Robert, your three points toward the end of your analysis are valid. But before we deal with radical environmental terrorists and other exotic brands, let's deal with the terrorists before us now: Islamic extremists. To wit, the Clinton State Department had many good ideas on dealing with global threats such as demographic youth bulges, disease pandemics, organized crime, etc. But because it could not fluently handle inner-core, traditional issues such as Serbian and Iraqi aggression, it never built sufficient legitimacy in Congress to have a freer hand on the new, outer core of challenges connected with globalization. In other words, we're not going to solve the potential threat of "American neo-Nazis"—which you mentioned—if we are pacifists in the face of Saddam Hussein, an East-bloc-style tyrant now trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, every time I traveled from Iraq to Syria in the 1980s it was like coming up for liberal humanist air, given how much worse the Iraqi tyranny was than the Syrian kind. Thus, I will get back to basics and pick up where I left off, in the Asian subcontinent, and breathe out my analysis to the Greater Middle East, dealing with your cosmic questions only at the end of the third and last round.

As I said, chaos was less the problem in Afghanistan than radicalizing, Pakistani interference there was, necessitated by the threat Pakistan perceives from India. While a solution to Kashmir may prove impossible, we should work the issue nonetheless. As Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco remarked in the early 1970s, in regards to the Arab-Israeli crisis, sometimes you need activity merely for the sake of activity, since the very involvement of an American negotiating team, even if it is not achieving much, can be stabilizing in its own right. But the prestige of the secretary of state himself should never be risked without a significant chance of success. That is why, as hot spots multiply, an American secretary of state will require a larger stable of elder statesmen to whom he can subcontract negotiating details in Kashmir, Nagorno Karabakh, the West Bank, and so on. As for the Indian-Pakistani rivalry, we need to keep the following in mind: India, despite its official pronouncements, may actually want a radical regime in Pakistan that would be an international pariah as well as weak internally. What India has more trouble dealing with is, in fact, a strong government in Pakistan that cracks down on extremists and thus wins more friends and support abroad. Thus India's game plan is to keep raising the bar on what it expects from Musharraf, until his own power base is threatened.

Management of the Indian-Pakistan rivalry is far more important than trying to bring central control to Afghanistan, a place that never really had it in good times.

Moreover, nation-building requires the implicit assumption that we will only have one or two nations at a time to rebuild. But if you look closely at the internal politics in some adjacent Central Asian countries, the possibilities of Islamic uprisings leading to upheaval could create quite a few more places to nation-build. We need to be involved everywhere, but deeply imbedded almost nowhere, so that our policymakers have the flexibility to deal with surprises all the time. Some points on other hot spots that intersect with the War on Terrorism:

• Israel-Palestine: The post-Arafat era could usher in "Rajoubistan" and "Dahlanistan:" warlordships in the West Bank and Gaza respectively, controlled by Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan. Notables such as Hannan Ashrawi have no power bases of their own, and their job will be, as before, merely to perform for CNN. Rajoubistan will rely on King Abdullah of Jordan, and Dahlanistan on Mubarak's Egypt. Thus, a variation of the pre-1967 reality might take hold. That would be the optimistic scenario: Hobbesian warlordships with which the Israeli security services can make deals and thus manage a cessation of hostilities.
• Iraq: Where are all the moral interventionists now that we need them for homeland security? In quantitative terms, Saddam Hussein's policies have led to the violent deaths of more people than those of Slobodan Milosevic. In qualitative terms, his brutalities are on the same level. I covered the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war and will never forget the bloodless bodies, the victims of Iraqi poison gas, in the Howeizah marshes. Repression in Iraq has no comparison elsewhere in the Middle East. Removing Saddam will provide more strategic benefits than removing Milosevic (whose removal was, of course, in our self interest). The liberated area of Iraq is now larger in proportional terms than the area of Afghanistan controlled by the Northern Alliance prior to our military campaign there: Getting rid of Saddam, for that and other reasons, is not a pipe dream. And were Saddam able to announce, with some credibility, that he has access to weapons of mass destruction, then his power to influence his neighbors would increase immeasurably, owing to the fact, which I mentioned in the first round, of how Middle Eastern politics ultimately rests on physical intimidation. Removing the Baghdad regime must be part of any long-range war on terrorism.

I will continue in the last round.