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The American and Chinese militaries took micro-steps on Monday toward smoothing over years of conflict and suspicion, but China’s defense minister sharply defended his country’s arms buildup, pointed to American military sales to Taiwan as a continuing obstacle and deflected an American request for “in-depth strategic dialogue” on nuclear missile defense, space and cyber warfare.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had set low expectations for his three-day trip, likely his last as defense secretary, which he undertook after President Obama and President Hu Jintao of China ordered their militaries to begin working out their differences ahead of Mr. Hu’s visit next week to the White House. The first meeting here bore out that caution, as well as predictions by Pentagon officials that the visit would be difficult and provide no breakthroughs.

But it did provide a clear reflection of the Chinese military’s growing confidence in its dealings with the United States.

Regarding American concerns over China’s new weaponry, including a radar-evading jet fighter and an antiship ballistic missile potentially capable of hitting an American aircraft carrier, the Chinese defense minister, General Liang Guanglie, suggested that the United States was overreacting to a simple effort to modernize.

“We can by no means call ourselves an advanced military force,” General Liang said at a joint news conference with Mr. Gates, held at the enormous Chinese Ministry of Defense after an elaborate welcoming ceremony of goose-stepping Chinese troops. “The gap between us and that of advanced countries is at least two to three decades.” He added that China was interested only in its own security and that “there are some people always in the world who want to label China’s military development a so-called threat to the world.”

On Taiwan, the general implied that any further sale of arms sales would disrupt relations and prompt China to cut off military ties with Washington, as it has repeatedly in the past.

“We do not want to see that happen again,” General Liang said. He concluded, “Neither do we hope that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan will disrupt our military to military relationship.”

Mr. Gates and General Liang did announce a handful of minor developments, among them the establishment of a working group to talk about future talks and the visit to Washington by the chief of the People Liberation Army’s general staff sometime in the first half of this year. But the American side’s request for a more specific date was frustrated.

But General Liang responded to Mr. Gates’ proposal for an “in-depth strategic dialogue” between the U.S. and China on nuclear missile defense, space and cyber warfare only by saying “we are studying it.”

Still, Mr. Gates took a positive tone on the contacts with the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army. “I come away from these meetings convinced that the P.L.A. leadership is as committed to fulfilling the mandate of our two presidents as I am,” Mr. Gates said at the news conference.

In recent years China’s military has grown increasingly forceful with the country’s political leadership, a fact Mr. Gates obliquely acknowledged to reporters en route to Beijing. Asked if he thought China’s political leaders were pressing for improved military relations with the United States even though the Chinese military did not necessarily want them, Mr. Gates replied, “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

American military officials say there is a growing danger of a confrontation between American and Chinese forces in the waters of the Pacific, where Chinese ships have begun to challenge the United States Navy. China’s next generation of anti-ship missiles, American officials say, could force the United States to keep its warships a long way from Chinese shores, and from Taiwan. Ultimately, they say, the new technologies could give China an ability to operate hundreds of miles beyond its shores with a freedom it has never before enjoyed.

Later on Monday, Mr. Gates met at the Great Hall with Vice President Xi Jinping, the heir apparent to Mr. Hu. “I believe the two sides should jointly and earnestly implement the consensus of our heads of state and make sure that our bilateral relations progress on the right track," Mr. Xi said in a statement for the cameras, shortly before reporters were pushed out of the room while Mr. Gates was making his remarks.

Beyond a commitment to continue talking, the meeting between Mr. Gates and General Liang on Monday appeared to produce little of substance, said Huang Jing, a visiting professor and expert on China’s military and leadership at the National University of Singapore.

“The Chinese are playing tai chi with the Americans,” he said, referring to the Chinese martial art of self-defense. “Gates is going out; there are a lot of uncertainties about the Obama administration, its policy and the likelihood that there is going to be a second term. They want to wait until the dust settles down in Washington.”

Nor, he said, is the relationship likely to change much in the near future. China’s military sees Beijing as a rising power and Washington as a declining one, he said, and so it has little incentive to accede to the Pentagon’s requests for more transparency and a more responsible approach toward regional peace and security, especially on North Korea and territory disputes with regional neighbors.

So we have come to the final two episodes of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” not only for this season but forever. Now is a time for reflection on all of the totally apolitical life lessons we’ve learned from the rugged wilderness, experienced guides, and wise elders of the 49th state. Plus all-new footage that was too boring to run before!

1. There are only two ways to appreciate wild animals: Slicing them open and anthropomorphizing them to make vaguely defined political points.

