This evening I was finally able to set aside the time to finish up Stephen Cohen's recent book The Idea of Pakistan. In this post I aim to summarize his key conclusions and in the process offer a review of the work.

As the title of this post suggests, The Idea of Pakistan is intended primarily as a guide to the political, social, and economic makeup of the country, its major political actors (the military, the Establishment, the Islamists), and the future trends and issues that the Pakistani and American leadership confront when making policy. Each of these topics are capable of sustaining multiple books of their own (and have), but Cohen's ability to provide a comprehensive briefing on each subject makes this a valuable introductory resource for readers new to the country. Since this information is presented categorically rather than chronologically, it can be at times difficult to hold all the factors operating at a particular point in time in your mind when reading on a different section, but Cohen compensates for this fairly well by starting off the book with an account of Pakistan's history from the struggles of Partition and the founding of the state to the coup that installed Pervez Musharraf in 1999, then going deeper in the subsequent chapters.

A well-balanced book (hey, this is the Brookings Institute we're talking about here), Cohen offers what are in my view key assessments on the following subjects (not, it should be noted, an exhaustive list):
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
via amazon.com

Behind Enemy Lines
by Steve Coll
Washington Post Book World, Aug 8, 2004

Understanding Terror Networks
by Marc Sageman (April 2004)

and Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (The Ceri Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies)
by Mariam Abou Zahab, Olivier Roy (2002, trans April 2004)

Public rhetoric about terrorism is often abstract. President Bush declares a generalized "war on terror." The press explains, as a provocative Newsweek cover put it after Sept. 11, "Why they hate us." Now a presidential campaign summer rings with broad questions about whether the Iraq war strengthened or weakened al Qaeda, and whether it is possible to alter the sweeping forces that are presumed to foster Islamic radicalism, such as satellite television networks, oil dependency, Middle Eastern poverty, and the spread of madrassas, religious schools that often teach an unyielding Islamic faith.

These two small and important books analyze al Qaeda and jihadist violence in a more granular, specific fashion. They are interested not in grand ideas but in the details of al Qaeda's recruitment and support networks. They use the biographies of individual terrorists and obscure al Qaeda-linked groups to explain the movement's evolving structure. By this path the authors challenge some poorly examined assumptions of familiar public debates.

In the end, by hewing to scientific method and forswearing strategy, the authors illuminate crucial but neglected strategic questions of their own: How and why do al Qaeda cells form? What are the important patterns of individual radicalization? What is al Qaeda's new geographical center?

Marc Sageman is a former CIA case officer who worked undercover on the Afghan frontier during the 1980s. After he left the agency, he became a forensic psychiatrist specializing in the motivations of murderers and genocide perpetrators. Drawing upon open sources, Sageman studied the biographies of 172 jihadist terrorists, scrutinizing their stories for patterns. In Understanding Terror Networks he spreads out a feast of stimulating insights.

Sageman concentrates on the small, loose, committed cells of young Muslim men that seem to form almost spontaneously in Europe or North Africa. The cell members pledge themselves to the global jihad, then develop the discipline and commitment needed to carry out a terrorist attack, sometimes by suicide. These Bunches of Guys, as they have been labeled half-facetiously, bind each other to secret membership and reinforce a mutual commitment to violence.

The multinational Hamburg cell that executed the Sept. 11 attacks -- intimate, ultimately loyal but often arguing among themselves, as the Sept. 11 investigative commission recently showed -- is a prototype of the emerging global jihad. In another context such testosterone cliques might rob banks or brawl at local soccer matches. Here kinship and friendship networks, images of violence against Muslims, deepening faith and access to al Qaeda's resources can lead them to cross oceans and commit mass murder.

