Uyghurs of Xinjiang paper status:

- 8670 8713 words
- 26 pages
- DONE!

(...pending one final re-read edit, that is...)

Edit - Ok, really this time it is! I found it in me to re-read the thing one more time today after all, and I think I'm generally satisfied. (At this point, I'd better be).

I've attached the .rtf file here, and will post the whole freakin' thing immediately following this post, for those who feel like plowing through it on the web.

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UPDATE Attachment 2 is the Final version handed in.

Those of you looking to follow along with the latest by Husain Haqqani might like to check out the latest issue of The Washington Quarterly, which features a piece by him as well as two other scholars of the subject of Pakistan. I have no real time to read it now, but I trust that it's good -- feel free to warn otherwise in comments if you disagree. I hope to get around to it myself (as well as finishing Stephen Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan) one of these days.

Now, off to (re)write!

I'm going out with something of a bang. My classes for my next and final semester at this fine institution:

IR 395 North-South Relations with Professor Strom Thacker
"Employs a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the relations between the industrialized nations of the "North" and the developing nations of the "South." Addresses historical and current issues in North-South relations, including trade, investment, migration, regional economic integration, and the environment."

IR 508 Islamic Political Movements and US Policy with Professor Husain Haqqani
"Studies the origin and impact of various revivalist Islamic political movements and their intersection with U.S. foreign policy. Examines their ideologies, their views of the West, and their contribution to the rise of terrorism."

IR 516 Homeland Security with Professor Arthur Hulnick
"Aspects of homeland security, including information and intelligence sharing, the role of first responders, the structure and functioning of the system, and defensive and operational aspects."

IR 522 Ideas and US Foreign Policy with Professor Andrew Bacevich
"Examines the intellectual foundations of U.S. foreign policy from the founding of the republic to the present."

I'll see about posting syllabi book lists when I get those.

One of America's increasingly prominent scholars in the fields of international relations and national security is none other than MC MasterChef's own professor at BU, Andrew Bacevich (specialty American military affairs). His op-ed today in the LATimes, "Unsafe for Democracy," is a timely reminder of a dimension of the recent election that has not received enough attention. With most post-mortems focusing on why Kerry came up short -- why Bush voters didn't pull the lever for Kerry, rather than an assessment of why Kerry voters rejected Bush -- no serious appraisal of the foreign policy voting patterns has received any prominence so far.

The President and his supporters have claimed bluntly that because he won, the Democrats should be expected to "stop campaigning" and support his foreign policies to promote "healing" and "national unity." All well and good from a "rally 'round the troops" standpoint, especially as serious fighting has just been launched in Fallujah. But in terms of how America should position itself in the world going forward, a substantial portion of Democrats and independents who voted for Kerry believe continuing down the road that the Bush Doctrine has placed us on would be a profoundly dangerous mistake.

Although a large portion of the electorate has begun to feel that the US got off was unwise to invade Iraq, a fundamental debate about the role of the US in a unipolar world has not yet been joined. During the election campaign, most of the pointed critique of Bush Admin policies and actions -- from either Democrats or the press -- involved relatively narrow issues, such as the feebleness of the grounds for the invasion of Iraq or the lack of competence in planning and execution of the post-invasion phase. Even those claims didn't receive a great deal of public attention until late in the campaign because of the slow process by which concrete evidence emerged that countered the Admin's fantastically rosy pictures of reality. (See discussions in "Media Tipping-Point " and "What will those dumb Americans do next?"

Bacevich argues, along the same lines as John Ikenberry's "Liberal Leviathan" analysis, that the witches brew of traditional conservative US foreign policy principles with Wilsonian idealism is neither sustainable at home nor acceptable abroad. Bacevich does not outline his preferred approach -- whether to shift from conservative to liberal traditional principles and/or to jettison Wilsonianism in favor of some version of realism or a new idealism . But that political elites must recast the discussion in terms other than the "false coinage" of "freedom" and "democracy" cannot be disputed.    more »

This is a fascinating conceptualization of things, one that we've edged around at a few points in the course of my Political Islam in South Asia class but haven't yet tackled full-on. (One recommendation, made with qualifications, on the subject that Prof. Haqqani did make last week was a book by Tariq Ali called The Clash of Fundamentalisms which I gather elaborates more on the identities and goals of the major world fundamentalist ideologies.) Comparisons between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism often raise ire early on that prevents much further discussion, but I would really like to see this expanded upon. Unfortunately, I have a paper to be writing at the moment, so my thoughts will have to wait.

Ok, the election is done with, I'm already tired of debating how the Democrats should be reaching out to disaffected red staters — though for what it's worth, I think elrod in the Tacitus diaries has a pretty good premise for that, together with Mark Schmitt (see his entry after that too). Best of luck to the party as it rights itself and all that but any hopes that I might personally make some contribution to bridging the red state-blue state divide is pretty well wiped out by the fact that I'm still an elitist godless secular-humanist liberal even when I'm back home in Indiana, so I don't help much with the emerging consensus that we need to do some work on our collective brand image. But that's all beside the point! The point is I want to blog about something else right now, that ended up getting shelved until after the election like so much else.

I took Praktike's recommendation from a week or so ago and watched Frontline's piece on Rumsfeld's War. It really was a fascinating program to watch, and a complex one too since a lot of different threads seem to be at work: the title is somewhat deceptive because there are actually quite a few conflicts surrounding the Secretary of Defense presented within the program, any single one of which could probably merit a whole program of its own.   more »

I have three term papers coming due at the end of the next month and a half or so, all theoretically running at 10-15 pages each but which, depending on my ability to focus, may well end up sprawling past that nominal limit.