In the penultimate episode, we watch Piper squeal excitedly over frolicking sea lions as Palin remarks, “I have a beautiful sealskin purse.” It's the circle of life, kiddo. Later, in the recap episode, we get to relive all of the caribou-hunting, halibut-bludgeoning, and salmon-dismembering good times of the season -- including never-before-seen footage. Hooray! Watch as Palin mounts caribou antlers, tours a den of taxidermy horrors and learns about curing fish heads.

But animals aren’t just for killing in “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” because the live ones also make handy, albeit strained, political metaphors. We’ve all heard about Palin’s beloved mama grizzlies seven or eight thousand times -- even when they were technically mama brown bears -- but did you know that adult muskoxen will position themselves around a baby at the first sign of danger, creating a protective circle? Palin proudly tells us that she recently used that image in a political speech about “how we should be as a society,” although she does not specify who the baby and adults are in the scenario. She just tromps toward the herd and declares, “I’ll be the mama muskox!”

2 . Technology is what’s really wrong with America.

After her scuba-diving brother retrieves some gold from the bottom of the sea, Palin takes Piper to have it turned into jewelry for Grandma Heath. Watching a man pour the recently melted metal into a mold, Palin explains that she expected the operation to be more high-tech, but no, like seemingly every other job in Sarah Palin’s Alaska, it’s the far more exciting “hands-on, blue collar work.” Later, Todd Palin is similarly psyched about the clicker a Department of Fish and Game official uses to count salmon by hand. How awesomely low-tech is that?

Husband and wife seem to agree: Alaskans don’t need no stinkin’ computers! That is, apart from the ones that transmit Palin’s FOX News commentaries. Those are actually really useful.

3. Sometimes kids do listen to their parents.

While panning for gold on a beach near Nome (and making a weak effort to discourage Piper’s fantasies of selling it on EBay for “something thousand” dollars), Palin asks their guide, “Does it come down to who works hardest or who’s luckiest?” “Both,” he tells her, as I boggle at hearing Palin acknowledge that luck might play even the tiniest role in an individual’s accumulation of wealth.

The moment is predictably fleeting, though. When asked what was the greatest life lesson she learned during the course of her mother’s reality show, 16-year-old Willow replies: “You have to work hard to get your money. And then the more money you have, the more things you can buy. Like a new car. I don’t know.”

The proud mama muskox laughs. “No, that’s a good answer.”

NATO's top commander in Afghanistan said Monday that a recent pledge by a southern Afghan tribe to stand up to the Taliban shows the military push in the country's most violent region is making headway and stifling the insurgents' "central nervous system."

U.S. Gen. David Petraeus told The Associated Press in the southern city of Lashkar Gah that a shift in thinking by the Afghan government and NATO means that the tribe's risky move is being embraced rather than ignored. And that brings the hope that others may follow suit, he said.

Later Monday, Petraeus was on hand in Kabul to greet Vice President Joe Biden, who made a surprise visit to Afghanistan to assess progress toward the key objective of handing over security from international forces to Afghans. The White House said Biden, who was last here in January 2009, was to meet with President Hamid Karzai as well as U.S. troops.

Petraeus spoke with the AP during a visit to the capital of Helmand province, where he discussed last week's tribal pledge with provincial Gov. Gulab Mangal. He told the AP that the Taliban is losing sway in volatile Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south.

Petraeus said there is increasing dissension among the fighting ranks of the insurgency and that fighters are bristling at being ordered to battle through the winter by bosses sitting far away in Pakistan. Meanwhile, targeted strikes on midlevel leaders in Afghanistan have fractured the hierarchy, Petraeus said.

"The sheer losses that they've sustained are tremendous. That in and of itself is very significant and it's caused enormous stress on the central nervous system of the command and control structure," he said.

A prime indicator of this success, Petraeus said, is the announcement by the Alikozai tribe that they would halt insurgent attacks and expel foreign fighters from one of the most violent spots in the country - Helmand's Sangin district. The expansion of both NATO and Afghan forces in the region has made such a move much more tenable that it would have been a year ago, he said.

"It has pushed out the security bubble," Petraeus said, adding "2010 was a pretty bumper year for Helmand province."

A year ago, Obama approved a troop surge of 30,000 forces, most of whom went to the south to try to beat back Taliban forces from their traditional strongholds.

The surge of forces in the south is seen as key to bolstering security enough that Afghan forces can take charge, which would in turn allow U.S. and NATO forces to draw down troops. The Obama administration has promised to start pulling troops out in July, meaning that Petraeus has only a few more months of operations before he has to start deciding where he can cut back.

The true test of recent progress will likely come just as the drawdown begins. Fighting typically lessens in the winter months in Afghanistan, when snows block fighters from traveling over mountain passes from Pakistan, then picks up again in the late spring and early summer.

