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.

From this UPI piece in the Middle East North Africa Financial Network we get some good news for Afghanistan, some bad:

Under a program called demobilization and reintegration, or DDR, the Afghan government, begun a process to disarm the militia groups. Although progress has been slower than expected, the process is expected to be complete by June 2005.

"This must happen now with the mandate from the people and all indications are that this is a concern, a high concern of the people," Khalilzad said. "The collection of weapons, the demobilization of militias, and the government will have to deliver on that."

That's the good part, and it's to be hoped that Karzai's government, with the right amount of American support, will be able to take advantage of two and a half decade's worth of cumulative public war-weariness to implement disarmament, either through its political or military force. Unfortunately, there's also this:

According to U.S. estimates, poppy cultivation is expected to jump 40 percent this year. Twenty-eight of 34 Afghan provinces grow poppy and the number of acres under poppy cultivation grew from 197,684 acres in 2003 to 247,105 acres in 2004. The country supplies 75 percent of the world's opium. Expert say the drugs trade, which the Taliban had managed to control during its draconian rule of the country, may be contributing as much as 60 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. ...   more »

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.

Via Noahmax of Defense Tech comes this. All of the article is key reading (and considerably more troubling than last weekend's Suskind article, if you ask me); a troubling reminder, coming from many of the administration's own former counter-terrorism officials, of just how unaware George W. Bush is of what threat it is, exactly, that we face.

[Retired Army Gen. Wayne A.] Downing, Bush's first counterterrorism adviser after Sept. 11, said in a 2002 interview that hunting down al Qaeda leaders could do no more than "buy time" for longer-term efforts to stem the jihadist tide. This month he said, "Time is not on our side."

"This is not a war," he said. "What we're faced with is an Islamic insurgency that is spreading throughout the world, not just the Islamic world." Because it is "a political struggle," he said, "the military is not the key factor. The military has to be coordinated with the other elements of national power."

Many of Downing's peers -- and strong majorities of several dozen officers and officials who were interviewed -- agree. They cite a long list of proposals to address terrorism at its roots that have not been carried out. Among them was a plan by Wendy Chamberlin, then ambassador to Pakistan, to offer President Pervez Musharraf a substitute for Saudi funding of a radical network of Islamist schools known as madrasas. Downing backed Chamberlin in the interagency debate, describing education as "the root of many of the recruits for the Islamist movement." Bush promised such support to Musharraf in a meeting soon after Sept. 11, said an official who accompanied him, but the $300 million plan did not survive the White House budget request.

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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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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.

In my earlier look into nuclear proliferation issues (whose initially promised final two parts on state nuclear ambitions and US ballistic missile defense I'm afraid probably won't be forthcoming after all, since I don't really have the time to devote proper attention to them at the moment) I speculated that, based on its past record of support for militant jihaddis in the name of Pan-Islam, there might well have been some sort of similar encouragement coming from the Pakistani government, which makes a far more likely nexus of terrorists and nuclear weapons than Iraq ever did, towards the proliferation network of A.Q. Khan. It's something of a relief to read today that, in the estimation of the Institute for Science and International Security, that doesn't appear to have been the case:
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From Daniel Drezner I see that a collection of 650+ international relations professors, calling themselves Security Scholars for Sensible Foreign Policy, have signed an open letter of protest decrying the Bush administration's foreign policy. Professor Bacevich of several courses past and currently the American Military Experience is a signatory, which is not a big surprise given how much he's made his disgust for the invasion of Iraq apparent in class, as is Professor Corgan, who teaches the introductory IR course to all the freshman IR majors. I wouldn't call either of them wishy-washy liberals, but then I also don't have as great a handle on figures in academia as Drezner or other members of it might.

This of course makes the SSSFP about the umpteen-billionth group of Knowledgeable People Against Bush, whether it's economists, professional diplomats, generals or whoever, and ultimately it will probably have a neglible effect on the vote since god knows John Kerry has too many endorsements to run through in the available time as it is, but maybe it's worth at least consulting briefly with the professionals on stuff like this, from time to time.

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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I've been kept constantly busy this week with managing the Habitat chapter and the demands of school, hence the lack of much posting or commenting, and meaning I won't have a chance to finish my attempt at tackling the nuclear proliferation issue until this weekend (which is fortunately a long one) at the earliest. Right now I have to study Qing Dynasty and Republican-era Chinese history and the New Culture movement and all that fun stuff in time for a midterm on the subject tomorrow. If I'm really clever, maybe I'll be able to spin some sort of a comparison between Islam's confrontation with Western modernity and China's own experience... but let's not get too carried away here.

Also: saw a Hitchcock movie as part of the IR Film Series here at BU last night; the series theme is "foreign correspondants" and this one was entitled, appropriately enough, Foreign Correspondant. An amusing bit of WW II-era pro-US-intervention propaganda, recommended if you're into that sort of thing, and really who isn't?