The army's leaders realised that they had overestimated their ability to pursue operations against heavily defended urban targets.
1 RAR was subsequently replaced by 1 ATF which was allocated its own area of operations in Phuoc Tuy Province, thereby allowing the Australians to pursue operations more independently using their own counter-insurgency tactics and techniques.
When this effort failed to forestall independence, it pursued Operation LABRADOR to cut Croatia in half, with the help of ethnic Serbs bent on creating their own state within a state.
The move comes at a time when the cost of upgrading to digital television capability is forcing many public television stations around the nation to consider pursuing joint operations with other stations.
But they have made little headway in Tbilisi, Moscow or Sukhumi, where grandstanding over principles is easier than pursuing co-operation on the ground.
But given the bitter experience of past deals, and the army's apparent readiness to pursue military operations against Mr. Mehsud this time, the news of the cease-fire has been greeted with dismay by some Pakistani analysts.
General McKiernan declined to use the term "surge," but also called for a quick infusion of troops to pursue counterinsurgency operations similar to those in Iraq but on a different scale and over a different politico-military landscape.
In roughly a dozen countries -- from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife -- the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.
"We have taken the decision to pursue an operation," Mr. Erdogan said Monday through an interpreter at the National Press Club.
First, he pursued co-operation with the main opposition, the Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (Fretilin), the party under whose flag the independence struggle was fought, but with which he had fallen out badly.
