I have come very late to the field of South Asian studies in my college career (prior to Prof. Haqqani's arrival at the university, I don't believe anyone was really teaching any courses specifically related to either India or Pakistan, which is kind of unbelievable when you think about it.. I think European and Russian studies are still a little over-represented in our IR department right now, but hey, to each his own turf).

The more I learn the more interested I am in the region, so it's interesting when my studies to date, which have mostly focused on China and East Asia, overlap — as they did in my Uyghur paper and as they do in these articles about recently increased Sino-Pakistani cooperation here, here, and here (all coinciding with a visit by Pakistani PM Shaukat Aziz to Beijing and Shanghai) which recieved little attention in the U.S. press (even though Hu's diplomatic efforts in Latin America, East Asia, and Africa have caught a good bit of notice as China becomes increasingly assertive) but which look to have been a big deal in Dawn, the establishment newspaper of Pakistan.

It's my understanding that the military alliance between Pakistan and China actually dates back several decades — I think Steven Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan may cover it somewhat, but does anyone have a recommendation for a book specifically on Sino-Pakistani relations, military or otherwise? — since you have the whole border war between India and China from the 60s as well as the Sino-Soviet split playing out there. I believe Cohen makes the point that in the absence of real committed American support, Pakistan has frequently turned towards other regional powers such as China, especially after the Bangladesh crisis and when we departed after the Afghan jihad in the 1980s. Since Pakistan under Musharaff post-9/11 has been shedding most of its overt support for the training of Islamic guerrillas in the Kashmir region (which China had previously complained was bleeding over into Xinjiang and riling up the Uyghurs) and since China is content to participate in the war on terror to the extent that it legitimizes its own moves in Central Asia, increased cooperation between the two countries is not surprising now.

With that in mind, Timothy Dunlop's relating of the reaction of Indian officials (via Drum and Pandagon) to a visiting U.S. Congressional delegation — "We consider ourselves as in competition with China for leadership in the new century. That's our focus and frankly, you have made it very difficult for us to deal with you." — strikes me as very interesting indeed. TJ in Pandagon comments has CIA factbook figures for India, China, and the US that suggest to him India may actually be the most dynamic of the three major powers for the future. I don't know anything about the Indian economy to judge whether that's true or not, but China certainly has its share of structural problems yet to be confronted for the future. Right now the U.S. is engaging both the Chinese and the Pakistani regimes, but it's not clear to me to what extent (since the Bush administration hasn't made much of a priority of anything besides a professed commitment to counter-terrorism) or how long that will last (since American relations with Pakistan have generally been utilitarian and limited, and its as yet unclear how deep our cooperation is outside the current hunt for Al Qaeda — one reason Pakistan should be in no rush to deliver, by the way). I really don't think we want to see some sort of Sino-Pakistani vs. India-American face-off in South Asia at any point in the future, but India's dismissal of American efforts is not a particularly encouraging sign either, since with its current political and economic ties (of varying degrees of strength) to all major parties in the region the U.S. would presumably be in the best position to uphold a peaceful status quo between them.

And to conclude this bout of semi-informed speculation, let me just add that if I were an apocalyptic science fiction writer these days, I would totally start it all off with Kashmir.

Oh the weather outside is frightful
But to be done with finals is so delightful
It'll suck when tomorrow on my way home over Chicago O'Hare I go,
Let it snow let it snow let it snow

As of thirty minutes ago, I am done with my last final for the semester. As of fifteen minutes ago, I have signed into Professor Charles Dunbar's American Foreign Policy Processes course (replacing the North-South Relations economic development class I had been thinking about earlier), which should be good since my knowledge of the actual D.C. policymaking process is only marginal, and depending on how my job search goes, I may be playing some small part of it in another three to six months or so. As of tomorrow, I'm back home in Indiana, with a huge stack of vacation reading ahead of me, so happy holidays one and all.

I've made an invitation to my classmates from my Islam in South Asian Politics course to share their final term papers here on the site, in order to satisfy my interest, theirs, and hopefully our readership's, for what they found in the course of their research and writing. It was possible to approach this course from so many angles, it would be a shame just to limit myself to the one I wrote on in my particular paper, so I hope many of them will indulge us and volunteer their work for others to peruse. We'll put them up here as they come: watch this space for more details.

It's perhaps a little early to start the nostalgia-for-college-days-of-yore process just yet, but yesterday was the final screening that I'll have a chance to enjoy here at BU of the annual fall IR Film Festival (hosted by Prof. Bacevich), of which I have been a loyal attendee for the past four years.

The first year I got here they were showing Cold War movies, and I got a chance to see such classics as Them!, Strategic Air Command, and of course Doctor Strangelove. Subsequent years brought themes of "Dirty Wars" and "Elvis In Arabia", the latter of which's schedule is still up there on the film series web site (I think the department events coordinator is new this year, so promotion efforts have been somewhat scattered. I am not infrequently the only one there... yet another reason to disparage the tastes of my college peers). The Elvis movie last year was sublimely bad, but for my money the best was the vastly underrated Ishtar; I really cannot believe that movie bombed at the box office, because it was hilarious.

Well in any case, this year the theme was "Foreign Correspondents", international relations through the eyes of journalists reporting from abroad and the final movie was Welcome To Sarajevo, which I'm assuming no one else has heard of either.

Although a little heavy-handed narratively at points, it was a suprisingly well done (cept for maybe some weird soundtrack choices) advocacy piece for the suffering of the Bosnians during the siege of that city, as seen firsthand by a British reporter. He becomes wrapped up in publicizing the plight of an orphanage (and one orphan in particular) unable to evacuate its young charges from the ruined city. It's based on a true story, I gather, and was much more powerful than I expected, but I don't know very much at all about the Balkans and lacked a lot of the context that might've helped me appreciate it better.

