Kabul

There's one bookstore in the world where you'll never, ever find a copy of "The Bookseller of Kabul." That would be the Bookseller's. The epic literary feud that erupted with the book's publication more than five years ago still endures -- at least from the perspective of Shah Muhammad Rais, who hated his depiction as Sultan Khan, a liberal intellectual in public but a tyrant in his own home.

KABUL, Afghanistan - A brazen daytime assassination on Sunday offered a grim reminder of stymied progress in a key part of NATO's effort to wind down the Afghan war: peace talks with the Taliban. Arsala Rahmani, a senior member of the Afghan government body set up to conduct negotiations with the militant group, was shot and killed while traveling by car through the Afghan capital, police said. Coming less than nine months after the assassination of the head of the High Peace Council, the killing cast yet more gloom over Western-backed efforts to bring the insurgents to the bargaining table.

Dy, a.k.a. "Dysprosium," a name taken from a rare chemical element and meant to suggest his elusive nature, glides across the underbelly of the edgy city. It's after midnight in Kabul, approaching a favored hour for would-be suicide bombers to enter the city while security forces sleep, so they can strike during the morning rush. Dy, however, is armed only with cans of spray paint, and his intentions are peaceful: to alter the drab contours of this embattled city. Identifying a wall, Dy pulls the paint cans out of his bag and works quickly, writing slogans and crafting images that rail against corruption, repression and the malign influence of drug money.

We're far enough away from it now that we can probably all agree: It was a mistake for George W. Bush to land on that aircraft carrier in a flight suit to proclaim "Mission Accomplished. " And not just because the war in Iraq was far from over at that point. Every president crows about his successes in war -- assuming he has anything to crow about. But he should try to seem modest and statesmanlike while doing so. President Obama should have reminded himself of that lesson this week as he prepared to fly to Afghanistan to observe the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death.

A car bomb hit an Italian military convoy on the main airport road near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Thursday, killing at least six soldiers and 10 Afghan civilians, Italian and Afghan government officials said. The bombing, which wounded at least 52 people, was the latest in a string of attacks and showed militants' ability to hit most corners of the troubled country at will. It was the fourth major blast in the capital in five weeks. Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election remains undecided as authorities attempt to sort out hundreds of allegations of fraud.

The men come at dawn, a ragged, anxious collection of faces peeking through scarves and hoping for work as they stand in a traffic circle beneath billboards advertising war heroes and washing machines. They are bricklayers, gardeners, hole diggers and carpenters. Sometimes they are tapped on the shoulder, most times they are not, so they hunch amid the cars and fruit stands, knowing that the higher the sun climbs the lower their chances of returning home with money in their pockets.

As their target, they selected the hub of Afghan governance, a part of downtown Kabul that includes the presidential palace, the Justice Ministry, the central bank and other heavily guarded buildings. Then, on Monday morning, as the heart of the capital bustled with shoppers and Afghans on their way to work, seven Taliban militants with AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, rocket launchers and suicide vests hidden under their shawls unleashed their attack. The militants left five people dead and laid bare Kabul's vulnerability even as the U.S. ratchets up the war to rout the militancy.

The Indian Embassy in Afghanistan's capital came under attack Thursday for the second time in 15 months as a powerful bomb exploded along an exterior wall, killing 17 police officers and civilians, wounding 76 people and destroying vehicles and buildings. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the suicide attack, which occurred in a heavily fortified area about 8:30 a.m. This latest blast in Kabul underscored the point, analysts said, that militants can strike at will even in Afghanistan's most secure areas.

Three suicide bombers attacked a police compound in Kabul's old city Saturday, killing four police officers and five civilians before they were overcome by police. The attack by militants disguised as Afghan soldiers -- a pattern that has become increasingly common -- started around 1:30 p.m. in a neighborhood dense with small vendors and shoppers. As the attackers approached the station, police reportedly noticed one acting suspiciously and shot him. The second attacker then detonated his vest, killing nine people, including an intelligence officer, who happened to be standing near the entrance.

Recently, after Afghan militants unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan, including in the capital, Kabul, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn't happened. "I'm not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet offensive," said George Little, the Pentagon's top spokesman. "We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], mortar fire, etc. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country.

Recently, after Afghan militants unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan, including in the capital, Kabul, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn't happened. "I'm not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet offensive," said George Little, the Pentagon's top spokesman. "We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], mortar fire, etc. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country.