And there are still plenty of hurdles ahead for NATO troops in the south. The area continues to be the most violent in the country, with daily announcements of coalition deaths. More than 20 Marines have been killed in Sangin since mid-October, when the U.S. took over the district from British forces.

In an end-of-year review of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, the Obama administration said that while Taliban momentum has been stopped or reversed in some areas of Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province, "gains remain fragile and reversible."

And the surge does not appear to have decreased the number of insurgent fighters. A NATO official said this week that the alliance continues to estimate about 25,000 fighters in the country - the same number as a year ago.

And so Petraeus and his team are doing their best to build rapidly on the successes they've had.

NATO quickly pledged to support the Alikozai tribe by bringing in schools and finishing a key road in the area.

Petraeus and the provincial governor spoke for nearly an hour, mostly about the Alikozai deal and what could be done to strengthen the hand of the elders and possibly get other tribes in the area to make similar pledges.

Success is far from guaranteed. Disenchanted Alikozai tried to rebel against the Taliban in 2007 but failed because of a lack of resources and coalition help. And a similar move by the Shinwari tribe in eastern Afghanistan last year was at first lauded as a major step forward by U.S. commanders until the Afghan government turned against the idea, saying that NATO was undermining its authority by working directly with the elders.

"That was an earlier time. That was back in the exploration stages," Petraeus said, noting that Karzai has since set up a formal reintegration process to accommodate those who want to realign themselves with the government. He said the growth of the Afghan security forces has made it easier to support those who do take a stand.

Petraeus kept to a typically fast-paced schedule Monday.

He met with the foreign minister of Estonia in the morning before rushing to board a helicopter for a quick ride to an airstrip, where a military plane flew his team to Lashkar Gah. Once there, they met with officials from the British-led provincial reconstruction team and then took armored vehicles into downtown to visit Mangal. He kept coffee at hand and used the travel time to continue consultations with advisers and officials.

On returning to Kabul, he rushed off to greet Biden.

If doctors' optimistic prognosis for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords holds, the question won't be "will she make it," but "how will she make it."

And that's a very big question.

For injuries like this, "recovery is on the order of weeks and months rather than days," says Dr. Shelly Timmons, neurotrauma director at Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania.

Timmons is not working on Giffords' case but has seen many like it. People can get better or worse from this point out. "The next few days are critical," she says.

Giffords has not yet spoken since being shot in the head at a public appearance outside Tucson on January 8. But she was able to squeeze her doctor's hand in response to questions before surgery and extend her fingers afterward.

"She is able to process information that she hears and translate that into an executable action. That's a very good sign," says Timmons. "But it's also a good leap from there to a fully functionally walking, talking human being."

If Giffords pulls through and emerges from the medically induced coma, doctors will be looking carefully at her ability to speak, both in terms of having the motor skills to form words in the mouth and the cognitive ability to recognize words and their meaning, says Timmons.

Paralysis is also an issue. Unlike spinal injuries, which can paralyze from the neck or waist down, brain injuries can cause total or partial paralysis on one side, like a stroke. Long-term rehabilitation can be effective against this, although it's not yet clear if it will be a problem for Giffords.

Personality changes can occur too, says Timmons.

"Anything the brain does can be affected by an injury like this: memory, attention, concentration, behavior and personality are all possible changes," she says. "But with one-sided injuries, that's not as common."

"There are many cognitive skills that can be adversely impacted by traumatic brain injury," says Dr. Steven Flanagan, chair of the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University. "Language is one skill. Often what we see, again this varies, are some combo of impairments in attention, concentration, solving problems, and processing information at various speeds. We see difficulty with remembering things from yesterday or years ago."

Giffords' doctors have said she was shot "through and through," meaning the bullet entered one side of the head and exited the other. That's important because it means some of the bullet's energy was spent outside of Giffords' body rather than shattering inside her brain. And in this case, the bullet's path did not cross from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. Also, she received rapid care. Doctors had her on the operating table within 38 minutes of the attack.

Those are all good indicators for Giffords, but her doctors were cautious.

"She is still in critical condition. Brain swelling at any time can take a turn for the worse," Dr. Michael Lemole, chief of neurosurgery at University Medical Center in Tucson, where Giffords is being treated, told CBS News.

During surgery, doctors removed parts of her skull to allow room for brain swelling. They also removed bone fragments that shattered during the attack.

And despite the news media's hunger for a quick resolution to this story like a Hollywood movie, Giffords' potential recovery could be measured in months or even years.

"We don't close the book on recovery for years," said Lemole. "It will take as long as it takes."