Parts 1b through 3 of "The Single Most Serious Threat to the National Security of the United States" will be forthcoming as time permits, but since I spent seven hours today getting myself certified in Basic First Aid, I haven't had a chance to research up anything sufficiently detailed for what I imagine for my future posts.

I did get a chance to finish up the book I was currently reading through, Robert D. Kaplan's Soldiers of God. I picked this one up off the shelves of the BPL to tide me over until my booklist order arrived for my South Asia course, and while it kept my attention, in the end it proved more valuable for visual and anecdotal texture than anything else. Kaplan makes some interesting observations and has a nice talent for describing the lands and some of the characters that populate Afghanistan, but offers no systemic analysis of the muj and not much in the way of a coherent narrative - befitting the nature of the conflict, perhaps, but his choppy chapter layouts, which weave in and out of multiple fronts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, multiple historical eras, and multiple trips in and out of Afghanistan -- make it hard to tell what, if anything, he's getting at in any particular chapter of the book.