Only quibble I make: I told him upfront I was not an expert on Colombia or our cooperation there but that I could only respond in a general strategic sense. I would have liked to see that disclaimer made up front. But otherwise very happy with the translation made on an over-the-phone interview.

India, Iran and Russia have long been averse to any dialogue with the Taliban that could give Pakistan greater leverage in the region or with Washington. All see the various extremist groups based in Pakistan as threats to their security. India is working to rebuild the regional alliance that opposed the Taliban and Pakistan in the 1990s. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited India last Thursday, partly to discuss a common strategy on a post-U.S. Afghanistan. Senior Indian officials have met with Karzai in Kabul and are due in Iran later this month.

Assuming the most likely scenario, the election's outcome will most benefit Arab-Kurd relations on the national level, and Iraq's oil industry. In light of Kurdish leverage over Maliki, the long-awaited national oil law could be near (even if a Kirkuk compromise may be too much to hope for), and Maliki's re-election means the companies that won last December's licensing round will breathe easier. But look for a deterioration of provincial-level Arab-Kurd relations, as Sunni Arabs in Ninawa, Kirkuk and Diyala fear they will be marginalized by another Shiite-Kurd government.

This explains New Delhi's recent push for greater international cooperation, with the inclusion of Russia and Iran, to reinvigorate efforts at arriving at an appropriate regional mechanism to tackle growing fundamentalism throughout the region.

Thus, in the overall context of coming under increasing attack in Afghanistan, India will need to combine its goal of becoming a major stakeholder in that country's stabilization with several concrete measures to raise Pakistan's confidence about its presence. To begin with, New Delhi must make its development work in Afghanistan more transparent. In addition, a constant, formal and wide-ranging engagement with Islamabad on issues relating to Afghanistan will be required. India must also harmonize its desire for the total elimination of the Taliban in Afghanistan with the emerging international consensus calling for a political resolution to Afghanistan's civil war. To this end, Afghan President Hamid Karzai will likely try to maintain friendly ties with India as a potential counterweight to Pakistan's historic relations with the Taliban, while remaining committed to preventing any proxy wars being staged in his country. Finding the necessary balance, and thereafter maintaining it, will be a challenge for all three countries.

"I feel our country's legal system has not yet been fully constructed and many legal definitions are not clear," Mr. Li said.

The AKP, by contrast, is demonstrably the chosen path to modernity of the socially conservative, observant but at the same time dynamic and entrepreneurial middle classes of central Anatolia, who now demand their rightful share of power. The AKP's appeal, in other words, is both aspirational and reassuring, by holding fast to the moorings of family, religion and the villages from which many Turks are just a generation away.

A report entitled " Religion Among the Millennials" produced by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life and released this week found that one in four people 18 to 29 years old are unaffiliated with a religion. But that by no means makes them all atheists or agnostics. While there are always religious people among the unaffiliated, the numbers are significantly higher among the younger unaffiliated crowd. While they are less likely than those unaffiliated and older than them to believe in God, they are more likely to believe in life after death, heaven and hell, and miracles. So, anyone laboring under the delusion that the generation weaned on MTV would move us closer to being weaned of an abnormally high level of religiosity -- at least when compared with other industrialized countries -- may have to keep waiting. In fact, on some measures, the data suggest that these so-called millennials may be more spiritually thirsty than older generations.