The first official statements of President Asif Ali Zardari's new government have been firm and robust. Pakistan is obviously a renewed democracy.

There is no military solution to the challenges of Syria.

Over the last few years they have done a superb job in their fight against al-Qaida. As you may recall, our embassy in Jedda (in Saudi Arabia) was overrun some four years ago and a number of foreign workers went home because of violence against them.

We cleared many of their towns and cities and rural areas of al-Qaida Iraq and other insurgents.

The Islamic State fighters in Mosul are dead men walking and I think they increasingly know it.

There [in Afghanistan] is also a growing insurgency threat from al-Qaida, the Taliban and other extremist elements, some of which comes from the tribal areas of Pakistan, as well as from the Northwest Frontier province and Baluchistan.

President Obama has said that our aspirations should be realistic. We are not going to turn one of the poorest countries in the world, that was plunged into 30 years of war, into an advanced, industrialized, Western-style democracy. What we want to achieve is Afghanistan's capacity to secure and govern itself.