Bharat Rakshak

Francis Fukuyama came to prominence for his 1989 essay “The end of history?” (1) and subsequent book (2). In them, he argued that all the world's political systems were converging to liberal democracy and that this was to be a sort of historical absorbing state. After making such an ahistorical argument, Fukuyama (a political scientist at Stanford University) has now produced the first half of a two-volume work on the historical evolution of political institutions. The Origins of Political Order focuses squarely on how three big things—the state, the rule of law, and representative democracy—emerged historically and why they did so in some places and not others.

Very well written, the book is packed with clever ideas and fascinating information. It reflects a huge amount of reading and reflection across the social sciences. As ambitious as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (3) in its scope, it starts even earlier, tracing the emergence of human societies from their primate ancestors. Fukuyama argues, however, that the type of parsimonious theory proposed by Diamond is simply not possible. In its place he offers a “middle-range theory” based on analogies with the theory of evolution. Human societies developed from roots in primate social behaviors. Over time, some grew from bands, through tribes, to larger entities. Some eventually formed states with representative institutions. Innovations fueled the development of human societies, and those societies that survived were well adapted to their circumstances.

The circumstances that Fukuyama believes are relevant are quite complicated, and they combined in various ways in different contexts and time periods. Although he mentions the importance of geography, often his discussions of one factor that might make a particular set of human institutions adaptive (or tend to create innovation) is immediately followed by consideration of other factors. These factors include ideas, satisficing nonrational behavior, religion, and leadership. Fukuyama places heavy emphasis on warfare and competition among societies. For instance, he argues that bands transformed into tribes because tribes are much better at waging war.

An early quartet of chapters focuses on China as the first part of the world to develop a centralized modern state. Whereas Fukuyama sees “unrelenting warfare” as the key driving force behind this, he also notes that almost all recorded societies fought each other intensively. (I think he is wrong about the evidence on the San people of southern Africa.) Thus warfare is certainly not sufficient for the development of a state and probably not even necessary. Rather, he points out, it was war in conjunction with other factors that led to a state in China. In contrast, despite constant conflict between the Nuer and Dinka in the south of Sudan, neither society developed any sort of political centralization because they lacked these other factors.

Exactly what these other factors are and how they interact with warfare are things that Fukuyama finds too complex to describe in any general way, even though he tries in many contexts. But if we can't precisely describe these factors or their interactions with warfare, then it seems difficult to conclude that warfare played such a crucial role in developing the state. After all, following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain was not forced to build a state by the threat of invasion; it could easily have sat out interstate warfare as it had done for most of the previous 150 years. In fact, Britain's development of the state and fiscal system was created by desires to be a big player in international politics and to create a mercantile empire. The simple correlation between state-building and warfare doesn't establish a causal relation, and other factors might have created a Chinese state, which then waged war. Indeed, Fukuyama discusses various other things (such as the lack of a European-like landed aristocracy) that might help explain the path along which China developed.

At a general level, the analogy to evolution is appealing. However, throughout the detailed historical examples that fill the book, it is hard to understand exactly how the pieces relate to the broader theory. Although you may not accept Diamond's argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel, at least it is easy to see what answer that offers to a question such as why Britain developed an effective centralized state in the early modern period. To apply Fukuyama's ideas, you have to immerse yourself in a complex historical story that interweaves the nature of Anglo-Saxon local government; the relative strengths of the monarchy, aristocracy, and gentry; the role of religion in changing underlying social relations; 17th-century political conflicts over domestic absolutism; military competition with France; etc. And it is difficult to determine whether or not the various institutions involved in the centralized state's development were adaptive. Were the pre–Magna Carta political institutions of Britain ever well adapted to their circumstances? Did forcing King John to sign the Magna Carta make them more adaptive? While emphasizing adaption, Fukuyama also includes discussions of maladaption and considerations of arguments about how institutions tend to persist over time even though the circumstances that made them appropriate change. There can be no presumption that any particular change of institutions is better or worse. Ultimately, the answer to that question involves a very complex series of historical contingencies.

Fukuyama seems quite correct to grasp for this type of contingent theory, but I think he is wrong to believe that it cannot be formulated much more systematically, even mathematically. Although human society is immensely complex (as he observes), so are many physical systems. In the natural and social sciences alike, it is all a matter of getting the right abstraction. Incredibly ambitious and fun as The Origins of Political Order is, in a sense Fukuyama has not been ambitious enough. He finished too far toward the trees in the forest-trees trade-off. While there is a lot to enjoy among the trees, I hope for more forest in the next volume—which I eagerly await.

References

1. ↵ F. Fukuyama, Natl. Interest 16, 3 (1989).
2. ↵ F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, New York, 1992).
3. ↵ J. M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Norton, New York, 1997)

From a noted historian and foreign-policy analyst, a groundbreaking critique of the troubling symbiosis between Washington and the human rights movement

The United States has long been hailed as a powerful force for global human rights. Now, drawing on thousands of documents from the CIA, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and development agencies, James Peck shows in blunt detail how Washington has shaped human rights into a potent ideological weapon for purposes having little to do with rights—and everything to do with furthering America's global reach.

Using the words of Washington's leaders when they are speaking among themselves, Peck tracks the rise of human rights from its dismissal in the cold war years as "fuzzy minded" to its calculated adoption, after the Vietnam War, as a rationale for American foreign engagement. He considers such milestones as the fight for Soviet dissidents, Tiananmen Square, and today's war on terror, exposing in the process how the human rights movement has too often failed to challenge Washington's strategies.

A gripping and elegant work of analysis, Ideal Illusions argues that the movement must break free from Washington if it is to develop a truly uncompromising critique of power in all its forms.


"Ideal Illusions forces us to confront a great contradiction: how the noble vision of human rights has been compromised and manipulated to serve the purposes of the national security state and divert attention from deep economic, political, and military pathologies. James Peck's work, based on a rigorous examination of an enormous collection of official and archival documents, is essential, sobering, and eye-opening."
—John Dower, author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

"This incisive and sophisticated analysis exposes the 'hidden history that once again reveals just how tied into U.S. national security concerns the evolution of human rights attitudes has been.' Ideal Illusions is a well-documented, impressive account and a timely warning to seek the interests that lie behind appealing rhetoric."
—Noam Chomsky, author of Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

"In this searing book, James Peck strips away the comforting illusion that, give or take a mistake or two, U.S. foreign policy for the past thirty years or more has been shaped by a dedication to the principles of human rights. He demonstrates how, on the contrary, successive administrations have captured the language of human rights and bent it to America's purpose. In clear and compelling prose, Peck calls on the human rights community to understand the dangers of its reliance on American power—and on American citizens to address the contradictions between a genuine dedication to the rights of humanity and prevailing definitions of U.S. national interests."
—Marilyn Young, author of The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990

"Ideal Illusions is both a devastating book and a deeply disturbing one. James Peck lays bare any lingering illusions that human rights concerns seriously influence U.S. policy. Yet he goes further: showing how Washington has consciously and cynically manipulated the very concept of human rights to serve the interests of American power."
—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

In his much-admired biography of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick French has an excellent half-dozen pages describing the disciplined, relentless way his subject set about gathering material for his last full-length examination of India, then widely seen to be incapable of reforming its roughhouse communal politics or quickening its development. When, twenty years ago, India: A Million Mutinies Now finally appeared, it was judged to be surprisingly sympathetic and hopeful, considering India’s actual circumstances and the tone of high dudgeon, sometimes mockery, that many Indians had found in Naipaul’s prior treatments of their land.

At the time it wasn’t clear what or who had changed more, India or the ex-Trinidadian sojourner. Now it can be said that Naipaul was prescient. Traveling and writing several years before economic reforms upended a planning bureaucracy that had smothered India’s entrepreneurial zeal and aptitude, which have since flourished, he sensed an irrepressible cultural change. The “mutinies” he celebrated as a burst of “self-awareness” were, he concluded, “part of the beginning of a new way for many millions.”

