Kabul

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.

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.

As students at UC Irvine, Ricardo Cerros Jr. and his buddy Mike Clark often made plans to train together for the university's taekwondo team. When they did, Clark would sometimes show up early at the gym, hoping for a head start. But there would be Cerros, already an hour or more into the workout. Often, Clark would find Cerros on the treadmill in several layers of clothing, including a sauna suit, to make his workout more challenging. "He would train harder than everyone," Clark said.