Sageman argues that poverty, religious belief and political frustration are "necessary but not sufficient" to explain how a few angry young Muslim men -- but not many, many others -- decide to embrace jihadist violence. More important are "social bonds" among the young volunteers, the sense of clandestine belonging they develop, and their ability to make reinforcing contact with al Qaeda leaders or trainers. Bunches of Guys become effective terrorist cells "through mutual emotional and social support, development of a common identity, and encouragement to adopt a new faith." These internal group ties are more significant, Sageman argues, than external factors "such as common hatred for an outside group." After losing its Afghan sanctuary, al Qaeda's leadership is less hierarchical than in the past and more reliant on such semi-independent cells in diverse regions. Sageman notes that the Moroccans who carried out the hotel bombings in Casablanca in 2002 bonded and planned their attacks on long camping trips in local caves and forests, aided by expert advice from more senior al Qaeda contacts who had once trained in Afghanistan. He calls such local volunteers and local training a "wave of the future." After his book went to press, a similar regional group killed 191 people in railway bombings in Madrid.

Sageman's work is mainly detailed analysis, but he does offer some practical advice, some involving his old work as a spy recruiter. Group loyalty among Islamic radicals makes it very difficult to lure informers or agents. The best luck is likely to be had from Bunches of Guys who trained for jihad but decided not to act -- the Lackawanna Six in upstate New York, for instance, or the similar accused group in Northern Virginia. In such cases, Sageman writes, an "aggressive policy of prosecuting" these almost-jihadists without exploring their recruitment as agents may be a "mishandled opportunity." Perhaps even more important is putting country-by-country and node-by-node pressure on al Qaeda leaders and trainers, making it harder and riskier for aspiring cells to connect with the more ambitious, capable wings of Osama bin Laden's movement. If a particular volunteer Bunch of Guys is unable to train or plan with competent al Qaeda leaders, they are more likely to fade away in place or carry out a relatively small attack.

These cell-by-cell outcomes may have much more impact on the overall potency of al Qaeda violence than changes in Middle East education or job creation -- certainly in the near term, and perhaps in the long term as well. Sageman also argues persuasively that just as European socialist parties and democratic communist parties helped to isolate Soviet-backed communists and radical Marxist cells, so should the United States explore how to use peaceful, radical Muslim political movements to cut off jihadists from popular support. Secular Arab governments have used such strategies successfully, as did European colonial administrations in the Middle East before them. Debate about such nuanced political strategies in the United States since Sept. 11 has barely developed; Sageman's contribution is helpful.

As for Iraq, it "is a great opportunity but also a great danger," Sageman concludes. Its success as a democracy may indeed alter Middle Eastern politics for the better, he thinks, but Iraq may also become a new "Peshawar or Khartoum . . . where the excitement for the jihad is renewed." The al Qaeda visible in Sageman's analysis is more movement than organization, an "imagined community," in the phrase of anthropologist Benedict Anderson, increasingly located not in any one geographical place but in the virtual and global space of the World Wide Web -- continually reaffirmed by cliques of angry young Muslim men tapping their keyboards in Internet cafés from Rabat to Riyadh to Jakarta.

Yet if there is any one country that matters most to al Qaeda's future, argue Mariam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy in Islamist Networks, it is Pakistan, where "the fate of the last jihadists" trained and inspired before Sept. 11 "is being played out." The "Pakistanization of al Qaeda," as the authors call it, is rooted in 20 years of collaboration between elements of the Pakistan army and intelligence service and the radical Islamist movements that birthed and nurtured bin Laden's organization. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, contradictions long submerged and unresolved in Pakistan are surfacing as open conflict -- as in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl and the recent assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf.

Zahab, a French specialist on Pakistan, and her colleague Roy, an accomplished scholar on political Islam, argue that in Pakistan -- unlike in other countries where al Qaeda has recruited and thrived -- "the state and the Islamist movements had common interests," namely, political control of Afghanistan and Islamic revolution in Kashmir.

Before Sept. 11, bin Laden targeted the United States while his lesser-known Pakistani allies -- radical groups such as Lashkar-e Jhangvi, Harakat al Mujaheddin al Alami and others -- concentrated on Kashmir. Now these Pakistani groups have more fully fused with al Qaeda under pressure from Musharraf, who in turn is acting under heavy pressure from Washington. The groups are responding by trying to kill Musharraf, sheltering fugitive al Qaeda leaders and organizing regional attacks against Western and Indian targets.

