Russia has suffered multiple diplomatic and judicial blows during the past week over its war on Ukraine, despite President Vladimir Putin's high-profile visits to North Korea and Vietnam and Moscow's claims that it is founding a "Eurasian security architecture that will replace the discredited Euro-Atlantic security arrangements". Putin signed a "comprehensive strategic treaty" with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on June 19, incorporating what he said was a defensive alliance. South Korea's government condemned the agreement. Its national security adviser, Chang Ho-jin, declared that Seoul would reconsider lifting a ban on arms supplies directly to Ukraine. Until now, South Korea has only sold weapons to Ukraine's allies.

Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, U.S. Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three Islamic State (IS) group "staging areas" on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed. In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed. In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an "unknown heavy object" into an IS "defensive fighting position," U.S. forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually "a person of small stature" -- a child -- who died in the strike. None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing. These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014. The trove of documents -- the military's own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times -- lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the U.S. government's image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon's highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare. The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of kilometers away. President Barack Obama called it "the most precise air campaign in history." This was the promise: America's "extraordinary technology" would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones. The IS caliphate ultimately crumbled under the weight of American bombing.

Fox News host slams Milley for allegedly wanting to share information with the Taliban and weighs in on the U.S. mistakenly striking civilians on'Tucker Carlson Tonight' As American forces were pulling out of Afghanistan this summer, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced a new and highly innovative intelligence partnership. The Pentagon, Milley said, would begin sharing classified information with the Taliban -- the bearded religious extremists in man pajamas that for 20 years we've been told pose a major threat to the United States. The Biden administration, Milley explained, was open to coordinating with the Taliban on counterterrorism strikes against our new enemies -- a shadowy group that may or may not actually exist, called "ISIS-K": Mark Milley, September 1: We don't know what the future of the Taliban is, but I can tell you from personal experience that this is a ruthless group from the past and whether or not they change remains to be seen. And as far as our dealings with them at that airfield or in the past year or so in war, you do what you must in order to reduce risk emission and force, not what you necessarily want to do. Reporter: Any possibility of coordination against ISIS-K with them (the Taliban) do you think? Because when you are fighting ISIS-K, no holds are barred.

The drone-strike disaster in Afghanistan on Sunday--a U.S. missile meant for a terrorist that, in fact, killed 10 civilians, five of them children, all relatives of an interpreter who'd worked for Americans during the war--shows what often happens when weapons are fired from the air with no intelligence on the ground. President Biden has said that he will keep up the pressure on the Taliban after the departure of U.S. troops through "over-the-horizon" (OTH) methods--information gathered, and weapons fired, from afar. Yet the farther away you are (and the nearest U.S. military base to Afghanistan is 1,000 miles away), the more uncertain the methods are. Or, as Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, now director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, succinctly puts it, "OTH is not precise." Usually, in planning air strikes, including remotely controlled drone strikes, myriad sources of intelligence are integrated into as complete a picture as possible--images from satellites and spy planes, views from the pilot in the plane firing the missile (if it's overhead), and communications intercepts.

KABUL, Afghanistan – After a day at work, Ezmari Ahmadi was just arriving at his home Sunday in Khwaja Burgha, a working-class neighborhood a few miles west of Kabul's airport, when calamity struck. As he pulled into the driveway about 4:30 p.m., children -- his own as well as those of his brothers and other relatives -- swarmed around Ahmadi's Toyota Corolla. His 12-year-old son, Farzad, asked if he could park the car. Ahmadi obliged, put Farzad in the driver's seat and switched to the passenger side. That's when what the family says was an American missile fired moments before from a drone buzzing nearby drilled through the car, slammed into the ground below and detonated.