Definition: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: PARIS — France and Italy said Wednesday that they would join Britain in sending liaison officers to support the rebel army in Libya , in what military analysts said was a sign that there would be no quick and easy end to the war in Libya. 
  
 The dispatching of the liaison officers — probably fewer than 40 of them, and carefully not designated as military trainers — is a sign also, they said, that only a combination of military pressure from the sky, economic pressure on the government and a better-organized and coordinated rebel force will finally convince Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi that he has no option but to quit. 
  
 “Some countries thought the Libya operation could be over quickly,” said a senior NATO ambassador. “But no military commander thinks so.” 
  
 Sending advisers to Libya is the latest in a series of signs of trouble for the NATO campaign, which began in earnest with a stinging, American-led attack but has seemed to fizzle since operational command was transferred to NATO on March 31. After that, a rebel offensive was smashed by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, which sent the rebels reeling toward the eastern city of Ajdabiya. 
  
 New tactics used by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces — mixing with civilian populations, camouflaging weapons and driving pickup trucks instead of military vehicles — have made it hard for NATO pilots to find targets. At the same time, loyalist artillery and tanks have hammered the rebel-held city of Misurata with cluster bombs, which have been banned by much of the world, making a mockery of NATO’s central mission of protecting civilians. 
  
 Divisions within NATO seem to be harming the strategy as much as Colonel Qaddafi’s new tactics, said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Only six of the 28 member countries are participating in the airstrikes, with France and Britain doing half of them and Denmark, Norway, Belgium and Canada the rest. 
  
 Prominent nations like Italy and Spain are hanging back, and others have sent planes only to support the no-fly zone, or are helping to enforce the arms embargo. The Obama administration, which has ruled out deploying American troops in Libya, announced Wednesday that it would authorize as much as $25 million in military surplus supplies, though not weapons, to the Libyan opposition forces. 
  
 “You want to send Qaddafi a message of collective will, that there’s no way out, that he’s facing a determined and unified opposition,” Mr. Niblett said. “And he’s seeing a European-led NATO that is not sufficiently cohesive.” 
  
 “If I were him, I would look at European disagreements and take heart from them, especially when the opposition appears so weak,” Mr. Niblett said. 
  
 Colonel Qaddafi “senses there is a gap between means and ends,” he added. “He can look at divisions among members of NATO and feel he can be part of a political solution, because in the end he may feel there is not sufficient cohesion to follow the strategy through to its end,” which is his ouster. 
  
 To persuade Colonel Qaddafi and his sons to leave, he said, “we need both the political and military track, and we have bits of the military and a fractured political situation, and we’re not giving the strategy the best shot.” 
  
 To some extent, the problems in NATO can be traced to changes since the end of the cold war. With the end of the Soviet threat and its expansion to global missions outside Europe, NATO has become less an alliance than a coalition of like-minded nations, analysts say. 
  
 “As soon as NATO went out of area it stopped being an alliance,” said François Heisbourg, a defense expert at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “In area, it is an unlimited liability partnership. But now with a global scope, everything must be negotiated, and it’s all à la carte. That’s the post-cold-war world.” 
  
 Tomas Valasek, a defense expert at the London-based Center for European Reform, compared NATO to an American political party, “a coalition of countries with broadly the same interests, but with different views.” 
  
 It was inevitable after the cold war, he said, that NATO countries would focus on different threats: terrorism and Afghanistan for some, like the United States, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands; Russia, for the Central Europeans. 
  
 “As for the rest,” he said, “I don’t even know why they stay in NATO.” 
  
 NATO will never be what it was, Mr. Valasek said. “NATO will become more of a transactional place in the future, so, as in Libya, more often than not there will be coalitions of the willing, with NATO support.” 
  
 NATO officials reject the criticism, saying the alliance has done a good job in a short time and that the air campaign is working well. 
  
 “There is no question about the collective will in NATO” to carry out the United Nations’ resolution on Libya, said Oana Lungescu, the alliance spokeswoman. She said that in the three weeks since NATO took over command of the operation, “we are steadily degrading Qaddafi’s ability to carry out and sustain attacks on his own people and gradually squeezing the regime’s forces.” 
  