It’s tempting to approach Patrick French’s survey of today’s energetic, surprising, still lopsided India as an implicit sequel to Naipaul’s last venture along those lines. He opens with a brief account of a visit to remote Ladakh, a high-altitude outpost of Tibetan culture in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, just up the road from the point at which Naipaul ended his travels a generation ago. But there’s no hint of an homage here; in fact, the name of his last subject never appears in these pages (only a coy reference to “a biography,” subject anonymous, that delayed the writing of this book). He’s in Ladakh, about as far north as he can get in India, merely to make the inarguable point that it’s very different from Tamil Nadu far to the south; and thus to make vivid the oldest idea in the long literature of Indian travelogues: that the country’s cultural tapestry is about as variegated as it can conceivably be. And so we are transported in reverse gear into another discussion of the nation-building challenges that faced India’s leaders after the Raj shut down in 1947.

Missing here is the rapacious curiosity with which Naipaul drilled down through the testimonies he assembled in search of the theme he would extract from such scattered findings, his conclusion about tectonic shifts in the Indian situation, that “new way for many millions.” French starts off in a similar vein, saying that there has been “some sort of unleashing.” Later he speaks of “a transformative revolution,” adding incontrovertibly that “it is not always a pretty sight.” What Naipaul claimed to have discovered, he takes as a given. Less an explorer than a tour guide, this Englishman has a collection of notebooks, anecdotes, insights, and clippings that he has gathered in the twenty-five years he has been visiting India and out of them he stitches together his patchwork, filling in blanks with new forays here and there. He meanders but his wit and eye for detail are sharp enough to reward a patient reading.

Cameo appearances by familiar figures on the Indian stage, past and present, are typically arresting, even where French is depending on secondary sources rather than direct encounters. We learn that Gandhi advised the young love-struck Indira Nehru to avoid “sex-pleasure” if she insisted on going ahead with marriage to “busy, fleshy, outgoing, and sensual” Feroze Gandhi (who shared only the Mahatma’s surname); that her father, the future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, then in the throes of an affair with a “buxom Congress politician” following the death of his wife, gave his “pained, partial consent.”

In a foreshadowing of a seemingly impossible convergence, we’re told that on “the very day” in 1946 that India’s Constituent Assembly convened, an infant named Sonia Maino was born in a bleak industrial suburb of Turin to a Roman Catholic family that kept a leather-bound set of Mussolini’s speeches in its front room. “Handcuffed to history,” she would become the queen regent of the Nehru-Gandhi family dynasty following the murder of her husband Rajiv, son of Indira, governing the party that’s now the leader of the ruling coalition until her own son Rahul is deemed ready to succeed to the prime ministership she astutely declined, in what will then be the fourth generation of the family’s rule. “The Congress Party is a Mughal court,” French writes of what remains of the national movement the original Gandhi once led, “and no one can do anything unless the Gandhis say so.”

Our author’s fascination with the “triumph of nepotism” in India’s democracy is by no means limited to the unofficial first family. Delving into the results of the 2009 national election, he finds that 37.5 percent of the Congress members of the Parliament’s lower house had a “hereditary” connection to current or previous Congress office-holders. He does not give the statistics on “sheeters”—elected officials with criminal records—but these can also be mind-boggling. Considering that two of our last four presidents have been named Bush, or that the present governor of New York bears the same surname as the last Democrat to serve a full term in the office, or that even with the departure of his brother from the family storefront in Chicago, the present White House chief of staff is named Daley, we should perhaps refrain from clucking over such findings.

French titillates too with references to swamis who played Rasputin to at least two Indian prime ministers (and on the place of gurus and astrology in the lives of many ostensibly secular Indians). Presenting the new India that is said to have emerged in the last fifteen or so years, he wheels in outsized examples of social and economic assertion. Inevitably, one is Mayawati, the woman who is the Dalit chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state (Dalit being the preferred designation for the people once called untouchables); her “pharaonic” building of monuments to herself and older Dalit leaders who inspired her has consumed tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars of public funds. If a cross-cultural reference can be interjected, Mayawati might be described as a Huey Long populist. “I’m a Chamar [a leather worker, traditionally deemed untouchable], I’m not married, I’m yours!” she tells her adherents in the Hindi of the streets. It goes down well, even with opportunistic Brahmins and Muslims ready to stand as candidates on her ticket. No one seems to mind that she has also, in the course of her political career, become very rich.

Mayawati’s excess can seem proportionate, even justifiable, when compared to the brazen displays of India’s new billionaires. The Indian steelmaker Lakshmi Mittal, we’re told, managed to hire the palace at Versailles for his daughter’s wedding. Not satisfied with local camels, another magnate imported giraffes from South Africa to a north Indian industrial town for his own daughter’s nuptials. And then there’s the much-remarked-upon twenty-seven-story residence, with three helipads and nine elevators, erected in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani, who, according to Forbes, has a fortune of $27 billion. French interviews a telecom billionaire named Sunil Bharti Mittal, in whom he finds a philanthropic ambition and potential worthy of a latter-day Andrew Carnegie, but he never really gets close to the new rich or a convincing analysis of their impact on Indian life and society.

Much the same can be said of his presentation of India’s frightening lower depths. It’s not hard to find outcastes or lower-caste Indians living at bare subsistence, far below anyone’s idea of a poverty line. There are estimated to be some 300 million of them, roughly a quarter of the population. But French finds only one, following up on a lurid newspaper article about an indebted quarry worker who was put in chains by his employer (an example of the “horror stories” to which he says foreign correspondents are addicted).

Two other lower-caste figures he introduces turn out to be a law professor, who started off in life as son of a landless laborer, and the professor’s nephew, now living in Silicon Valley as a software engineer. These, it need hardly be explained, are stupendously atypical examples of the new social mobility that has suddenly been loosed on the land. The nephew thinks of returning to India. “In some ways we would lead a more sophisticated life in Bangalore,” he explains. He instantly defines what he means by sophistication, this offshoot of a landless laborer: “You can have a driver and a nanny there, which is hard to afford in the US.”

This English writer’s inclination is to see the early years of Indian independence as an era of misguided idealism, during which an artificial austerity was imposed on the land, foreign luxuries were banned, and all key economic decisions had to be signed and countersigned by bureaucrats. Paraphrasing Clauswitz, he calls that era, now deemed to have ended, a continuation of colonialism by other means. In search of what went wrong in the period, he travels into some obscure byways, considering an early treatise by John Maynard Keynes called Indian Currency and Finance, published on the eve of World War I, which may or may not have influenced economic thinking in India after World War II; he dwells on the failure of the enormous, state-owned Heavy Engineering Corporation to run at capacity or a profit over several decades. It’s a chapter most readers will want to skip, once they’ve grasped the argument that India didn’t really start to come into its own until the 1990s.

Of course, the servants were always there, even when Indian elites imagined themselves to be pursuing lives of idealistic self-abnegation because their government wouldn’t allow them to import foreign cars or other luxuries. “The omnipresence of dispensable servants…makes a certain kind of existence possible. Servants fetch, carry, polish, iron, sweep, wash, shop, fix,” French writes evocatively.

They are slimmer and darker than their employers; they look childlike but profoundly adult, as if they have had to work like adults since they were children. They move without assurance, and the expectation is that they will always be there, to facilitate a certain way of life.

It’s a telling passage, one that suggests that examples of social mobility in accounts of India still exist at the level of anecdote, that the churning they reflect may be less transformative than advertised. Patrick French leans one way, then another. Neither a booster nor a naysayer, he lopes along, keeping the open mind of an affectionate bystander whether he’s presenting gated communities for the affluent, advertised as “lifestyle enclaves”; a gay pimp providing male strippers to Bangalore “hen nights” attended largely by so-called NRIs (nonresident Indians) on home leave; or the tangled story of an ostensibly orthodox Hindu politician slain in a lurid fratricide whose son then survives a drug overdose in a jacuzzi to go on to become star of a reality TV show. Such images flash by kaleidoscopically. Since it’s India we’re talking about, they proliferate, leading to their own kind of overdose.

