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.

In part one of this series of post-debate analyses I tried to assess George W. Bush's assertion that the nuclear proliferation network of A.Q. Khan, father of Pakistan's "Islamic Bomb", had been "busted". Given Khan's considerable freedom and the reluctance of the Musharaff government to challenge his high level of popular support within Pakistan, I found this claim rather dubious, as well as disconcerting considering Pakistan's attempts to expand its sway throughout the Islamic world by championing the military causes of groups such as the Afghan mujahadeen.This post, associated with the first under the issue of "How to prevent access to nuclear weapons technology from spreading to those who do not currently possess it," will swing northward to examine, the threat posed by "loose nukes" and nuclear material in the former Soviet Union; future posts will look at how the candidates propose to deal with non-status quo states who currently or may soon possess nuclear capabilities, and how to defend ourselves from the threat of a nuclear attack.   more »