted no part of her dad. In the months to follow, she would throw a punch at one of her teachers and scissors at another, distinguish herself as a regular violator on Miss Kerry's red light/green light disciplinary chart, and get kicked out of two preschools.

The Pentagon on Tuesday announced the latest troop deployment for Afghanistan, a move aimed at ensuring that the bulk of additional forces requested by President Obama will be in place this summer. The Defense Department said 3,100 troops, most from the 4th Combat Aviation Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division based at Ft. Hood, Texas, would deploy to Afghanistan sometime this summer. With the announcement, the Pentagon has issued deployment orders for about 25,000 of the 30,000 additional troops approved in the fall by the Obama administration.

Afghanistan's security forces will need U.S. support for another 15 to 20 years, President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday in the latest in a series of indications that U.S. involvement there is likely to last far into the future. Also Tuesday, the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, told lawmakers in Washington that the U.S. needed to signal a long-term commitment in Afghanistan in order to reverse the momentum of the Taliban-led insurgency, a commitment that he said must continue even after combat forces begin to draw down in 2011.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took exception Wednesday to President Obama's assertion that the Bush administration rebuffed commanders' repeated requests for more troops in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld, who oversaw the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, said he was unaware of "a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006," while he served under President George W. Bush. "Such a bald misstatement, at least as it pertains to the period I served as secretary of Defense, deserves a response," Rumsfeld said in a written statement.

Though generally welcoming the promised buildup of American troops to Afghanistan, Europe is likely to present President Obama with a mixed bag of responses to his request that allies step up their own deployments. Some European leaders say that their countries are already stretched to the limit militarily and that growing public opposition to the war severely restricts their options. In France, headlines trumpeted President Nicolas Sarkozy's "flat refusal" to meet a reported request for 1,500 more soldiers.

Pakistanis do not doubt that President Obama's troop buildup will give U.S. and allied forces more wherewithal to uproot Taliban militants from their strongholds in Afghanistan. What worries them is that the strategy will push Afghan Taliban over the porous border and bolster the ranks of brethren militants in Pakistan's tribal areas, security experts say. Pakistanis remain skeptical that Obama's new blueprint for winning the war in Afghanistan will pacify their volatile, unstable neighbor to the west.

As President Obama measures the potential burden of a new war strategy in Afghanistan, his administration is struggling to come up with even the most dispassionate of predictions: the actual price tag for the anticipated buildup of troops. The calculations so far have produced a sweeping range. The Pentagon publicly estimates it will cost $500,000 a year for every additional service member sent to the war zone. Obama's budget experts size it up at twice that much. In coming up with such numbers, the White House and the military have different priorities as well as different methods.

Responding to new threats that have made America's military deployment obsolete, the Pentagon will reduce the number of U.S. installations abroad from about 850 to 550 and shift forces closer to global crisis points, Defense officials told Congress on Thursday. Unveiling a plan more than three years in the works, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S.

It's commonplace to hear Afghans describe a rush of mixed feelings when a Western military convoy roars past. They're glad for the protection from insurgents, but they don't want foreign soldiers in their homeland forever. So President Obama's pledge to send more troops now to fight the Taliban -- coupled with talk of an eventual pullout -- is a message that resonates with many here. Still, there are misgivings. Some Afghans fear that the U.S. strategy will prompt the Taliban to simply wait out the Western presence.

President Obama ordered 30,000 more troops into the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on Tuesday, but warned that the United States could not afford an open-ended war and pledged to begin bringing home U.S. forces in 18 months. Speaking to cadets at West Point, some of whom have fought in Afghanistan and others who may soon be deployed there, Obama said the administration would rush all the additional combat troops into the country by next summer. But those forces would not stay any longer than necessary to ensure U.S. security, Obama said, noting that the cost of the decade's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches $1 trillion.