For my Islam in South Asia course, I have chosen to focus on Uighur separatism in China's western Xinjiang province. Muslim minority separatist groups in places like Chechnya have in the recent past successfully exploited their identity to appeal to a broader Pan-Islamic community, drawing in material, monetary, and ideological support as well as the occassional corps of foreign volunteers like the Arab Afghans of the 1980s; given the considerable efforts by Beijing to repress Uighur nationalism and the Han colonization campaign in the west, it's important to determine whether those small handfuls of Uighurs you always hear tacked onto the end of the list of Egyptians, Jordanians, and other Middle Eastern and South Asian militants captured or killed in the news reports are signs that Xinjiang might develop into the newest front of radical Islamic revivalism sometime in the near future.

For my China course, I'm planning on writing something on the danwei work unit system, with all the incorporated housing, educational, and social controls that come with employment in a state-owned factory unit; the basic focus of that will be the penetration of the CCP party-state apparatus into Chinese society and asking whether the CCP leadership can continue to effectively rule China without the use of such interventionist state organs to prop up their rule.

And for my Japanese Foreign Policy course, I'm trying to explain why the Self Defense Forces continue to operate under a system of such binding hadome ("brakes"), because frankly it just boggles my mind the kind of restrictions they place on their military forces. Did you know they can't even take part in land mine removal missions? I don't think they have to wait for a Diet resolution to return fire any more, but some of this stuff puts even the American aversion (that keeps repeating itself every other chapter in my American Military Experience course) to funding a standing war-fighting Army during times of peace to shame.

Right now for all this I have... an introduction for one of them and an outline for the other two, so if I'm not blogging much from now till early December, I trust you'll understand why. If I get any good excerpts while writing, I'll be sure to post them here, otherwise I'll put the whole things up when I can finally get them finished.

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?"

   more »

One of the things I find fascinating, and maybe to an extent under-appreciated, is the extent to which the implementation of American foreign policy has become militarized; that is, when it comes to administering, informing, and representing American policies overseas, the Department of Defense has found itself in a greater and greater role over the course of the past century in general, and I would say the post-Cold War era in particular. The marginalization of the State Department from the policy-making and implementation process was particularly vividly apparent in the run-up to the Iraq conflict, but it's something that's been going on for a long time now, to the extent where the best solution for American engagement in a region -- say, Africa -- requires appealing to the power of the proconsuls first.

One of the themes of my course on the American Military Experience has been the evolving role of the US military, from a small regular force primarily intended to operate at the core of a larger citizen's militia during the immediate post-Revolutionary period to the pacification and exploitation of the West to the gradual movement towards professionalization of the services and a reliance on a trained regular standing army, something anathema in the founding days of the republic, in the post-Civil War era. The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked a major turning point in resolving what purpose the Army would be used for in the future, with deployments of military governors and counterinsurgency forces to Cuba and the Phillipines and the inculcation of a set of lessons for occupation duty that I believe are still studied today -- the Marine Corps' Small Wars Manual being one example. Though civil administration followed, it was the Army that was tasked with reconstructing Cuban and Phillipine society and administering the American protectorates -- just as it had been forced to do in the occupied South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Tomorrow's lesson will be on these nation-building efforts in the Phillipines specifically, and I hope to have more specific insights to offer after the lecture. Professor Bacevich has actually written a book on one of the major figures of the Phillipine occupation, Maj Gen. Frank McCoy, and his hybrid role as a military leader and a political envoy and administrator, which I read two years ago and will have to look up again to refresh myself on, because it too covered the question of the proconsul's role in some great detail as I recall it. On the one hand, I can appreciate the unity-of-command type logic behind relying upon a central politco-military authority to implement US foreign policy in the farflung corners of the globe (after all, as Clausewitz said, they are essentially two responses on the same spectrum), but if it's truly going to be US policy to ultimately rely upon its military to run the show, it seems as though it will still require a serious shift in their defining missions, geared as they are now to war-fighting above all else.

Because that's the thing -- as much as we rely on the military to implement a whole range of foreign policy for us, they don't really seem to want to be doing it. When the entire US Marine Corps, often the first responders to a crisis overseas, maintains only two teams of civil affairs units (as I learned in reading this interesting report of one such unit's daily struggles), or when I read about Tommy Franks' and others' bizarre insistence that tactical military success against the Hussein regime somehow constitutes a "victory" totally separate from the failings of Phase IV post-combat operations (more on this in Prof. Bacevich's review of Franks' recent book here, it makes me think we have yet to seriously come to grips with the requirements of concerted nation-building, which seems to be a recurring need in the implementation of our foreign policy. If I remember correctly plans to do away with the Army's small peace-keeping school were in fact put on hold, but if the military isn't willing to whole-heartedly embrace the state-building mission (and I can see why they would be reluctant to, given their conception of their role as warriors first and foremost), maybe we need to think seriously about developing a really strong foreign civil service corps for these sorts of duties that can work directly alongside them in complement to the military mission. Out of all the categories we have here on the blog, I think the broad issues of "Nation-building" are the one topic of pre-eminent, overarching importance for the future of US foreign policy (in the sense that it seems to me to be, in whatever degree, the ultimate answer to "what is the solution" after we've finished establishing "what is the problem"), and it's something I'm not at all sure I know enough about, on either a practical or theoretical level. When you think about it, it covers such a diverse array of issues that it could really be almost a major unto itself, let alone an important subset of international relations; I don't think there are really any comprehensive courses taught here at BU in "Occuptation theory" or "Comparative State-building Missions" but if there were, I'd sure like to take one.