Anand Giridharadas, a second-generation Indian-American journalist born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, doesn’t travel nearly as far as French into the subcontinent’s past or present but, in a book that’s a hundred pages shorter (and could easily have been briefer), he manages to dig considerably deeper into the psychology and circumstances of the “new kind of Indian” we’ve been hearing about since Naipaul. In this younger writer’s account—drawn from family visits in his childhood, followed by a prolonged residence in Mumbai as first a corporate consultant, then a journalist—this new Indian is at once more self-confident and less Westernized in the sense of being freer from hand-me-down colonial models. Viewing the changes through the prism of the families his parents left behind in India, Giridharadas sketches pictures of cultural reinvention and loss that will be more or less familiar to anyone who has read a few Jhumpa Lahiri stories. The personal narrative provides a useful point of entry but becomes repetitious; his forays into the actual India are more likely to be remembered.

Giridharadas finds in the new India “quiet refusals to know one’s place,” to be pinned down by the old signifiers of caste and status, the old Indian “boundedness,” by even geography. He’s not merely finding new words for the “mutinies” Naipaul described a generation ago. He succeeds in evoking these new Indians, most strikingly in the case of Ravindra, a self-created motivational speaker who overcomes humble village origins through close study of Dale Carnegie. He never wore footwear till the ninth grade but he has now read How to Win Friends and Influence People twenty-eight times, he says. “I will change my destiny,” vows Ravindra, who gets his start staging “personality contests” in a small nondescript town called Umred near his village in the center of India, a town too small to have a train station but big enough to have had its conventions shaken, if not exploded, by television and the Internet. One of the contestants for the plastic tiara that comes with the title of Miss Umred is asked what she hopes to become. “My aim in life is to become a newsreader,” she replies in English, which Giridharadas calls “the language of success in the India that was beginning to flourish in the 1990s.” She probably picked it up at what he calls “middle-class finishing schools,” describing a sort of low-rent Berlitz for the slightly dislodged, aspiring masses.

The pleasure of Giridharadas’s portrait of this striver is that he doesn’t just descend on his subject for a single opportunistic interview but returns again and again over a period that seems to cover a few years. Soon Ravindra has started one of those makeshift academies on his own, offering Umred’s awakened youth not only English but courses in “personality development”—what’s now sometimes called “personal branding” in listings of American extension courses—so they can learn how to present themselves at a job interview, perhaps at a call center where successful candidates go on to field orders and complaints from American villages, towns, and cities.

Roller-skating is also part of the curriculum. In the period when Giridharadas follows him, this former villager buys himself a motorcycle, builds a house, becomes manager of an Indian skating team that travels to Hong Kong, and nearly pulls off a “love match” instead of falling into the standard arranged marriage. His journalist friend engages him in quasi-metaphysical discussions of concepts like karma and destiny. “I believe that life is only a one-time chance,” Ravindra says, writing off, it seems, millennia of Indian spiritualism.

From Umred and Ravindra, India Calling swings back to Mumbai and the billionaire Mukesh Ambani—the conceiver and lord of the twenty-seven-story mansion with hanging gardens—whom Giridharadas pursues with the same admirable persistence and curiosity with which he went after Ravindra. The young provincial becomes in this telling an Ambani acolyte and wannabe. Reliance Industries, the empire over which the tycoon presides, is portrayed as a state within a state, with its own intelligence service, fixers, and emissaries, all rooted in the sort of personal give-and-take relationships and obligations that drive trading in an Indian marketplace where insider trading is the name of the game. These are values not taught in any business school. Ambani, sent to Stanford by his father, a trader who became an empire builder, left without completing his MBA. He didn’t feel he needed it to run an expanding business in India.

In the portrait Giridharadas assembles almost obsessively through interviews and close observation in the owner’s box at a cricket match, Mukesh Ambani becomes “more than a man, more than a businessman, more than the billionaire.” The author skates along the edge of hyperbole but by the time he describes Ambani as “the most powerful private citizen of India since Gandhi,” it seems he has made his case. Here he stands, “a new kind of Indian…mentally uncolonized, fanatical about his own country, unconstrained by an abstract British-taught morality.” Of course, as we’ve repeatedly been reminded these last few years, it’s not necessary to be reared in the customary ways of Indian trading to be unconstrained by an abstract morality, or to lobby politicians long entangled in a web of favors and obligations to which cash values may be imputed. MBAs do it too.

The nonresident Indian from Ohio is fascinated by the way these various moralities bleed into each other. At the fancy airport in Hyderabad, sometimes called “Cyberabad” because of its success in attracting foreign software companies, he finds sixty-three kinds of whisky on sale in a shop where sumptuary laws once banned the sale of liquor to Indians. He introduces a Maoist who wrote for a business newspaper where he accepted gifts from companies like Reliance Industries, and a self-propelled divorcee from the Punjab who, speaking no English, had gone to England to become a beauty therapist. He shows how the Internet is used in India to arrange marriages rather than dates, and remarriages when the new kind of self-seeking Indian flouts tradition by bailing out of a failed union. The single career women he gets to know in Mumbai believe, he says, “with equal fervor in filial piety and in promiscuity, rejecting as false the dichotomy the Western mind would see.” Ultimately most of them will make a match acceptable to their parents.

Giridharadas sees his own story as part of a pattern, finding a symmetry between his journey and that of his parents, who left India to reinvent themselves. The chief executive officers of Citibank and PepsiCo are also offshoots of that migration as are the governors of Louisiana and South Carolina. One of “India’s stepchildren,” he is doing the same thing “in reverse” as, he tells us, thousands have. “We forged dual-use accents,” he writes, becoming part of “a new worldwide fusion class: people positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.” Lapsing into self- absorption, he plays a series of variations on that theme.

I was reminded of an evening a couple of years ago on the rooftop terrace of Mumbai’s Intercontinental Hotel where I found myself seated near a large group of spirited and stylish young Indians with American accents, gossiping and drinking Cosmopolitans. I couldn’t tell whether they were visitors in transit or expatriates in the land of their parents. The terrace we inhabited seemed as the sun sank into the Arabian Sea to be afloat somewhere between Mumbai’s Marine Drive and Tribeca. India, meanwhile, was down below, just an elevator ride away.

The Silk Road was the contemporary name for a complex of ancient trade routes linking East Asia with Central Asia, South Asia, and the Mediterranean world. This network of exchange emerged along the borders between agricultural China and the steppe nomads during the Han Dynasty (206BCE-220CE), in consequence of the inter-dependence and the conflicts of these two distinctive societies. In their quest for horses, fragrances, spices, gems, glassware, and other exotics from the lands to their west, the Han Empire extended its dominion over the oases around the Takla Makan Desert and sent silk all the way to the Mediterranean, either through the land routes leading to the caravan city of Palmyra in Syria desert, or by way of northwest India, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, landing at Alexandria. The Silk Road survived the turmoil of the demise of the Han and Roman Empires, reached its golden age during the early middle age, when the Byzantine Empire and the Tang Empire became centers of silk culture and established the models for high culture of the Eurasian world. The coming of Islam extended silk culture to an even larger area and paved the way for an expanded market for textiles and other commodities. By the 11th century, however, the Silk Road was in decline because of intense competition from the sea routes of the Indian Ocean.

Using supply and demand as the framework for analyzing the formation and development of the Silk Road, the book examines the dynamics of the interactions of the nomadic pastoralists with sedentary agriculturalists, and the spread of new ideas, religions, and values into the world of commerce, thus illustrating the cultural forces underlying material transactions. This effort at tracing the interconnections of the diverse participants in the transcontinental Silk Road exchange will demonstrate that the world had been linked through economic and ideological forces long before the modern era.

Acclaimed historian Amanda Foreman follows the phenomenal success of her New York Times bestseller Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire with her long-awaited second work of nonfiction: the fascinating story of the American Civil War and the major role played by Britain and its citizens in that epic struggle.

Even before the first rumblings of secession shook the halls of Congress, British involvement in the coming schism was inevitable. Britain was dependent on the South for cotton, and in turn the Confederacy relied almost exclusively on Britain for guns, bullets, and ships. The Union sought to block any diplomacy between the two and consistently teetered on the brink of war with Britain. For four years the complex web of relationships between the countries led to defeats and victories both minute and history-making. In A World on Fire, Amanda Foreman examines the fraught relations from multiple angles while she introduces characters both humble and grand, bringing them to vivid life over the course of her sweeping and brilliant narrative.

