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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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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Parts 1b through 3 of "The Single Most Serious Threat to the National Security of the United States" will be forthcoming as time permits, but since I spent seven hours today getting myself certified in Basic First Aid, I haven't had a chance to research up anything sufficiently detailed for what I imagine for my future posts.

I did get a chance to finish up the book I was currently reading through, Robert D. Kaplan's Soldiers of God. I picked this one up off the shelves of the BPL to tide me over until my booklist order arrived for my South Asia course, and while it kept my attention, in the end it proved more valuable for visual and anecdotal texture than anything else. Kaplan makes some interesting observations and has a nice talent for describing the lands and some of the characters that populate Afghanistan, but offers no systemic analysis of the muj and not much in the way of a coherent narrative - befitting the nature of the conflict, perhaps, but his choppy chapter layouts, which weave in and out of multiple fronts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, multiple historical eras, and multiple trips in and out of Afghanistan -- make it hard to tell what, if anything, he's getting at in any particular chapter of the book.

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President Musarraf has been making the tour of Rome, ending his visit Thursday with a meeting with the Pope. High on his list of themes, both at the UN in NY last week and in Rome, is discouraging the development of what he called an "iron curtain" between Islam and the West.

While he's at it, he had time to agree with Italy's President, Carlo Ciampi, that the two countries are opposed to an enlargement in the permanent membership of the UN Security Council. Their opposition was, of course, couched in the most noble of sentiments:

Pakistan and Italy has agreed to block the expansion of permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to ensure equality of nations in the world body.

Issuing joint press statement with the Italian President in Rome Tuesday after one on one meeting, the President said Pakistan and Italy are in total consonance on the issue of expansion of UN Security Council.

He said we would be against any attempt to violate the basic tenets of democratic norms of certain equality of nations and oppose any increase of nations in the UN Security Council having special privilege of being more equal than others.

The Italian President Carlo Ciampi speaking on the occasion said Pakistan and Italy both envisage a role that could enable the United Nations to more effective performance in its charter and respond to any threat to the security and the problems to any development.

The two countries are mobilizing against the four-country bid of Germany, Japan, Brazil and India which was launched last week in NY. Needless to say, Italy is opposed to Germany joining Britain and France without Italy being represented, and Pakistan is mortally opposed to India's bid.

Of all the classes I'm taking this year, I think my Islam in South Asia course has the potential to be the most interesting -- in part because it is all very much new frontiers for me personally in my studies, in part because of the increased profile of South and Central Asia in our post-9/11 security conceptions, and also in large part because of the professor himself. A former reporter in Afghanistan during the jihad (he briefly met bin Laden "back when he was nobody"), a former Pakistani ambassador to Sri Lanka, and an expert on political Islam in its various permutations, Professor Haqqani leavens his considerable personal experience (he's recently mentioned his friend former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as a possible guest speaker at some point in class) by engaging readily with his students; a diplomat's skills at personability, no doubt.

In any case, my having come to the class already familiar with (and with plenty more questions about) the broad outlines of the Afghan conflict and the twin roles of Pakistan and the US in shaping the anti-Soviet jihad through having read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars has given me a bit of a rapport with him, but not so much that I wasn't rather startled when out of the blue in class last Thursday he asked me if I'd be willing to comb through the book for some quotes he would be using in a book he's working on. Well... sure, why not? I've certainly never been asked to be a research assistant before (if you could call it that) but hey, I'm not about to pass up the opportunity. So last weekend, borrowing his copy of the book (Amazon just delivered mine yesterday), I set about skimming over the pages again looking for quotes (which, having compiled and handed on to him last Monday, I've now got burning a hole in my hardrive waiting to be put to use in some blog posts; I've attached the complete list I found at the end of this post for others' use, and there are a lot of them -- the one in this post's title on page 166 definitely being my personal favorite) on the liasons between the US CIA and the Pakistani ISI and how the Americans were initially content to a great extent to sit back and allow the Pakistanis control where US money would be funnelled. This lax oversight of American money and materiel is a dominant theme in the early parts of Coll's book, -- having set the CIA to the goal of bleeding the Soviets, the Americans in Islamabad and Washington, D.C. left questions of who would be undertaking that task (and thus gaining training and support) and what kind of political future might follow to Pakistan's ISI and ruling junta under the political Islamist General Zia ul-Haq.    more »