In a richly detailed analysis of the recruitment patterns among the Pakistani groups, Zahab and Roy report that, contrary to popular belief, the great majority of violent Pakistani jihadists have come not from the madrassas but from dysfunctional state schools or private, semi-commercial English-language schools promising a modern education in exchange for religious indoctrination. (In Sageman's more global sample, too, only 17 percent of the terrorists he examined had Islamic religious primary or secondary education; the rest went to secular schools.) For Pakistan's floundering, desperate lower-middle classes, jihad can offer a path to upward social mobility, since "the family of a martyr acquires a privileged position" in local towns and villages, often including financial support. Islamist Networks is a thin work, more a journal article between hard covers than a fully formed book. Still, especially read with Roy's other lectures and published work, it is nourishing.

Iraq is commonly described as a hinge conflict that will decide al Qaeda's future, but Zahab and Roy place more weight on the current peace talks between India and Pakistan, especially the talks about Kashmir's future. Unless those negotiations succeed, Pakistan's army will again "need the jihadis to put pressure on India," they fear, reviving the cycles of violence and state support that strengthened al Qaeda in the past. In the meantime, they argue convincingly, while Iraq's insurgency may be of rising importance, Pakistan "continues to be the central point of mobilisation of the Islamic radicals."


Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

I generally enjoy the prose stylings of Atrios, James Wolcott, Kevin Drum, and even Steve Gilliard on occasion.

But, like Matthew Yglesias, I think they really ought to keep their opinions to themselves until they've actually read The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Betweeen Iran and America. Having just finished the book, I think it's wrong to suggest that Pollack has simply gone through The Threatening Storm replacing q's with n's. If anything, the book is meant to forestall a foolish course of action such as a military invasion (he's got a section aptly named "The Case Against Invading Iran") or a covert regime destabilization campaign (there's another section called "The Ghost of Kim Roosevelt").

Pollack's nuanced case is duly replete with qualifiers and caveats, but the bottom line is that, as "our least bad option," he favors a "Triple Track" approach consisting of the following elements:

• Hold Open the Prospect of the Grand Bargain
  
• A True Carrot-and-Stick Approach
  
• Preparing for a New Containment Regime
  

He says on p. 385:

[J]ust because the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons does not quite justify the extraordinary price of an invasion does not mean that it is not a threat or that it would not justify other actions by the United States that might not be as costly as an invasion but could still require considerable sacrifices. Foreign policy is rarely an all-or-nothing activity--that either a threat is great enough to justify paying any price, including invasion or nuclear strikes, or else it is not a threat at all and therefore does not justify paying any price. Most foreign policy problems fall somewhere in between, and the Iranian nuclear threat still falls toward the higher end of the spectrum.

Failing to succeed would meaning learning to live with a nuclear Iran, which would be pretty bad but not the end of the world.

I should warn potential readers that the book is quite sloppy in parts, probably the result of a headlong rush to publication. Pollack often appears to directly contradict himself within the same paragraph.

For instance, on p. 16, amid a discussion of 19th century Iranian history:

Entire Iranian industries were thus wiped out by foreign competition, impoverishing Persia's middle class and artisanry. At various points, European creditors pressed the shah to sell off Crown lands to repay debts, increasing the power of the landlords at the expense of the central government and further diminishing royal revenues in the future. Moreover, these new duties brought the shahs increasingly into competition with Iran's rising middle class, composed largely of merchants and business (called bazaaris because their place of business was the bazaar, meaning "market" in Persian) who were being penalized for the government's financial mistakes. (my bolding)

Try making sense of that.