Between 1861 and 1865, thousands of British citizens volunteered for service on both sides of the Civil War. From the first cannon blasts on Fort Sumter to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, they served as officers and infantrymen, sailors and nurses, blockade runners and spies. Through personal letters, diaries, and journals, Foreman has woven together their experiences to form a panoramic yet intimate view of the war on the front lines, in the prison camps, and in the great cities of both the Union and the Confederacy. Through the eyes of these brave volunteers we see the details of the struggle for life and the great and powerful forces that threatened to demolish a nation.

In the drawing rooms of London and the offices of Washington, on muddy fields and aboard packed ships, Foreman reveals the decisions made, the beliefs held and contested, and the personal triumphs and sacrifices that ultimately led to the reunification of America. A World on Fire is a complex and groundbreaking work that will surely cement Amanda Foreman’s position as one of the most influential historians of our time.

In this landmark work, one of the world’s most renowned Egyptologists tells the epic story of this great civilization, from its birth as the first nation-state to its final absorption into the Roman Empire—three thousand years of wild drama, bold spectacle, and unforgettable characters.

Award-winning scholar Toby Wilkinson captures not only the lavish pomp and artistic grandeur of this land of pyramids and pharaohs but for the first time reveals the constant propaganda and repression that were its foundations. Drawing upon forty years of archaeological research, Wilkinson takes us inside an exotic tribal society with a pre-monetary economy and decadent, divine kings who ruled with all-too-recognizable human emotions.

Here are the years of the Old Kingdom, where Pepi II, made king as an infant, was later undermined by rumors of his affair with an army general, and the Middle Kingdom, a golden age of literature and jewelry in which the benefits of the afterlife became available for all, not just royalty—a concept later underlying Christianity. Wilkinson then explores the legendary era of the New Kingdom, a lost world of breathtaking opulence founded by Ahmose, whose parents were siblings, and who married his sister and transformed worship of his family into a national cult. Other leaders include Akhenaten, the “heretic king,” who with his wife Nefertiti brought about a revolution with a bold new religion; his son Tutankhamun, whose dazzling tomb would remain hidden for three millennia; and eleven pharaohs called Ramesses, the last of whom presided over the militarism, lawlessness, and corruption that caused a crucial political and societal decline.

Riveting and revelatory, filled with new information and unique interpretations, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt will become the standard source about this great civilization, one that lasted—so far—longer than any other.

Audrey Kurth Cronin has produced a work that is both insightful and frustrating—but it is frustrating for all the right reasons. Readers searching for definitive answers for the end of terrorism will be disappointed. So, too, will critics expecting a presentation of how "simple" it is to end terrorism. What readers will find is a book written conditionally and with much argument by counterfact, but active readers will find a rich source for debate. More critically, it is the right debate to have regarding terrorism and its threat today: namely, how will it end? One of the most effective themes throughout the book is that despite all of the contemporary hyperbole, historical experience shows that terrorist movements generally do not last long, and at some point in time, practically all of them come to an end. How that end is achieved—whether it is done by or at the expense of the state—and what lessons states today can take from past experiences are the major themes of this book.

The introduction serves as an effective executive summary of the argument and insights of the entire book. Successive chapters detail the six potential avenues for the demise of a terrorist movement: decapitation (leader/leaders are killed or captured), negotiation, success (movement's aims are achieved), failure, repression, and reorientation (group/movement shifts from terrorist violence to something else). These avenues are developed from an analysis of over 400 terrorist groups (a description of the dataset and more detail from the statistical analysis are given in an appendix). Each chapter then presents a few cases as illustration of how the particular avenue ends (or does not end) the terrorist movement in question. The cases are selected for variance in terms of leadership, goals, and other factors. A seventh chapter applies the various frameworks to al Qaeda, putting forward an initial analysis on that group's possible end, and a short conclusion closes out the text.

While some may view the conclusions from the data as basic, Cronin's analysis brings them into stark relief, especially considering shortcomings in U.S. counterterrorism policy to apply such "conventional wisdom." Some of the findings include the point that the arrest and discrediting of a terrorist leader are generally more effective than assassination as a decapitation technique. Negotiation may not be possible with core members of an organization, but may have value in creating factions within the group. More importantly, the historical record shows that negotiations are not linear, that setbacks will inevitably occur, and that the most successful negotiations occur with terrorist organizations with clearly articulated goals. The findings are important, but a deeper insight may be the underlying point that terrorism is most effective when governments overreact. In other words, the question may not be how terrorism succeeds, but how governments fail.

The chapter devoted to the end of a terrorist movement due to its success is perhaps the weakest of those presented (the cases are Irgun in Israel and Umkhonto in South Africa). Much of Cronin's own analysis suggests these causes are won despite the use of terrorist violence (and indeed, such violence may have been counterproductive to achieving the goal). Regarding the "success" of establishing the state of Israel, Cronin notes that Irgun chooses to lay down its arms rather than engage in a civil war in Israel (p. 247, note 43, which also points out that this decision coincided with the sinking of a ship carrying arms for Irgun). The goal of an independent Israel was certainly achieved, but Irgun's contribution to that goal could be contested. Its role could be considered akin to that of a spectator at a sporting event trying to distract the opposition. Can those actions really be connected to "victory"? More importantly, Cronin's argument regarding the role of terrorist violence in achieving a particular goal does not mention the possibility of the terrorist organization's value as the "greater evil." Terrorist violence may be counterproductive politically, but it may also move a government to negotiate with a more moderate entity sharing the goals of the terrorist group. Terrorist violence may not "win" in and of itself, but it may make some compromise more palatable to a government.

Another point for debate lies in the application of the various approaches to al Qaeda. Cronin suggests the various ways al Qaeda may be unique (considering most of them as matters of degree rather than type), and a reader can take issue with some of the conclusions drawn. For example, Cronin points out al Qaeda's "resilient structure" but later suggests that its methods of recruitment and forms of communication move it further away from being an organization and closer to a larger social movement with various like-minded affiliates. If the latter is the case, then is it even valuable to discuss a structure to al Qaeda? Cronin herself seems to note this, suggesting "the debate over the size, structure, and membership of al Qaeda is a quaint relic of the twentieth century" (p. 176).

Cronin's argument illuminates more than it obscures but still touches on only part of the problem. Ultimately, the reasons for the end of terrorism, despite the categorizations offered here, are almost as varied as the reasons given for the causes of terrorism. While Cronin correctly recognizes that focusing on single groups or only the current phenomenon is ahistorical and misses valuable potential lessons, the reasons and factors for the end of terrorism are too broad to be valuable in and of themselves. The preoccupation with an ongoing terrorist organization misses valuable precedents, while simply noting "factors" of terrorism's demise is too vague. The value is in the synthesis of these approaches: "The lessons of the past must be considered, comprehended, and then carefully calibrated for the particular circumstances and the particular strategy of a particular group, directing its energies at the vulnerabilities of a particular kind of state" (p. 206). Alliteration and repetition notwithstanding, the combination of deep knowledge of a specific group with a broader conceptual framework of the overall phenomenon is the way to greater understanding. JFQ

Ronald Asmus was recruited to the Bill Clinton administration State Department in 1997 from the RAND Corporation, where his writing on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion attracted attention. During the next 3 years, he worked to open NATO's door eastward. As Executive Director of the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. office in Brussels until his death in April 2011, Asmus opened discussion on the future scope of the Alliance and European Union (EU) in the Balkans and beyond the Black Sea.

With this book, Asmus offers the first comprehensive political analysis of the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, the most serious blowback against Western power in Europe since the end of the Cold War. This small war caught by surprise nearly everyone not personally involved in trying to avoid it. Like the other guns of August, the tragedy is that it should have been averted.

Russia prepared meticulously for an opportunity to crush Georgia and its Western aspirations. Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili had been well warned not to pick a fight with the Russians. While not falling into a trap—Asmus assiduously defends Saakashvili and his decisions—the president nonetheless sent his small and ill-prepared forces into the maw once the decision was made to preempt Russian forces massing near Tskhinvali. Asmus argues that Saakashvili believed there was really no choice. He could go on the attack with the advantage of surprise, or wait to be crushed by invasion.

