Robert D. Kaplan:

Americans are about to lead a great battle against culture and geography.

Literacy rates in the Pushtun belt of the south and east that has seen most of the serious fighting is under ten percent, with women's literacy hovering near zero in many places. One regional governor told us that he has to micromanage everything because there are so few competent people around him.

"This is not easy shit," says one American Army colonel. "But what's the alternative?"

Robert Levine:

The Great Depression brought the New Deal to the United States. It brought the rest of the world Nazism and universal war. This time, though, many nations have nuclear weapons.

"Maybe we could" is the limit of optimism in this paper. The world ahead looks difficult.

David Kilcullen:

We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state. The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today.