This evening I was finally able to set aside the time to finish up Stephen Cohen's recent book The Idea of Pakistan. In this post I aim to summarize his key conclusions and in the process offer a review of the work.

As the title of this post suggests, The Idea of Pakistan is intended primarily as a guide to the political, social, and economic makeup of the country, its major political actors (the military, the Establishment, the Islamists), and the future trends and issues that the Pakistani and American leadership confront when making policy. Each of these topics are capable of sustaining multiple books of their own (and have), but Cohen's ability to provide a comprehensive briefing on each subject makes this a valuable introductory resource for readers new to the country. Since this information is presented categorically rather than chronologically, it can be at times difficult to hold all the factors operating at a particular point in time in your mind when reading on a different section, but Cohen compensates for this fairly well by starting off the book with an account of Pakistan's history from the struggles of Partition and the founding of the state to the coup that installed Pervez Musharraf in 1999, then going deeper in the subsequent chapters.

A well-balanced book (hey, this is the Brookings Institute we're talking about here), Cohen offers what are in my view key assessments on the following subjects (not, it should be noted, an exhaustive list):
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From the Asia Times Online's Sergei Blagov (under, ironically enough, a blinking banner ad for $250 gas cards..)

MOSCOW - The Kremlin's decision to approve the East Siberia-Pacific oil pipeline and pump its Siberian crude toward Japan has come as a blow to China's hopes of securing its own slice of Russia's hydrocarbon riches. And Moscow's energy overtures toward Beijing as a consolation prize are not much by which to set store.

On New Year's Eve, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov approved the Taishet-Nakhodka oil pipeline blueprint, the government said in a statement. The annual capacity of the East Siberia-Pacific pipeline system would eventually reach 80 million tons, the statement said. ...

Russia's decision to build a Siberian oil pipeline to the Pacific port of Nakhodka will please Tokyo, but upset Beijing. Japan backed the Nakhodka route, while Beijing favored an alternative pipeline that would have brought the oil to Daqing in northwest China. Russia has been toying with both options, but in March 2004 indicated that it could favor the Japanese-backed project.

Tokyo has been lobbying for an oil pipeline route to the Pacific. To back up its lobbying, Japan reportedly promised up to $14 billion funding of the pipeline as well as $8 billion in investments in the Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2 oil and gas projects, according to Russian media reports. The estimated cost of the oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to Nakhodka could reach $11-12 billion. The Taishet-Nakhodka route is seen as a strategic asset for Russia, allowing it to funnel crude not only to Japan but to Korea, Indonesia, Australia and the US west coast as well.

I suppose it's probably too much to hope that all this new oil will mean a new look at the wonders of central heating on the part of the Japanese (I spent about half my time there on a visit last winter scorching my leg hair off under one of these things), but this is still good news for Japan all the same. China, which has its own energy needs to feed, is probably not going to be so happy:

Russia had been discussing a China-bound oil pipeline for nearly a decade. In June 2002, Russian officials pledged to invest $2 billion to fund the construction of the 2,247 kilometer pipeline from the Russian city of Angarsk in the Irkutsk region to Daqing in northeastern China, which was scheduled to begin in 2003 and commissioned by 2005. ...

In the past, Russian and Chinese officials have raised the possibility that a branch of Russia's Pacific pipeline could eventually be diverted to China. However, the December 31 announcement mentioned no China-bound branches of the proposed pipeline. As consolation, on December 30, Russia said it would offer China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) up to a 20% stake in a new state-owned entity that would control Yuganskneftegaz, the main asset of the collapsing Russian oil company Yukos.

I haven't studied Chinese energy and resource consumption as a topic in itself, so I can't offer much speculation on how this particular development will impact it in concrete terms. You never know — maybe all those tens of thousands of Chinese engineering students being trained in their university system will end up devoting themselves towards coming up with some of the clean energy alternatives Matt's looking for.

Edit: China better find something to keep the lights going soon, though. As the UN Population Fund's China representative warns, "China will get old before it gets rich." The one-child policy, while still not enough to prevent China's population from increasing by 8 million per year, is now firmly entrenched within the urban population, presenting China with a looming demographic crunch.

The desire for a son has also so skewed the gender balance that there are now 117 males for every 100 females. To round off the China articles for this evening, we learn that in this corner of China, though, daughters are seen as a valuable commodity for sale in the Southeast Asian sex trade. Those that find success "working outside" bring great wealth to their impoverished homesteads, but also, inevitably, further exacerbate China's HIV and AIDs problem. As a solution to prostitution within China:

the government has set up "re-education centres" in every province. Much emphasis in these centres is put on educating women on the "social evils" of prostitution but they usually only provide limited information about sexual health and how the prostitutes can protect themselves. A study amongst prostitutes in China found that only a few knew that condoms could be protective (14-30%). They all mentioned abstinence as much more protective. Very few (2-30%) perceived themselves at risk of contracting HIV.

Sadly, that's exactly the style of sex education that George W. Bush and his supporters like to see, so I don't suppose there's much hope of the US pressuring the Chinese to get their act together on this front any time soon.

As coastal China's wealth rises, so too does its skyline, its shopping malls, and its number of reconstructed luxury French castles (unfortunately gone behind the NYT archive barrier by now, but a great article if you happened to have caught it) Edit: LJ in comments offers this reprint from the Gainsville Sun, which carries the original article (though not the NYT's photos of the castle). Thanks!
From the LAT article today:

In the public sector, decisions are often made by Communist Party officials who see impressive buildings as key to a promotion. Then they assign a few bureaucrats with limited knowledge of contracting, cost control, project management, aesthetics or problem solving to carry out those decisions.

Some of this happens with government projects anywhere, but critics say the problems in China are compounded by the lack of democracy or taxpayer scrutiny under its top-down governing system. ...

Not to mention the absence of property rights, meaning the government (or well-connected officials like the fellow described in the NYT piece) can comandeer land with considerable impunity.

... China's building spree has also spurred an ongoing debate over preservation. Although the country arguably invented city planning thousands of years ago, as evidenced by the well-ordered grids of its ancient capital cities, its headlong impatience to become world class overnight often results in messy patchworks, as traditional courtyard homes are razed, the faster the better, to make way for skyscrapers as flashy as possible.

"It's not the first time the whole nation has suffered from a bout of overconfidence," says Zhou Rong, assistant dean of the architecture school at Beijing's Qinghua University. "In the 1950s, you had the Great Leap Forward, as China argued it could catch up with Britain in five years, the U.S. in 10. Now they're trying to do that all over again."

It seems to me there is sort of a precedent for this kind of development.

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 »