But Georgia had virtually no air force and only five mechanized brigades—one a training brigade, one deployed to Iraq, and all prepared for counterinsurgency rather than armored warfare. They faced a joint force of the well-equipped 58th Army, elements of the Black Sea Fleet, and forward-deployed bombers and attack aircraft. Most of these forces had just finished a major exercise preparing for precisely the scenario they faced on August 9.

With the Georgian offensive, Russian forces attacked along two fronts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Only the latter was contested by Georgian forces, Asmus notes, providing evidence of premeditation. Russian naval units landed marines at Ochamchira in Abkhazia and bombers attacked targets across the country, flying 400 sorties in 5 days, including 120 sorties on August 9 alone.

The Russians have been critical of their own performance, particularly given their overwhelming superiority. Georgia claimed 17 shootdowns, including a Backfire bomber. Russian armored and mechanized units faced constant breakdowns and could not coordinate with their air forces.

But nothing effectively prevented Russian forces from dismembering the country and taking Tbilisi. Georgian defensive lines were broken in 2 days, and the leadership was in disarray. Only the rapid and extraordinary political pressure brought to bear by the EU, led by the irrepressible French President Nicholas Sarkozy, appears to have held Russia back.

Not enough credit is given to the French president, or to the EU, for the effort to end the war. Without coercive power at their disposal, it was a dramatic feat of diplomacy. But Asmus is right about the consequences of the EU's lack of leverage: Sarkozy's prime imperative to end the conflict drove a diplomatic settlement that heavily favored Moscow. The six-point agreement was left vague enough to put the region's most intractable cold conflict in deep freeze.

Everyone lost this war, Asmus argues, the West included. That probably overstates the case. Georgia clearly lost, with its territory annexed, its military destroyed, and no strong advocate to move westward. Russia won only through massive advantage and was punished by isolation for its aggression. The war led to enormous capital flight, and following a collapse in oil prices, Moscow discovered that its newfound power was largely ethereal.

Traditional friends, mostly border states, were deeply alarmed by Russia's action against its neighbor. NATO, the EU, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe all condemned Russia and sided with Georgia. Moscow learned the hard way that real power only comes through relationships, and its new position as pariah stung.

Russian aspirations are a reality of the new century, but so are those of Georgia. NATO and the EU are also fixed realities with which Russia must contend. Its recent rapprochement—signing the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, commemorating the Katyn Forest massacre, and marking Victory in Europe Day with allied troops marching for the first time in Moscow—may be the first steps toward reconciling these essential truths. JFQ

In his prophetic book Blowback, published before 9/11, Chalmers Johnson warned that our secret operations in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe would exact a price at home. Now, in a brilliant series of essays written over the last three years, Johnson measures that price and the resulting dangers America faces. Our reliance on Pentagon economics, a global empire of bases, and war without end is, he declares, nothing short of "a suicide option."

Dismantling the Empire explores the subjects for which Johnson is now famous, from the origins of blowback to Barack Obama's Afghanistan conundrum, including our inept spies, bad behavior in other countries, ill-fought wars, and capitulation to a military that has taken ever more control of the federal budget. There is, he proposes, only one way out: President Obama must begin to dismantle America's empire of bases before the Pentagon dismantles the American dream. If we do not learn from the fates of past empires, he suggests, our decline and fall are foreordained. This is Johnson at his best: delivering both a warning and a crucial prescription for a remedy.

Chalmers Johnson is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. Chalmers Johnson minces no words on his concerns with a U.S. overemphasis on the military. "The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will . . . condemn the U.S. to . . . imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union."

The 2008 Pentagon inventory includes 190,000 troops in 46 nations and territories, and 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. In just Japan, we have 99,295 connected to U.S. forces living there. The only purpose is to provide control over as many nations as possible. Britain, Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Japan have given up their empires, and we should too. Per Nick Turse ('The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives') we could net $2.6 billion selling our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and another $2.2 billion for Guantanamo Bay - just two of those facilities. The Pentagon also has 234 golf courses around the world, 70 Lear Jet airplanes for generals and admirals, a ski resort in the Bavarian Alps.

Meanwhile, we continue trying to pacify Afghanistan, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Britain and the Soviet Union previously failed. Even Pakistan cannot command the Pashtun tribes in its own area; worse yet, its army trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, while extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, Persian Gulf emirates, and the U.S. to train 'freedom fighters.' Our linkage, however, with anti-Muslim Israel and India makes full Pakistani commitment impossible.

Another problem is that our overseas troops often bring sexual violence against local women and girls, 83% of which were not punished between 2001-08 in Japan. Our uniformed 18-24 year-olds have become 'ugly ambassadors' for the U.S. around the globe. As for U.S. military females, 90% of the rapes are never reported.

Johnson asks "What harm would befall the U.S. if we closed those bases that we garrison around the world?" Our prior predictions of disaster (falling Asian dominoes) proved false after the Vietnam War, and it was Vietnam, not the U.S. that put an end to the murderous reign of Pol Pot in neighboring Cambodia. Imagining that China would want to start a war with the U.S., even over Taiwan, would mean a dramatic change of personality for that country. The author believes that no evidence exists to suggest U.S. efforts advance global peace - in fact, we make it less likely (eg. Iraq), and our weapons and tactics (eg. cluster bombs, 10 million unexploded mines in Afghanistan, and 'surgical strikes') enrage locals. As for why few of the world's billion+ Muslims like the U.S. - estimates range from 500,000 to 1 million Iraqi children were killed as an outgrowth of U.S. sanctions. Johnson also goes on to document U.S. blocking contracts to improve Iraqi water and other utilities just prior to our invasion. Then there are the matters of torture and secret renditions - how did these acts reduce terrorism?

Statistics compiled by the Federation of American Scientists analyzed by Gore Vidal show 201 military operations initiated by the U.S. against others between the end of WWII and 9/11 - none of which directly resulted in the creation of a democracy. These included Iran (1953, 1979), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959-present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-73), Greece (1967-73), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1979-present), El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua (1980s), Iraq (1991-present), Panama (1989), Grenada (1983). (The Korean War is a notable positive exception.)

Another example - instead of radical demobilization after the Soviet Union's demise, we attempted to shore up Cold War structures in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and repeatedly irritated both Russia and China. Space has become militarized. Per Johnson, Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA director Gates made it clear that U.S. aid to the mujaheddin began six months prior to the Soviet invasion, and helped provoke it.

The author recommends cutting the number of dependents, mercenaries, and civilians stationed overseas, along with their expensive facilities, stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and educating Third World militaries in torture and coups, abolish ROTC (militarizes campuses) and the CIA (history of dismal intelligence and operational failures), and bring our troops home.

Though not included in "Dismantling the Empire," a recent 'Newsweek' article also pointed out waste in the Pentagon - Secretary Gates estimates there are 30 levels between himself and line officers, and expects by 2020 for the U.S. to have 'only' 20X China's number of advanced stealth fighters; other researchers recently found 530 deputy assistant secretaries of defense, compared to 78 in 1960.

Bottom-Line: Chalmers Johnson wishes he could be more optimistic about the future; unfortunately, he believes it is time to lower the flag on the 'American Century' (actually only 70 years - 1940-2010). I would also suggest we stop supporting Israel - an enormous burden that has led to the Arab Oil Embargo, 9/11, and our current never-ending War on Terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and endless Homeland Security often bufoonish efforts to accomplish the impossible - 'terrorist-proof' America.

The society of traditional India is frequently characterized as static and dominated by caste. This study challenges older interpretations, arguing that medieval India was actually a time of dynamic change and fluid social identities. Using records of religious endowments from Andhra Pradesh, author Cynthia Talbot reconstructs a regional society of the precolonial past as it existed in practice.

