Dexter Filkins

The overriding goal of counterinsurgency is to make friends: You make friends with the people; you isolate the insurgents. ”

It's so jarring to go from Baghdad to Cambridge, to go from a place where people are fighting and striving and dying to a place where the biggest concern is what kind of cheese to put in your sandwich. ”

I think - I think the real nightmare place now is less Afghanistan than it is Pakistan. I mean, again, Pakistan is this gigantic country, deeply troubled, kind of almost ungovernable, sitting on top of probably 50 or 60 nuclear warheads. Nobody really knows where the warheads are; the Americans certainly don't know where they are. ”

In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense. ”

Any American who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you: the closer you get, the less certain you are of anything. If you are in Iraq, if you are in Afghanistan, everything is ambiguous. Everything is murky and gray and uncertain and possibly lethal. ”

The expectation in the Obama Administration, or at least the hope, is that a nuclear deal with the West could ultimately moderate Iranian behavior by helping to integrate the country more thoroughly into the international system. Will this happen? It's impossible to predict, of course. We will only know if we get there. ”

The whole kind of post-World War I settlement that formed the modern Middle East is in danger of collapsing, and we can - we, the United States, you know, the preeminent power in the world - we can say that we want to ignore that, but how long can we avert our gaze? And how long can we stay out? ”