the all-of-the-above approach [past is prologue]

NYT: British diplomat predicts NATO defeat and recommends dictatorship for Afghanistan
NYT: three fronts in recently ramped-up war against the Taliban in Pakistan
"In early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border.

Earlier this summer, the military became locked in an uphill fight against the militants in Swat, a more settled area of North-West Frontier Province that was once a middle-class ski resort. Today it is a maelstrom of killing...

At a third front, south of Peshawar, around the town of Dera Adam Khel, the army recently recaptured from Taliban control the strategic Kohat tunnel, a road more than a mile long that carries NATO supplies from the port of Karachi to the American and coalition forces in Afghanistan."

NYT: rebuilding Samarra
LAT: US cops advising Iraqis
"Acree is one of about 800 civilian police officers working under a military contract with DynCorp International. Unlike the thousands of civilian contractors who have come to Iraq to supplement the military, Acree and his colleagues don't provide security services. They're here to impart their experience in urban police work to a young and inadequately trained and equipped force.

The consultants, whose pay starts at $134,000 a year, are assigned to U.S. military police units and travel in convoys of Humvees."

LAT: more clashes between Turkish and Kurdish forces
"The fighting, which represented Turkey's largest loss of troops this year in a single incident, was considered likely to spur Turkish military strikes at rebel hideouts across the border in northern Iraq. Within hours of the rebel attack, the Turkish military was already aiming artillery strikes across the frontier...The fighting came days before Turkish lawmakers are to take up a measure that would give the army continued authority in the coming year to stage strikes across the border in Iraq."

NYT: who will pay the pirate ransom?
"As if things were not complicated enough, one of the few people with experience in prickly pirate problems has been jailed by the Kenyan government on suspicion that he is a pirate himself...Many seamen in Kenya insist that Mr. Mwangura is a good man, and that his only fault may have been being outspoken. He was the first maritime official to say that the hijacked ship was part of a secret arms deal between Kenya and southern Sudan. Kenyan officials have denied this, saying the heavy weaponry, including battle tanks, is for their use. But Western diplomats have privately said this is a lie."

LAT: ANC factions may prove too difficult to keep together
LAT: bloggers expose dissent within the opposition in Egypt
"This Internet revolution strikes at the Muslim Brotherhood's identity. The organization, founded in 1928, has renounced violence and supports democratic change in Egypt, but it is allied with the militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of the banned party's members are arrested each year; human rights groups say Mubarak is portraying the brotherhood followers as terrorists in an effort to silence his most potent detractors.

The brotherhood is praised for its community outreach services, but often viewed as out of touch, too rooted in religious dogma and its quest for an Islamic state. This ideology and constant pressure from government security forces have left the organization unable to create a credible coalition with leftists, nationalists and others to seriously challenge the ruling National Democratic Party.

In one of his posts, Naggar urged the brotherhood to "question ourselves and admit our mistakes. It is not shameful to revise our ideas and change our positions. It is not shameful to be brave enough and say that we were mistaken. What is really shameful is not to speak about our mistakes and claim that our ideas are sacred."

Such soul-searching represents an unprecedented public criticism of the bureaucracy and thinking in a major Islamic movement and has shattered the secrecy prized by the brotherhood, said Khalil Anani, an expert on the group. He suggested that the brotherhood's leadership is threatened by the brashness of its young reformers, yet it needs these Web-savvy critics to reach new generations of Muslims."

LAT: Mexicans march on 40th anniversary of student massacre
"The killings -- official reports put the toll at 25 to 43 but human rights groups have long maintained that the number was closer to 350 -- started when government forces opened fire on a massive but peaceful student demonstration just days before the Olympic Games were to open in Mexico City. It was a time of political effervescence in the country and across the globe, and the Mexican government of the day was eager to conceal what had happened.

The incident in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, in the Tlatelolco zone of Mexico City, remained shrouded in secrecy for decades."

LAT: reassessing how many died in Dresden
"While estimates for the numbers killed in the attacks on the city have fluctuated wildly between 35,000 and half a million over the past six decades, the historians commissioned by the city say the figure was considerably lower.

"The results of the commission conclude that 18,000 to 25,000 people died in Dresden from the air raids," an official said yesterday. The figure has long been a matter of dispute, heightened by the entry into the regional parliament of Saxony in Dresden of the NPD, a far-right political party, who called the February 1945 raids a "bombing holocaust", and claimed they had killed half a million.

The bombing, which took place just 12 weeks before the surrender of Nazi Germany, remains one of the most controversial actions of the second world war. While the operation was defended by the allies as a justified attack on a vital transport hub, most of those who died were civilians and refugees. Many were said to have perished in the resulting firestorm.

The former mayor of Dresden, Ingold Rossberg, commissioned the 11-strong team of historians four years ago to try to establish a clear figure. The results were presented at Dresden's annual Conference of Historians.

While the figure is well below previous estimates, members of the conference were keen to stress that the report did not belittle the immensity of the act. Thousands of lives were claimed in just four US and UK raids, lasting 63 minutes. Almost 4,000 tonnes of high explosives and incendiary devices were dropped."

LAT: the women of San Luca and behind the 'Ndrangheta mafia
"The women here have always had a complex role in the dynamics of an insular society that seems to exist at the margins of mainstream Italy. They are the mothers of the mobsters, their wives and, prosecutors say, often their accomplices. Fiercely protective of their brood, they can be as ruthless as their men. In the last year, it also appears that some San Luca women have served as a counterforce to the violence spiraling from internal feuds...San Luca is a town of interconnected clans, and there is no one who cannot claim a mobster among his or her relatives. In virtually every family, someone has been imprisoned or killed...

Calabria, the toe-of-the-boot region of Italy where San Luca is located, is the nation's poorest, on paper at least; the women complained that the only time they see an arm of the government it's in the form of police rounding up suspected gangsters...

San Luca sits on the edge of the densely forested Aspromonte mountain range, a favorite spot of the 'Ndrangheta for hiding its kidnapping victims in the 1970s and '80s. The organization has existed in some form for more than a century, evolving as a protection racket after World War II and then graduating to drug trafficking a decade or so ago. The 'Ndrangheta developed a multibillion-dollar enterprise in the last few years when it took over cocaine routes from Latin America to Europe, the fastest-growing market for illicit narcotics.

This region is like few others. The minute a stranger enters San Luca, a kind of silent alarm is sounded. Outsiders will be followed, their movements tracked. The people have their own body language, not to mention their own actual language: All speak a Calabrian dialect. An Italian speaker unfamiliar with the dialect will grasp only parts of a conversation.

San Luca gained international notoriety last year when six Italians were gunned down outside a pizzeria in Duisburg, Germany. Authorities called it a revenge hit in an escalating 'Ndrangheta feud. Three of the dead, including a 16-year-old boy, were from San Luca, and the others from nearby Calabrian towns.

The killings -- the most public evidence to date of the international reach of the 'Ndrangheta -- shocked Italians and unleashed fears of further violence. But more than a year later, no one else has been killed, and the credit, at least partially, goes to a woman...

At a tense funeral for the Duisburg dead in San Luca in August 2007, instead of demanding revenge, as many mothers and wives had, Strangio insisted on forgiveness...

Diego Trotta, a senior police investigator in Calabria who has led many operations against the 'Ndrangheta, thinks reprisals have only been delayed, not canceled. Any relative peace, he said, is thanks to scores of arrests in the last year...

The women of San Luca are for the most part locked into a certain fate. They are married off to other families within the clans to seal the impervious unity of the 'Ndrangheta. Only in the last decade or so did San Luca families allow their daughters to go to high school."