I'm not going to liveblog the debates, but I am watching them here at the moment now, and about five minutes into it Dick Cheney already has me yelling at the screen. I'm sorry, but IRAQ was not the "most likely nexus" (paraphrasing from memory here) of terrorist groups and nuclear weapons, because if I've learned anything in my Political Islam in South Asia course, that "most likely place for them to come together" was freaking PAKISTAN.

Of all the classes I'm taking this year, I think my Islam in South Asia course has the potential to be the most interesting -- in part because it is all very much new frontiers for me personally in my studies, in part because of the increased profile of South and Central Asia in our post-9/11 security conceptions, and also in large part because of the professor himself. A former reporter in Afghanistan during the jihad (he briefly met bin Laden "back when he was nobody"), a former Pakistani ambassador to Sri Lanka, and an expert on political Islam in its various permutations, Professor Haqqani leavens his considerable personal experience (he's recently mentioned his friend former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as a possible guest speaker at some point in class) by engaging readily with his students; a diplomat's skills at personability, no doubt.

In any case, my having come to the class already familiar with (and with plenty more questions about) the broad outlines of the Afghan conflict and the twin roles of Pakistan and the US in shaping the anti-Soviet jihad through having read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars has given me a bit of a rapport with him, but not so much that I wasn't rather startled when out of the blue in class last Thursday he asked me if I'd be willing to comb through the book for some quotes he would be using in a book he's working on. Well... sure, why not? I've certainly never been asked to be a research assistant before (if you could call it that) but hey, I'm not about to pass up the opportunity. So last weekend, borrowing his copy of the book (Amazon just delivered mine yesterday), I set about skimming over the pages again looking for quotes (which, having compiled and handed on to him last Monday, I've now got burning a hole in my hardrive waiting to be put to use in some blog posts; I've attached the complete list I found at the end of this post for others' use, and there are a lot of them -- the one in this post's title on page 166 definitely being my personal favorite) on the liasons between the US CIA and the Pakistani ISI and how the Americans were initially content to a great extent to sit back and allow the Pakistanis control where US money would be funnelled. This lax oversight of American money and materiel is a dominant theme in the early parts of Coll's book, -- having set the CIA to the goal of bleeding the Soviets, the Americans in Islamabad and Washington, D.C. left questions of who would be undertaking that task (and thus gaining training and support) and what kind of political future might follow to Pakistan's ISI and ruling junta under the political Islamist General Zia ul-Haq.    more »