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

Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters - all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.

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

Afghanistan has other enormous challenges as well, including a political system that is still very much developing, although there has been some progress in the past several years.

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

The fact is that Iran doesn't want to see the Taliban come back any more than do most Afghan citizens.

US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and I have repeatedly sought to emphasize that the progress in Iraq is fragile and also, possibly, reversible.