The bear-like Grillo, who sports a beard and a mop of tangled white hair, says Italy should dump the euro, devalue the lira, and force foreign banks to accept debt payments - at a loss - in the new currency.

Pizzarotti chooses his words carefully and does not swear. Instead of attacking rivals, he talks about finding "common ground". He sidesteps the question of the euro, saying he is not an economist."We do different jobs," Pizzarotti said of the movement's leader. "He's our loudspeaker, he shakes up people's consciences. He is like a plough that shifts the earth. We are the ones planting the seeds."

Grillo refuses to call the movement a party, and bans his candidates from going on TV talk shows. The Internet, his blog and social networks are the movement's main means of communication.It accepts no public campaign financing, unlike the millions of euros pocketed by the established parties every year, funding itself instead from the proceeds of Grillo's stand up shows, and sales of books, videos and T shirts. Pizzarotti spent just over 6,000 euros ($7,500) on his entire campaign.

it's easy to see why German politicians might be hesitant to actually take the initiative on breaking up the euro. Reviving the deutschmark will involve certain and immediate pain for German voters. Muddling through might cushion that pain by leaving more of it with other electorates and enable German voters to blame the policies and work-cultures of Southern Europe.

The fact that violence is still simmering in eastern Congo -- and despite the costs that extraction imposes on the Congolese people -- has not been enough to deter Beijing from wooing Congo's government for access to the country's abundant resources. So, if there's any thought that war in Afghanistan might dissuade Chinese investment there, it's best to dispense with that notion immediately.

China, which has a narrow land border with Afghanistan, already invests heavily in the war-torn Central Asian state. The state-owned China Metallurgical Group has a $3.5 billion copper mining venture in Logar province. Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei are building digital telephone switches, providing roughly 200,000 subscriber lines in Afghanistan. Even back in the war's early days in 2002 and 2003, when I worked in Afghanistan, the Chinese presence was acutely visible in Kabul, with Chinese laborers on many building sites and Chinese-run restaurants and guesthouses popping up all over the city. As Robert Kaplan has pointed out, these investments come with a gratuitous hidden subsidy from the United States -- which has defrayed the enormous costs of providing security amid war and looting.

With its massive wealth, appetite for risk, and willingness to underbid others on labor costs and human rights conditionality, China is the odds-on favorite for development of any new Afghan mineral resources. Chinese firms will control the flow of new funds, and the way those funds are distributed between the central and local governments. It's all well and good that Barack Obama's administration has recommitted to building civil projects in rural Afghanistan, but consider the relative scale of building a school to establishing a multimillion-dollar mine (not to mention the transport networks and infrastructure required to get the extracted minerals out) and it's easy to see what kind of influence the Chinese will bring to the table.

Although many have warned of a new Sino-colonialism, Brautigam's work suggests that perhaps China's awareness of its gargantuan and growing need for foreign export markets will make it a better "colonial" power than any European country ever was.

Stability in Pakistan should be an important goal for China. It is by now clear that the Taliban's campaign west of the Durand Line is inextricable from the destabilizing efforts of Islamist militants in Pakistan. If China does not want another nuclear basket case on its border, then it should care deeply about instability in Afghanistan. Currently, however, Beijing is still freeloading, relying on Washington to provide security for its limited interests. Perhaps the tantalizing prospect of $1 trillion in minerals might be enough to change the strategic equation.