Fortunately, Prof. Haqqani dropped by early on (his office is upstairs from the screening room) and stayed to watch the whole thing. Naturally enough, he had visited there during the siege while working as an assistant to Benazir Bhutto. One point he suggested at the end, perhaps vaguely apropos praktike's post below, was that the general Muslim reaction to Bosnia was: it doesn't matter how Westernized, how secularized, how moderately you practice Islam, when it comes right down to it the West is not going to intervene to help out Muslims. Bin Laden in particular has apparently made this point, and Woody Harrelson's character in the movie makes it explicitly with a quote to effect of (paraphrasing from memory) "I can't help but thinking if this had been Muslims attacking Christians we would've done something by now".

Whether this is true or not (and sadly, there may be something to it), the perception as such is a dangerous one. Haqqani made the point that the reaction among a lot of British and European Muslims in particular to this episode has been greater estrangement from the local cultures. This would seem to reinforce the point that Marc Sageman makes about alienation among Muslim immigres being a large factor in the rise of militant Islamism on the Continent.

I don't have an answer to any of this (particularly since, like I said, I know essentially nothing about the Bosnian situation beyond this), but thought it was worth sharing. It really is stuff like this that makes me appreciate college.

Tuesday I attended a presentation by Tyler Hicks, staff photographer for the New York Times (BU COM '92), and pride and joy of the photography department here. For good reason: Hicks has taken some amazing photographs over the past three years, a witness from the ruins of Ground Zero to the mountains of Afghanistan to Iraq, before, during, and after the invasion.


As a slide show of his work, the presentation didn't lend itself especially well to blogging, but you can find some of his pictures (some of which may be familiar to Times readers, but many of which I don't recall having seen before now) on display at the Times website. He also has a book out, with accompanying essays by NYT reporters John F. Burns and Ian Fisher, Histories Are Mirrors: The Path of Conflict through Iraq and Afghanistan. Powerful stuff.

Enclosed is my term paper on postwar Japanese military policy. While considerably more academic and probably less general-interest than my Uyghur piece, it is still somewhat relevant today. This paper mainly sprang out of my frankly flabbergasted disbelief at the kinds of operational restrictions the Japanese government puts on their Self Defense Forces. After reading more on the subject in an effort to understand, I've constructed an argument for why that might be. I lost this paper once when my computer crashed and died, so this version didn't have as much cumulative effort devoted to it as the Uyghur one just on the basis of time constraints; to some extent I think this may have lead me to overstate my case (that of a realist leadership calculating costs and benefits of a particular national strategy), and I don't believe that it alone is the sole explanation by any means. Nonetheless, it's one explanation, and hopefully one that's sufficient for my professor, whose views on the matter I happen to arguing against.

In any case, it's done, and now I can move on to my even more obscure study of the Chinese danwei work units, which I expect to spend the entire weekend frantically trying to finish by Monday!   more »

Warning: fairly shameless praise. Professor Haqqani — who I believe may be reading this blog — may want to cover his ears.   more »

For those of you who don't follow doings in Asia closely but want to keep abreast of goings on, the best place I've found by far is Simon World's twice-weekly roundup of Asia blogs (and blogs writing about things Asian). He selects posts with lots of good insight on newsworthy events and cultural trends with lots of color and wit as well. Highly entertaining and extremely informative all in one. Yum!

The Chef's Uyghur article is featured in the newest installment of Asia by Blog. Check both out.

And to all Simon World readers, welcome to chez Nadezhda.

Revised December 6, primarily illustrations and format

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Uyghur Separatism and the Politics of Islam in China's Western Frontier

Colin Cookman

From its earliest inception, the modern Islamic terrorist movement has been transnational and pan-Islamic in character. Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network had its origins in the corps of volunteers known as the "Islamic Internationale", or "Arab Afghans": young men hailing from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the whole breadth of the Middle East who flocked under the banner of jihad to the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the training camps of Peshawar. There they gathered to wage guerrilla war in the name of Islam against the godless Soviet Communists, while the American government looked on with grim satisfaction as it covertly supported efforts to bleed the Russians in their own "Soviet Vietnam".

Following the United States' campaign to topple the Taliban and disrupt Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, news reports tracking captured fighters and key figures in the Al Qaeda leadership regularly reiterated, either explicitly or through non-commental labels of ethnicity, the multinational character of the terrorists' network: U.S. President George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" was facing off against a stateless, loosely affiliated coalition of the dispossessed, the globally marginalized, and the violently revivalist. Although the biggest names and largest percentage of captured Al Qaeda members continue to be primarily of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, every now and then reports mention other, more exotic figures in the mix of captured and killed: Chechens from the Caucuses, Uzbeks, Filipino Moros, and, infrequently but not unnoticed, Uyghurs from China's Xinjiang province.

What motivates those small handfuls of anonymous young men to cross the Pamir mountains into Afghanistan and fight alongside the militants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban? In order to attempt an answer, we must examine the origins of Xinjiang's oasis peoples, the Uyghurs, and their aspirations for nationhood; the nature of Chinese rule over them today, and its effects on those aspirations; and the extent to which militant Islamic revivalism may have infiltrated China's western hinterlands, and what implications that holds for the Uyghurs and their region. This paper argues that China's discriminatory policies have, more than any other factor, served to alienate the Uyghurs and increase the appeal of militant Islam, in effect making Beijing's worst fears a reality.
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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.