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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I found the article I think I mentioned earlier by Professor Haqqani on the madrassa movement from an issue of Foreign Affairs; I'll share and reccomend it here as well.

In a basement room with plasterless walls adorned by a clock inscribed with "God is Great" in Arabic, 9-year-old Mohammed Tahir rocked back and forth and recited the same verse of the Koran that had been instilled into my memory at the same age: "Of all the communities raised among men you are the best, enjoining the good, forbidding the wrong, and believing in God." But when I asked him to explain how he understands the passage, Tahir's interpretation was quite different from the quietist version taught to me. "The Muslim community of believers is the best in the eyes of God, and we must make it the same in the eyes of men by force," he said. "We must fight the unbelievers and that includes those who carry Muslim names but have adopted the ways of unbelievers. When I grow up I intend to carry out jihad in every possible way." Tahir does not believe that al Qaeda is responsible for September 11 because his teachers have told him that the attacks were a conspiracy by Jews against the Taliban. He also considers Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden great Muslims, "for challenging the might of the unbelievers." ...

Muslim states are now calling upon Western governments to support madrasa reform through financial aid. The proposed recipe for reform is to add contemporary subjects alongside the traditional religious sciences in madrasa curriculum. But Madrasas will probably survive these reform efforts, just as they survived the introduction of Western education during colonial rule. Can learning science and math, for example, change the worldview shaped by a theology of conformity? I asked Tahir if he is interested in learning math. He said, "In hadith there are many references to how many times Allah has multiplied the reward of jihad. If I knew how to multiply, I would be able to calculate the reward I will earn in the hereafter."

As I said in my comments on the Tactius thread (cross-posting my comments below) where I first excerpted this: we continue to ignore this at our own peril.

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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I'm about midway through Ahmed Rashid's Taliban and finding it fascinating (and I'm relieved to see much more readily accessible than his Jihad, which I still haven't gotten around to finishing all the way through). In any case, I think one of the most striking observations Rashid makes is the extent to which the Taliban militans were almost completely disassociated from their own culture and history -- that twenty years of war against the Soviets had so completely dislocated the Afghan refugee population that the madrassa students who absorbed the creed of the Wahhabi and Deobandi Islamicists along the Pakistan border and then returned home to combine it with their conservative pashtunwali culture to take up arms as the Taliban were nearly completely ignorant of Afghanistan's own much more tolerant Sufi-inspired religious traditions and operated largely outside of the tribal structure that was previously the political norm. With the educational and family structure destroyed and disrupted by war, there was no normalcy for them, and so they turned inward to an isolated, severely puritanical military brotherhood.

In one of the addenda to Soldiers of God Robert Kaplan references this with the observation that "the most dangerous movements are often composed of war orphans, who, being unsocialized, are exceptionally brutal", giving the Khmer Rouge (who I think would probably qualify as my personal number one candidate for total scale of atrocities committed upon a particular civilization) and Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front as two other examples.

I think this offers many deep implications for other areas around the world where chronic war has eradicated any semblance of normal life, and so I was wondering whether any readers or fellow bloggers could reccommend further reading on the subject of something like child soldiers or efforts to rebuild an area after the traditional social structure has been heavily disrupted, or even just something on educational theory in these sorts of nation-building struggles. I picked up Fukuyama's State-Building on praktike's recommendation but haven't started yet -- is this sort of question addressed in there, perhaps? I imagine it's an issue confronted most frequently in Africa, which I know very little about, so anything readable on any of these sort of lines will be much appreciated.