The job of the leader is to get the big ideas right.

If you don't want to have to kill or capture every bad guy in the country, you have to reintegrate those who are willing to be reconciled and become part of the solution instead of a continued part of the problem. And then, above all, the resources.

Progress in Iraq has always been about teams of people and teams of teams - and ultimately about young men and women, Iraqi as well as people from the coalition.

Al-Qaida in particular remains dangerous, and there [in Iraq] is some residual militia and special group presence. There are still between 20 and 30 attacks per day, still periodic car bombs and still loss of innocent civilians.

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.

The job of the leader is to get the big ideas right.

Let's remember that the reason we are there is that we have vital interests in Afghanistan, hugely important national interests, as do the other countries involved.