The brazen and well-coordinated attacks by insurgents against four embassies and other key sites in the heart of Afghanistan's capital were aimed less at inflicting high numbers of casualties, analysts said, than at humiliating the government and its foreign allies as Afghan forces take increasing responsibility for protecting their own homeland. Taking positions on high-rise construction sites, attackers on Sunday rained down rocket-propelled grenades, bullets and fear on Kabul, targeting major symbols of Afghan and foreign power, including the U.S., British, German and Russian embassies and NATO headquarters.

KABUL, Afghanistan - The Afghan police and army have won praise for fighting off one of the war's most ambitious insurgent strikes, but the marathon siege of key diplomatic, government and military installations in Kabul also highlighted worrisome weaknesses, including glaring intelligence failures. With evidence pointing to a virulent Taliban offshoot known as the Haqqani network as the perpetrators of the tightly coordinated assaults, the prospect of protecting Kabul appears even more difficult.

Army Sgt. Noah M. Korte, the father of two young sons, was planning a second honeymoon. He told his parents that he wanted to take his wife, Kristi, to Las Vegas. They were going to rent a sports car, stay in a fancy hotel, see shows and celebrate their marriage. His parents planned to baby-sit Sean, now 6 months old, and James, 3. Korte, 29, described the planned honeymoon during his last conversation with his parents just before Christmas. Seventeen days into his fourth overseas tour of duty, Korte was killed with two other soldiers by an improvised explosive device in southeast Afghanistan's Paktia province, south of Kabul.

How should we measure success in Afghanistan? It's a crucial question, but there isn't much agreement on an answer. In mid-January, this newspaper ran a story on the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, a classified assessment drafted by analysts at more than a dozen U.S. intelligence agencies. According to The Times, the report "warns that security gains from an increase in troops have been undercut by pervasive corruption, incompetent governance and Taliban fighters operating from neighboring Pakistan.

In the gray light of each cold dawn, the parents of 10-month-old Shoaib hold their own breath as they listen for the rasp of his, waiting to see whether their coughing, feverish little boy has survived another night. Winter's chill has settled over the Afghan capital, and with it, privation is sharpening, especially among the city's poor. Nighttime temperatures regularly fall into the teens, or even lower. The season's first snow is on the ground, the open sewage ditches are crusted over with ice, and in shantytowns such as the one where Shoaib's family lives, survival turns on a series of cruelly simple calculations.

An enormous blast rocked the Afghan capital this morning, five days before the nation's widely anticipated presidential election. The explosion, near the gates of the main Western military base, killed at least three people and injured dozens, Afghan officials said. Afghanistan's Defense Ministry called it a suicide car bombing. Black plumes of smoke rose into the air at the site of the blast, a heavily fortified area of Kabul. U.S. military officials indicated that the attacker did not penetrate the base, headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is based.

Winter in Afghanistan is always a hardscrabble time, but this year the season's bite has been sharpened by a growing shortage of fuel. And because the dwindling supply is due to an Iranian blockade, the dispute is further tangling complicated dealings with a powerful neighbor. For the last five weeks, a traffic jam of fuel tankers, now swelled to about 2,500 vehicles, has been backed up at the Iranian-Afghan frontier, with only a fraction of the usual number allowed to pass. The resulting shortages were initially felt most keenly in the agricultural south and west.

Bomb blasts targeting Shiite Muslim gatherings Tuesday in two Afghan cities killed at least 59 people and injured 150, a rare outbreak of sectarian violence in a country racked by 10 years of war with Taliban insurgents. A noontime blast in Kabul, the capital, involved a suicide bomber hidden among a throng of Shiite worshipers outside the Abul Fazal Abbas shrine, said Gen. Mohammed Zahir, head of criminal investigations for the Kabul police. That attack killed at least 55 people and injured 134, the Interior Ministry said.

The words were a farewell from a son and a soldier: I want to make myself perfectly clear about why I gave my life for this. On his fourth deployment to Afghanistan over three years, Tyler Holtz wrote his family a letter. The 22-year-old sergeant in the Army's elite Ranger regiment gave it to a fellow Ranger and asked him to send it home if anything happened to him. Don't make the mistake of thinking I joined the Army out of some misguided, short lived sense of patriotism.