 But just about everyone agrees “that there can’t be a military solution to the crisis as such,” Ms. Lungescu said. 
  
 “This mission keeps up the pressure for a credible political solution,” she said. 
  
 A senior NATO ambassador asked for patience. “In the end the balance will shift; it has to,” he said. “Qaddafi gets no more arms, no more tanks, no more ammo, and he gets weaker and over time the others get stronger. And at some point someone around Qaddafi decides to have a political way out.” 
  
 While Colonel Qaddafi’s foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, defected to Britain three weeks ago — where he was treated leniently, as an encouragement to others around the Libyan leader to change sides — there have been no prominent defections since. 
  
 The current political debate, the senior NATO ambassador said, is not about whether the Libya war will end in negotiations, but the nature and context of the talks. Some countries would like to begin negotiations with Colonel Qaddafi before he leaves power, with the clear aim that he must leave. But others, particularly the rebels, say that negotiations can begin only after the colonel and his sons are safely out of the country. 
  
 For now, Mr. Valasek said, the problem is that both Colonel Qaddafi and the NATO-supported opposition think that time is on their side. “It may take everyone longer to realize that this is as far as military force takes us. But unless we want a divided Libya, we need to sit down and negotiate.” ||||| Correction: An earlier version of this article said that two journalists working in Libya, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, had been reportedly killed in an artillery attack. It remains unclear how the journalists were killed, although they are believed to have come under attack by mortars or rocket-propelled grenades. 
  
 The United States and its allies have entered a new stage of involvement in Libya, sending assistance and advisers directly to opposition military forces, which have been unable to break Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s stranglehold over much of the country despite help from NATO airstrikes. 
  
 France and Italy said Wednesday that they would join Britain in dispatching military advisers to assist the inexperienced and disorganized rebel army, primarily in tactics and logistics. President Obama authorized sending $25 million worth of nonlethal equipment, including body armor, tents, uniforms and vehicles. 
  
 The assistance appeared to stretch the definition of the “civilian protection” mandate contained in last month’s U.N. resolution authorizing foreign intervention in Libya. The allies said their efforts were indirectly achieving that objective, because the rebel force was best-positioned on the ground to protect Libyans from attacks — or the threat of attacks — by Gaddafi loyalists. 
  
 The rebel-held western Libyan city of Misurata continued to be the focus of the fighting. Among those killed in the violence were photographers Tim Hetherington, a British American, and American Chris Hondros, reportedly from an attack by Gaddafi forces, and two other Western journalists were wounded. NATO said its warplanes struck government targets on the outskirts of the besieged city, as well as around Tripoli, the capital. 
  
 The arrival of European military advisers and U.S. uniforms is unlikely to rapidly change the trajectory of the conflict, however, and NATO and its Arab partners in the Libya operation continue to count on their economic and diplomatic war of attrition against Gaddafi paying off in the end. 
  
 “We are dealing with a set of imperfect options,” a senior administration official said, noting that the measure of success is not “where things stand” but “where they would have stood had we done nothing.” The NATO airstrikes and a no-fly zone enforced by NATO and Arab countries “have essentially frozen the battle space in terms of the advance of Gaddafi’s forces,” he said, and “if you work all the other levers, you can make time work against Gaddafi.” 
  
 The official emphasized that Obama has no intention of sending U.S. ground forces — including noncombat military advisers — to Libya. But the administration’s attempts to firmly limit its involvement have also contributed to an image of disarray within NATO. 
  
 A senior European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the Americans, said that Obama’s eagerness to turn over command of the Libyan air operation to NATO late last month, and the withdrawal of U.S. fighter planes from ground-strike missions, had undermined the strength of their united front against Gaddafi. 
  
 Although U.S. military officials have said that American strike aircraft remain “available” to NATO commanders should they request it, the senior administration official indicated that agreement would not be automatic. 
  
 “We would assess any requests,” the official said. 
  
 In a feisty response to any suggestion that the U.S. move to the back seat had undermined the NATO campaign, Vice President Biden said the alliance was perfectly capable of handling the air attack mission itself. 
  
