NATO would only “confirm there has been a situation,” while promising to send a “joint NATO assessment team” to find out exactly what happened and how. So far the nationality of the warplane has not been identified.

The details of the attack are not entirely clear. Kapisa Governor Mehrabuddin Safi said the strike hit the Giawa village, and other officials said there may have been a night raid in the area shortly before the strike.

Karzai has deployed his own team to the district to investigate the killings, promising a “all-out probe” in a statement released earlier today. A number of MPs are part of the delegation being sent, and it is just one more in a long line of embarrassing incidents straining Afghan-NATO ties.

But this time, as NATO DMs met, the discussion was about making the unwieldy behemoth smaller, as they are finally realizing that NATO will have to finance the military indefinitely.

The enormous $11.6 billion price tag, nearly eight times the revenues of the entire Afghan government, is ending the delusion that the Karzai government will be able to pay for it even a decade down the road.

While the talks contemplate how to make that military a little more affordable (not for Afghanistan, surely, but for NATO), Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has raised the idea of other, non-NATO countries chipping in, saying it’d be “much better in a longer-term perspective.” Though a number of nations have offered to give the Afghan government a little aid, the number willing to bankroll the military in perpetuity is likely low.

Indeed, Arab League leader Nabil ElAraby is backpedaling so quickly that he’s revising history, insisting now that the Arab League’s “Yemen solution” for Assad to step down in favor of his Vice President never really meant for Assad to step down but instead of delegate certain powers.

A new compromise resolution is reportedly in the works, and it will finally answer long-standing Russian demands for a resolution “without foreign military intervention” and expressly including a clause warning nations not to “resort to the use of force or the threat of force.”

But while the “Yemen solution” appears dead so far as Syria’s government is concerned, and the UN Security Council resolution is not going to force the issue, US and European governments are hard at work looking for a potential exile locale for Assad, should he eventually decide to step down. His choices appear limited – reportedly no European nation will take him, and the Saudis, the default exile hosts for most Arab dictators, do not particularly like Assad either. The United Arab Emirates is reportedly “open” to the idea, but this seems far from a solid deal, presenting one more obstacle to a negotiated solution.

The Arab League is pushing a resolution demanding Syrian President Bashar Assad immediately step down. The resolution is eagerly backed by NATO member nations, but is almost certain to be vetoed by Russia.

Russia’s concern centers around fears that NATO or the Arab League would use the resolution as an excuse to invade Syria if Assad doesn’t step down. Most of the speeches from NATO and Arab League members consisted of mocking Russia and insisting this was a “conspiracy theory.”

And while everyone was insisting today that the threat of war was a myth, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have both been pushing for debate on putting Arab League troops on the ground in Syria, and NATO member Turkey is also seen to be considering an invasion to create a “humanitarian corridor” in the nation’s north.

Those pushing the UN resolution point to the growing civil war between the government and the defector forces loyal to the Free Syrian Army (FSA). There is significant doubt, however, that the resolution would settle anything between the two factions, even if it did convince Assad to transfer power to his deputy.

Russia, for its part, has sought to start negotiations between the Assad regime and opposition forces, but the interventionist elements in the international community seem to be averse to it, and the Syrian National Council (SNC) has ruled out any negotiations under any circumstances.

The visit was aimed at bolstering Georgia’s ambitions to join NATO, which are supported loudly by the US but appear overwhelmingly opposed across the rest of the alliance. The elephant in the room was the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.

In that brief war, Georgia attacked Russian forces in the secessionist enclave of South Ossetia. The result was massive Russian retaliation, which destroyed much of Georgia’s military and saw both South Ossetia and Abkhazia declaring formal independence from Georgia.

The US has refused to recognize the new republics, and even today Obama reiterated his support for Georgia’s “territorial integrity,” including reclaiming both of those territories. Saakashvili has vowed to reclaim them by any means necessary, but both have reached security deals with Russia which make such a reunification virtually impossible.

The security arrangements also stand in the way of Georgia’s NATO ambitions, as the alliance is never going to agree to admit the nation given the current situation on the ground. Both sides were careful not to mention the war in today’s talks, but it will cast a big shadow over all dealings with the Georgians going forward.

In some ways this reflects Russia’s growing willingness to challenge NATO at the UN Security Council, but it is also a product of NATO’s increasing eagerness to use the council to rubber stamp its operations.

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The goal now is for the French to have all their troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2013. The plan was previously for France, along with the rest of NATO, to complete their “handover” by the end of 2014.

Sarkozy and Afghan President Hamid Karzai discussed the announcement and now say they are pushing for the entire NATO “handover” to be sped up to the end of 2013. Sarkozy is presenting this as a faster end to the war. Karzai, who has in the past confirmed negotiations to keep US troops in the nation through 2024, is likely just in the market for the “handover” part, and the influence on the ground that might confer. Karzai’s government has been mostly sidelined in the US-Taliban talks due to its comparative lack of influence, particularly across the nation’s south.

The sudden interest in an exit plan by the French government is the result of an incident last week, in which four French soldiers were killed and a dozen others wounded in an attack by an Afghan soldier. The Afghan soldier was reportedly motivated by anger at a video of US Marines urinating on the corpses of several slain Afghans.

Rasmussen demanded that Russia immediately accept NATO’s missile defense system, installed largely along the frontier with Russia, though he conceded that there was no real progress toward that end.

Russia initially offered a deal on the missile defense system if it would be jointly operated, saying it was concerned that the NATO system was targeted at them. NATO, for its part, insists the shield targets Iran, even though much of it is outside of the theoretical range of even Iran’s best missiles.

Rasmussen said NATO would keep the “option” of holding the scheduled Chicago summit open, but that it would almost certainly not happen if the Russian government did not agree to the missile defense shield.

Security officials quoted in the Agence France Press (AFP) today have a simpler explanation, saying that the soldier was motivated by anger over the video of US Marines desecrating Afghan corpses.

The video, which was released earlier this month, has fueled considerable anti-US sentiment, and apparently some of that sentiment is extending to other nations’ soldiers aiding in the US-led occupation.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai downplayed this notion, insisting the killings were an “isolated incident” and not indicative of anything. But with plenty of reasons to dislike the occupation forces coming around all the time, such blowback attacks seem unsurprising and NATO troops remain in danger.

A Taliban spokesman claimed credit, saying they had shot down the helicopter. US officials deny that this is the case.

It is the second NATO helicopter lost this week; another was downed in Helmand Province. The Taliban claimed credit for that one as well, though NATO declined to confirm this and Afghan officials speculated it was “technical problems.”

The US Marine Corps says that he six were members of the Heavy Helicopter Squadron 363, based out of Hawaii.