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.

Kaplan doesn't try to hide the extent to which he's been swept up in the adventurous romanticism of the Afghan jihad that so captivated Charlie Wilson; rather he at best seeks to somehow explain to the reader what was so compelling about these warriors of god and the atmosphere in which they operated. To some extent he suceeds -- if maybe through a bit too many appeals to Kipling -- and he certainly offers a few interesting travel stories, which read fast and well. His portrait of Abdul Haq and several other muj figures is obviously not an objective one, but it is an interesting perspective to have on top of the more detailed accounts given in works like Ghost Wars or Ahmed Rashid's Taliban, which I'm about to start in earnest.

The main effect of the book was making me wonder whether I could some day visit the exotic locales of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Subcontinent and experience some of the same taste of adventure that Kaplan does; it's a rather romanticaly appealing notion, as I start making my post-graduate plans, which will most likely involve some sort of program overseas in an effort to pick up a solid foreign language capability through immersion.

Unfortunately, the risks involved in something like that, my still extensively-ignorant command of the region's issues and history (though this South Asia course really is helping to improve some of that), and the fact that the most solid language base I have to start from right now is Japanese probably means that I will opt for a more prosaic destination post-graduation. Whether I one day physically try and follow the progression of my studies south-westward from Japan into South-central Asia will, I guess, remain to be seen... but I'm thinking, after Mandarin and some reinforced Japanese, of adding Urdu and Farsi to my list of languages I'd like to learn at least a smattering in. Well, it's a thought.