 “It is bizarre to suggest that NATO and the rest of the world lacks the capacity to deal with Libya — it does not,” Biden said in an interview with the Financial Times. 
  
 “Occasionally other countries lack the will,” he said, “but this is not about capacity.” 
  
 Biden said U.S. resources were better spent trying to guide Egypt’s transition toward democracy. He denied that U.S. public reluctance to become deeply involved in another conflict in the Muslim world had anything to do with Obama’s decisions. 
  
 “This is about our strategic interest and it is not based upon a situation of what can the traffic bear politically at home,” Biden said. “The traffic can bear politically more in Libya,” he said, because “everybody knows [Gaddafi] is a bad guy.” 
  
 But as the situation in Libya has continued without resolution, popular disapproval of the president’s handling of the situation has shot up 15 percentage points, from 34 to 49, since mid-March, shining a light on the political risks Obama faces on the issue amid a host of domestic problems, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Among political independents, disapproval jumped to 51 percent. 
  
 Fifty-six percent of those polled said they agreed the United States should participate in the NATO-led international coalition; most of those said they wanted the level of U.S. participation to remain “about the same.” Most of those who supported participation appeared to agree with Biden’s assessment of Gaddafi, with 58 percent saying the goal of the operation ought to be getting rid of him. 
  
 France and Italy have recognized the opposition Transition National Council (TNC) as Libya’s legitimate government, and Britain, France and Italy have had civilian and military personnel on the ground at rebel headquarters in the eastern city of Benghazi for some time. But the new teams being sent were described as professionals capable of training rebel officers and organizing a more efficient command network for the ground war. Each country is expected to field at least 10 advisers. 
  
 France has also agreed to escalate the airstrikes being carried out by NATO. French President Nicolas Sarkozy met Libyan opposition leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil in Paris on Wednesday. 
  
 Although NATO is in command of the U.N.-authorized operation in Libya, different countries have agreed to different missions. Only six NATO members — France, Britain, Canada, Belgium, Denmark and Norway — are participating in the airstrikes against Libyan government forces on the ground. Others — along with non-NATO nations, including some Arab countries — are contributing aircraft to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya but have declined to participate in strikes. A third group is enforcing an arms embargo with air and sea patrols outside Libyan territory. 
  
 Those sending advisers or other assistance to the rebel forces are doing so as individual nations, in coordination with but outside the NATO command structure. 
  
 The three sending trainers have publicly ruled out sending ground forces. “The rebels themselves are afraid of being accused by other Arab countries of having allowed ‘crusaders’ on their land,” said an Italian official who was not authorized to discuss the issue on the record. 
  
 Qatar, one of several Arab countries whose planes are participating in the no-fly-zone enforcement, is also reportedly providing military equipment directly to the rebels, including weapons. “They’re sort of freelancing . . . throwing in money in a lot of different and odd ways,” including helping to finance a satellite television station to counter Gaddafi’s control of domestic media, said a senior congressional aide briefed on the operations. 
  
 Obama administration officials said their comfort level with the rebel council had grown in recent weeks, after high-level meetings with its leaders and direct contact by a U.S. diplomatic mission sent to Benghazi. 
  
 “Whether there are people in Libya who may have more extremist or nefarious agendas, that is something we watch very carefully,” the senior administration official said in reference to suggestions of possible al-Qaeda involvement. “We don’t believe that the organized opposition, represented by the TNC, reflects that agenda.” 
  
 Staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan contributed to this report. |||||
Output:
Coalition forces have stepped up their cooperation with Libyan rebels, with France and Italy announcing yesterday that they would send military liaisons and advisers, and the US saying it would send them $25 million worth of non-lethal equipment like body armor, tents, and vehicles, the Washington Post reports. The moves are a telling sign that this war will drag on, military analysts tell the New York Times. “Some countries thought the Libya operation could be over quickly,” said one senior NATO ambassador. “But no military commander thinks so.” By hiding among civilians, Gadhafi’s forces have largely blunted NATO’s attack power, and consolidated their grip on western Libya. “Gadhafi’s people are feeling quite confident,” one European security official tells Reuters, predicting that the conflict will ultimately result in a “de facto partition for a long time to come.”