Jay Taylor’s masterful biography of Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), first published in 2009, is now available in paperback, with a new postscript that assesses documentation unavailable when Taylor completed his manuscript in 2008.
However, nothing that has appeared since then dilutes Taylor’s original, powerful reassessment of Chiang’s appropriate place in twentieth-century history. Over the decades Chiang Kai-shek had become a textbook example of politically corrupted writing of biography and history. After the so-called “loss of China” in 1949, Chiang’s well documented failings were conscripted to camouflage the many failings of American policy makers. Later, during the Vietnam War, the fate of the anti-Communist cause in China as led by Chiang Kai-shek became a metaphor for those who argued against American involvement. Thus a large and consequential figure was rendered irrelevant and a statesman of considerable acumen and foresight was unceremoniously dumped into History’s dustbin.

Still, Chiang’s dominance of China’s politics from 1925 to 1949 did indeed end in his defeat in China’s civil war and his subsequent flight to the island of Taiwan. What more do we need to know than this? Why accompany Jay Taylor on his long march through mountains of documentation and read the hefty book that resulted from it?

The appearance of The Generalissimo is for students of modern China another important milestone in an ongoing and thorough reevaluation of the achievements of “Republican China” (that is, the period between the collapse of
the last dynasty in 1912 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949). A generation ago we were taught to regard this era as nothing but an exercise in futility, a series of false starts, an opera buffa, albeit with a cast of millions
in misery. It was but an interlude on the way to the People’s Republic, the best and final form of Modern China, which, presumably, would last forever. Over the past thirty years, however, as China has been remade and has reopened itself
to the world, many scholars have come to see the years of 1913 through the 1930s as a fertile seedtime, with advances in politics, commerce, and culture that prefigure not only today’s China but also Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.
Yet Taylor’s magisterial book stands on its own as a well lighted pathway into China’s modern history, illuminating the connections between China’s own violent and tumultuous situation and a larger world assaulted by murderous ideologies. As Taylor explicates Chiang’s complicated view of these things, we see the eclectic confusion that is the modern Chinese mind, and we are witnesses to China’s still ongoing struggle to somehow marry its inherited tradition to the needs of contemporary life. Chiang Kai-shek was, at one and the same time, deeply Confucian, piously Christian, and thoroughly committed to China’s modernization. His political creed derived from Sun Yat-sen’s (1866–1925) “Three Principles,” a racially based Han nationalism; a one-party and elite-managed constitutionalism; and a vague amalgam of both state socialism and
state capitalism that was meant to avoid any virulent variant of either.

Chiang’s life and times also remind us that China was not, and still is not, isolated from world events. As a military cadet in Japan when China’s final dynasty, the Qing, was collapsing, Chiang saw in Japan what his mentor Sun Yat-sen had
seen—a model and a potential ally. Frustrated by the West’s dismissal of China’s claims after World War I and staggered by the seeming collapse of Western civilization in Europe, Sun then led his part of the republican movement into a close
alliance with the new Soviet Union—the “First United Front” with the Communists. Chiang followed him there, but as Sun’s successor and as a partial unifier of the country. He then turned on the Communists, but later agreed, under duress,
to a “Second United Front” with them.

Meanwhile, looking for other ways to counter the military pressure from Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, Chiang skillfully played a very weak diplomatic hand, maneuvering among the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States. He
did this not only to build a powerful anti-Japan coalition but also to persuade the allies to pursue a grand strategy against Japan that would work to his political advantage in the postwar era. This is an underappreciated aspect of China’s twentieth-century experience; it reminds us of the emphasis that traditional Chinese statecraft has long placed on appearing strong when it is actually weak.

Chiang’s performance on the world stage was at one with that of his longtime friend and rival Zhou Enlai, who, in negotiating in the 1970s on behalf of the China that Mao Zedong (1893–1976) had ruined, nonetheless always managed
to convey the impression that he was speaking for a great power. Finally, as much as Chiang himself was a master operator within the Chinese political system, he and his formidable wife Song Meiling (1898–2003)—Madame Chiang Kai-shek—together were a powerful force for decades within the very different American political system.

Taylor deftly succeeds in tying all these threads together into a highly readable and cogently presented story. As he helps the reader to understand, the strands of the tale cannot be untangled, and so our own understanding of the history of
this maddening era is abetted by watching Chiang himself think it through. In this, Chiang’s daily diaries (kept 1918–72), which have gradually been made public, are a great resource. Taylor knows how to properly exploit them by
weighing them against a trove of other contemporaneous documentation. Taylor’s work is also a major advance in that it pays close attention to what happened after Chiang repaired to Taiwan and implemented economic and social reforms there. Through Taylor’s convincing account of those years it becomes apparent that the “Rise of Taiwan” prefigures the “Rise of China.” In China, after the destructive decades of Mao Zedong’s ascendancy, Beijing has been tracing the design for “Modern China” that Taiwan first drew, and as Beijing moves out into the world economy, it relies substantially on Taiwan’s
capital and managerial expertise. Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo (1910–88), carried out the political reforms that will also be the template for China’s political modernization. In 1987, he ended his father’s regime of martial law, and today Taiwan’s competitive multiparty electoral democracy is admired throughout the Chinese world.

If the Chiang family’s vision of economics and politics is indeed increasingly influential in China, Chiang Kai-shek’s once-far-fetched project of reestablishing his sway in China now seems less fanciful. Still, Chiang (and his Republic of China) and Mao (and his People’s Republic of China), no matter their mortal rivalry, were as one in their support of a “One China” that includes Taiwan. Today, Taiwan’s democratic institutions mean that unification requires the assent of Taiwan’s people. This constrains both those within Chiang’s Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party who still seek unification and China’s Communist Party, which would like to fashion yet another Communist-Nationalist rapprochement, a “Third United Front,” that would mimic the previous two. But unlike those two “fronts,” mere “nationalism” will not now suffice. Just as the economic systems of Taiwan and China have begun to converge on Taiwan’s model, the political systems will also have to converge on Taiwan’s success as a democracy. It is in this way that Taiwan may yet in the end come to the rescue of the mainland.

This is a timely book, given the current revolutions unfolding across the Middle East and North Africa, where local intelligence and security services have been a major focus of public anger, fear, and resentment. Across the region, in
regimes of all ideological stripes, the secret police agency (the dreaded mukhabarat) has long served as a pillar. These
services have a well deserved reputation for brutality, sometimes even effectiveness, yet their murky operations have
long remained shrouded in whispered myth. The fall of the secret police services, especially in Egypt, where the pervasive mukhabarat had long been the stoutest defender of the Mubarak regime, has begun to open the door on what the spies have been up to. Dietl, who promises to reveal secrets about what has really been going on, has the right credentials to do so, knowing both the region and the world of espionage; yet he himself is the subject of much speculation and controversy. For years before his cover was blown in 2005, Wilhelm Dietl reported on events from across the Islamic world for quality European media outlets. It was then revealed that he was an operative for the German Federal Intelligence Service
(the BND), which has long had a strong presence in the Middle East. Most controversially, Dietl had spied on fellow
journalists for the BND, a revelation that tarred his reputation and caused a major political scandal in Germany.
This book (unable to find a publisher in Germany, it was instead put out by a small Austrian firm) may be seen as an
effort at redemption. Certainly the expected spy stories are here in abundance, presented against the background of a “new Cold War” between the West and the Islamic world. Schattenarmeen begins with a long and detailed chapter on the nefarious activities of revolutionary Iran’s clandestine dirty work, going back to 1979. This is a nasty saga that includes
details about assassinations by Tehran’s spies of dissidents abroad, in a long list of countries. It is fitting that Dietl devotes so many pages to Iran’s intelligence services, since they have been active in Germany for many years, including involvement in high-profile killings of dissidents.

There are similar but shorter chapters on bad behavior by Syria and Libya, both of which have employed their spies to kill and intimidate enemies abroad. The chapter on Egypt is unsatisfactorily thin, given the importance of the mukhabarat in the now-fallen regime, and the discussion of Saudi Arabia is equally perfunctory. Particularly unsatisfying is Dietl’s presentation of Iraqi activities before 2003; Saddam’s secret services enjoyed an evil reputation across the region for repression at
home and dirty work abroad, yet one finds only a general discussion of the role of the intelligence and security services in Saddam’s complex and sordid regime. Considering the avalanche of materials now available on the Iraqi mukhabarat, thanks in no small part to U.S. government efforts to declassify and release thousands of pages of captured files, this omission is troubling and perhaps revealing.