That's only a minor example of Pollack's discombobulating prose-- the big picture is equally muddled. Iran has been mostly helpful in Iran and Iraq, he says, but Iran has reverted to its bad old ways from the 1990s. Khatami has lost his mojo and the hardliners from that time period are back in charge, but the current regime "does not have a history of reckless behavior." It's been nearly impossible to get the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese to go along with punishing Iran for its bad behavior, but it will be possible to get the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese to go along with a multilateral sanctions regime. Strangely, there's no mention of Iranian support for Muqtada Sadr or most of the other predations described in US News, although Pollack does cite one November 2003 attack by Iranian guerillas on a Fallujah police station as an example of bad behavior. Sadr's name doesn't even appear in the index. If Pollack believes the swirling accusations about Iran's involvement in the insurgency to be false, he should have made some effort to debunk them rather than letting them stand. I was also troubled by Pollack's use of Wikipedia as a source on the 1973 Oil Crisis (aren't there books on that subject?), and I imagine I could find other problems if I cared to look. Not to mention the fact that Pollack has never been to Iran, and doesn't speak any Farsi.

My bottom line: I can't recommend this book unless you know little about Iran, don't follow the news, and can't bother to read the James Fallows piece or Pollack's burgeoning list of editorials on the subject. But don't believe the knee-jerk reactions from left blogistan, either. Pollack should have done a better job, but this isn't Threatening Storm II.

There are political seasons when certain phrases seem to latch themselves to the brain, repeating themselves over and over, like a song's refrain. This year there have been two for me. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" (even though the remark was occasioned by a Depression-era inaugural, not the war that began on the day that still lives in infamy). And "We have met the enemy and he is us."

I came to Walt Kelly and Pogo late in Kelly's career, when even his strongest admirers would admit he was well past his most creative years, and when the characters had been running for decades and the strips assumed a knowledge of their past adventures not evident from the later tales. Like devoted fans before me, I was captivated by the humor of a funny sketch between a couple of foolish characters, or some over-the-top word play, or Kelly's unique manner of penciling in words in the background or margins of frames: familiar signs, topical quotes, brand-names, mangled literary allusions or sayings. Although I had the impression Kelly began more as a journalist/writer than cartoonist, I knew little about him, and never had the benefit of the long history of Pogo before I became an occasional reader.

Imagine then my pleasure, when Henry at Crooked Timber found a lengthy review/appreciation of a major part of the opus of Walt Kelley that's currently available in a series of eleven volumes of Pogo (1948-60). The essay is by John Crowley in the Boston Review. Of topical interest this political season, Crowley doesn't neglect Kelly as social and political satirist. He gives a flavor of how the McCarthy era, in particular, played out in the characters and storylines of Pogo.
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It only recently came out, so I hadn't been able to order a copy with the rest of my recent book orders, but Stephen Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan was one of the books recommended to me by Professor Haqqani at the start of my Islam in South Asia course. Seeing that Pervez Hoodbhoy has a major review of it in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (which I have just inadvertently found out I can read for free online when connecting through the university network.. sweet!) I've got hopes that I can successfully order a copy now and place it somewhere on my pile.

Ominous declarations of imminent chaos in Pakistan abound in the United States. Cohen aims both to raise warnings and to soothe fears. Although he acknowledges that profound problems plague both the idea and the reality of Pakistan, he distances himself from apocalyptic "failed state" scenarios. Catastrophic failure of this nuclear-armed state is surely a possibility. But Pakistan's fate will ultimately depend on whether its leaders can find an answer to the fundamental question that has plagued their fellow citizens for more than half a century: "How can we make the idea of Pakistan actually work?"

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Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

I wrote this review last year for my Introduction to Security Studies course. Looking back on it, it's a little more stilted that I'd like it to be, but the word count limits for the assignment were pretty brutal as I recall. Right now I have to be reading up on Japanese defense policy post-9/11 (the consensus so far, it must be said, does not look so great for Kerry's grand-alliance-against-terror plans, at least where Japanese participation is concerned) so an updating of the older review probably won't be forthcoming any time soon... the book itself was quite good, and I'd really recommend you read it over my review, if you have the chance.

For more cogent and current thoughts on the role of private military firms (PMFs) in our current operations in Iraq, check out Phil Carter's reaction to an LA Times Sunday op-ed by Hallburton chief exec David Lesar.
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