Dietl’s presentation of terrorist groups, with an analysis of secret alliances with intelligence services across the region,
is an amalgam of assertions and speculation—little of it new. Asking important questions about the exact role
of Islamic secret agencies behind such groups as Hizballah and Hamas (which too few Western journalists have been
willing to do) is to be encouraged, but the information offered here lacks specificity and, above all, sourcing.
Throughout, it is impossible to tell from where Dietl gets his information. He talks about “insider sources” yet provides no footnotes, even to anonymous sources. Given the controversial nature of many of his assertions, this does not pass journalistic, much less academic, muster. The short bibliography of “recommended literature” is a pedestrian collection of secondary sources (none in local languages), some of dubious reliability, that would be known to any student of the topic.
The omission of any discussion of Algeria is especially curious, since that unfortunate country has experienced the
worst jihad-inspired insurgency of any Islamic state in recent memory. It has been a bloody conflict, killing some
200,000 Algerians since 1992, and it is still in progress. Considering that Algerian intelligence has been exceptionally
successful at fighting terrorists, employing clandestine methods that are brutal and nefarious even by regional standards, the absence of any analysis of Algeria cannot be explained. In the end, Schattenarmeen is really a
collection of spy stories, many of them of questionable provenance, and lacks much overarching analysis. The stories
are entertaining and, based on this reviewer’s experiences, essentially true; however, they are not a serious treatment of an important subject. Instead, Dietl has added to the unfortunate genre of terrorism books, marred by unattributed revelations, inadequate analysis, and overheated rhetoric. The major role played by Middle Eastern intelligence agencies in security matters and nearly all regional politics is poorly understood in the West and demands detailed analysis. This is not the book to fill that need.

JOHN R. SCHINDLER
Naval War College

John Mueller has written an extensive body of work on national security issues, work that runs counter to the conventional wisdom. Atomic Obsession, a broad examination of the limited role nuclear weapons have played in history,
examines the prospects for a terrorist’s acquisition and use of a nuclear device. Mueller argues that the expense of these
nuclear arsenals (perhaps as high as ten trillion dollars over the course of the entire Cold War, by one estimate) was
not worth it. He contends that the memory of World War II, great-power “contentment,” and fear of conventional escalation were enough to prevent the Cold War from going hot. He cites historian Adam Ulam as stating
that Stalin “had great respect for the United States’ vast economic and hence military potential, quite apart from the
bomb.”

On the specter of proliferation, Mueller points out that decades of predictions of an imminent cascade of new members in the nuclear club have not been borne out, that warnings by Herman Kahn that Japan would “unequivocably”
have an arsenal by 1980 (and similar predictions concerning a unified Germany) have not come to pass. Mueller
documents what he says is a sixty-year history of nuclear alarmism, arguing that this is the light in which we should
view current concern about proliferation.

The most engaging aspect of this important book is its section on nuclear terrorism. Mueller, to my mind, demolishes the casually constructed conventional fears on the subject. Even rogue regimes are highly unlikely to transfer
one of these expensive (and laboriously acquired) weapons even to a trusted independent group, because of the potential for extreme danger to the state. AlQa‘ida, the “chief demon group” in this regard, is trusted by no one; its “explicit
enemies group includes not only Christians and Jews, but all Middle Eastern regimes.”

Mueller documents how remarkably difficult nuclear weapons are to steal and use. Not even all weapons designers
are familiar with modern security safeguards, such as conventional explosives within a nuclear weapon that render the weapon useless if precise operating procedures are not followed. Regarding concern over terrorists building their own
bombs, it is very hard to steal fissile material, and the work of constructing a bomb is “difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting.” A great deal of complex experimentation, experimentation beyond the capabilities of substate
groups, would be required. Mueller points to a raft of alarming but mistaken predictions about the likelihood of a terrorist group using a nuclear weapon. For example, John Negroponte, as UN ambassador (2001–2004), suggested that there was a “high probability” that al-Qa‘ida would attempt to use a nuclear weapon on the United States within two years—an ominous warning offered in 2003.

Those concerned by the threat of nuclear terrorism against the United States are likely to find Atomic Obsession a well
argued, engagingly written, thoughtprovoking, and ultimately reassuring work.

ANDREW L. STIGLER
Naval War College

Olivier Roy, a professor of social and political theory at the European University Institute, in Fiesole, Italy, has the exceptional ability to bring religion, globalization, and politics to his discussions of political Islam and its role in European and Islamic societies. In his latest book, Holy Ignorance, he puts this talent to good use to explore a critical question about the modern world: "Does the expansion of a religion go along with the spreading of a new culture . . . or does it expand, on the contrary, precisely because this religion has nothing to do with any specific culture?" The answer is important because if religion is dissociated from culture, religious fundamentalism will become both more globalized and more diluted, and mainstream culture will become even more secular. If the two are not dissociated, religious fundamentalism may increasingly penetrate societies and erode their secular and democratic practices.

Like many other books about religion and modernity, Holy Ignorance describes a myriad different new religious movements -- Protestant evangelicalism, Haredi Judaism, Islamic Salafism -- against the backdrop of secularizing societies, highlighting the changing relations between culture and religion as globalization intensifies. In the first part of his book, Roy displays an impressive grasp of the innumerable permutations in these relations over history's long arc. He organizes the variations into four broad categories: deculturation, acculturation, inculturation, and ex-culturation. Deculturation occurs when religion tries to eradicate paganism (as European Christianity did in North America and orthodox Islam did on the Indian subcontinent). The best example of acculturation is the Jews' adoption of mainstream values during the Enlightenment. A religion's attempts to position itself at the heart of a given culture (for instance, liberation theology in Latin America) is a form of inculturation. And ex-culturation is the more modern process whereby a religion disassociates itself from mainstream culture.

Throughout this discussion, Roy's thesis is clear: the major religious movements of today -- Pentecostalism, Protestant evangelicalism, and Islamic Salafism -- are setting themselves free from their cultural moorings. These religions have not lost their importance, but they have become universal and less affiliated with any one territory, and more personal and private, increasingly embodying a spiritual search for self-fulfillment. Although they acknowledge what Roy calls "floating cultural markers -- halal fast food, eco-kosher, cyber-fatwa, halal dating, Christian rock, transcendental meditation" -- he claims that they are fundamentally separating from the cultures in which they developed.

In the second part of the book, Roy argues that globalization has increased this distancing of religion from culture by promoting scripturalism and fundamentalism, erecting a barrier of doctrinal purity to fend off secular attacks. Religious advocates say that their faiths are becoming purer as a result: returning to sacred texts is one way to speak to the faithful outside of any particular cultural context. And globalization is the conveyer belt on which this purer religion travels. But Roy says that in rejecting their grounding in national cultures, these global faiths are becoming a form of "holy ignorance." The phrase evokes the Pentecostal "speaking in tongues" and the associated belief that the relationship between God and individual believers need not be mediated. The truth of God's word necessitates no knowledge -- cultural, linguistic, theological, or otherwise. As Roy points out, several Christian revivalist movements, many Islamic groups, and even some Jewish organizations (such as the Shas party in Israel) only selectively engage with past theological debates. The result, for Roy, is a sort of degradation of religious knowledge. This observation leads him to make an important assertion: that all these movements -- the Christian right in America; the various Islamic movements in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province; and the ultra-Orthodox in Israel -- are losing steam.

Holy Ignorance is an elaboration of the theses of Roy's earlier works, especially The Failure of Political Islam and Globalized Islam, in which he argued that the fundamentalist Islamic religious movement, by virtue of being extraterritorial and decultured, was becoming "oblivious to its own history" -- or, to put the point differently, undergoing a form of secularization as a result of rising fundamentalism. In his latest book, he expands the claim to include other forms of fundamentalism -- especially Christian strands such as Protestant evangelicalism -- to demonstrate, first, that the phenomenon is widespread and, second, that it cannot last. Fundamentalism has become a global market for religious goods without any labels indicating a culture of origin. Individuals throughout the world are being presented with a religious market in which they can choose whatever product they want. With so many easy options available, people frequently convert to other religions or beliefs. This is nothing new: mass conversions occurred in the past thanks to conquests and colonial expansion. But according to Roy, people find it easier to convert today, especially from Christianity to Islam and vice versa. Given this, Roy's thesis is a tacit rebuke to Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations."

ALL RELIGION IS LOCAL

Roy's view is basically optimistic: the implication of his argument is that fundamentalism cannot last. He claims that the influence of religion on culture is doomed to wane as religion becomes simultaneously more individual and more globalized. By focusing on global religious movements (rather than, say, national Islamic politics) to illustrate his thesis, however, Roy is in effect downplaying the important matter of how religion shapes social, political, and economic life -- and overlooking religion's widespread and transformative influence. American Christian evangelicalism and Islamic fundamentalism are not only aspiring to global expansion; they are also interested in bringing about cultural transformations in narrower, that is, local and national, contexts. Consider how American evangelicalism developed: it did so thanks to the convergence of several intellectual currents; their battles against Darwinism, philosophy, and liberalism; and the particular social and political exigencies of the post-World War I era. More recently, the discourse of American evangelicalism has been about how to influence American society and politics. In the words of the American evangelist Jerry Falwell, "For too long, we have sat and said, politics are for the people in Washington, business is for those on Wall Street, and religion is our business. But the fact is, you cannot separate the sacred and the secular." The whole purpose of much of the evangelical movement in the United States today is to shape the culture of the country. Throughout the world, in fact, religion continues to engage with culture and the state, whether to validate or threaten them. And recent converts often become involved in the public sphere and adopt politically contentious positions regarding social and cultural issues. When religion is no longer inherited but chosen, its adherents are much more willing to relate it to all aspects of life: social, cultural, and political; and they more readily engage in the public sphere. In the United States, for example, the religious right has been pushing for the reform of school curricula.

According to Roy, the importance of culture is declining both because those who choose fundamentalism are in effect replacing culture with religion and because globalization is diluting local cultures everywhere anyway. But this argument hinges on his minimalist definition of culture as "the production of symbolic systems." This characterization allows Roy to claim that culture and religion are distinct and that culture is declining, but it is much too narrow. Culture is more capacious than a set of symbols; it is a web of meanings that people attach to their lives and use both to order their world and to interpret it. Culture is not in decline these days; as ever, it is adapting and transforming, integrating the new and the old. Anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and Michael Gilsenan have described how Islam has adapted to different cultural, political, and socioeconomic contexts -- and been successful as a result. Today, the struggle between fundamentalist movements and secular forces everywhere is about who will get to define both current events and their historical antecedents in the public sphere. It is, in other words, a cultural struggle.

But Roy pays little attention to the work of Geertz and Gilsenan or to that of the anthropologist Talal Asad, who has argued that Islam is a discursive tradition that moves back and forth between widely accepted foundational texts and the beliefs, practices, and politics of Muslim communities in specific times and places. And yet the Islam of Indonesia does not resemble that of Saudi Arabia. In both countries, religion is at once the product and the producer of cultural values, but it is also recognizably and self-avowedly Muslim. Roy acknowledges this as being true only in the past. But even today, religions cannot exist in a vacuum. If globalized religions employ the tools of global culture, such as the Internet, they also aim to influence particular national cultures.

GIVE-AND-TAKE

Roy sees the separation of the religious from the cultural as a symptom of secularization and the success of fundamentalist movements as a defense against secularism. But it is also possible that the success of fundamentalist movements stems instead from their capacity to appropriate secular culture and render it more religious. And at the same time that religious groups engage secular culture to reform it, they themselves become more secular.

This mutual transformation is most visible in places where religious groups have reacted to the secularization of society by engaging in politics. Entering the public sphere has forced Islamists, for example, to adopt modern forms of organization, rationalize their thinking and practices, and revise their positions in historically contextualized ways in order to become more relevant and more effective. The results have been very different in democratic political cultures compared to in authoritarian settings. In countries as distinct as Turkey, Indonesia, and Pakistan, the emergence of religious political movements has made those movements more secular and at the same time has re-Islamicized the public sphere.

In Turkey, the rise of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) a decade ago occurred against the backdrop of an Ottoman culture that had never integrated, much less institutionalized, rigid interpretations of Islam and that for most of its tenure had maintained a diverse culture and a policy of inclusion. With the advent of the Turkish republic in the early 1920s, the role of religion was redefined and constrained by a strong secular and democratic political culture that basically hid Islam from the public sphere. The AKP succeeded in bringing it out again, effectively deprivatizing religious discourse and practice, and all the while adopting a modern democratic discourse on social and political rights.

In Indonesia, Islamic politics have spread with democratization, but within a culture of tolerance and respect for religious pluralism. The two major Indonesian Islamic organizations, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, have argued against a strict interpretation and application of the Koran, opposed the creation of an Islamic state in Indonesia, and helped develop many social movements, such as youth and women's rights organizations.

Even in the more contentious case of Pakistan, as Humeira Iqtidar, a research fellow at Cambridge, argues in Secularizing Islamists?, Islamists have inadvertently facilitated a kind of secularization. This may seem counterintuitive, but Iqtidar demonstrates how, even as the Islamists have forced a rethinking of the boundaries of politics, their engagement in mainstream politics has brought about a conscious, critical, and ultimately rationalized definition of religion in contemporary Pakistan. To understand the constant interplay among religion, culture, and politics, one need only look at Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring. Various factions within the Muslim Brotherhood are trying to figure out the right way to enter Egyptian politics. They are not only calculating how to increase their odds in the election scheduled for the fall; they are also looking for an approach that speaks to the democratic youth movement that emerged in Tahrir Square.

The fact is that as religion reenters, more or less forcefully, the public sphere, modernity is coming to many countries. Most important, religion is adapting to political cultures, including democratic cultures, everywhere, be they in western Europe or Islamic states. The most significant aspect of the evolving relationship between religion and culture is not their disengagement from each other thanks to globalization, as Roy claims, but the close interaction of religious movements and national politics. Some forms of religious fundamentalism may well be disappearing into the ether of abstraction, but in most cases, religion, culture, and politics are still meeting on the ground.

This is a well told revisionist version of how the Romans and the Saxons actually took over Britain. The Britons hated the tribe next door more than the overseas newcomers, and invited in the Romans and Saxons to help them in their local rivalries. The Romans were happy to perpetuate and rule through the tribes, and the defensive works of later Roman Britain reflect inter tribal violence, being mostly on tribal borders rather than against external marauders. After the Romans had gone, the tribal kingdoms reasserted their political independence, in a process the author usefully compares to the revival of local nationalisms in late 20th century eastern Europe and Africa. The tribal kings then called in the Saxons as hired swords and settled them on disputed tribal borders, and in due course the Saxons took over the tribal kingdoms more or less intact as the starting point for their own disunited kingdoms - the Heptarchy. The argument is credible and persuasive. Both Caesar and Gildas commented on the Britons' disunion, and the author shows how the defensive and military archaeology matches the tribal geography. The Catuvellauni in particular made enemies of everyone around as they tried to push out from their territories north of the Thames. Boadicea's Iceni tribe burned London and St Albans in AD 61 not simply because they hated new towns but because they hated Catuvellauni towns. For the Romans the province was routinely treated as a PR opportunity or a launchpad to take over the rest of the empire. The Britons always thought in tribal terms - they had no idea a United Kingdom would come along over a thousand years later. The barbarians in other Roman provinces were strong enough to stop this sort of balkanisation when the western Empire fell, but the Saxons in Britain were not strong or united enough to do the same for another five hundred years.

So why only four stars. Well the author could have tried harder to fill in the historical gaps in the Roman period : how far did the Romans treat Britannia as an entity ; did the later Roman "sub provinces" match the tribal borders ; what was the impact of the large permanent Roman military presence upon the tribes ; did the local aristocracy view themselves as British ? What part in all this was played by the Christian church, and why did it vanish ? Also the author rightly complains of the poor historical record, so it is surprising that he feels able repeatedly to contradict or ignore Tacitus who is the best historian that we do have - his father in law had governed Britannia for eight years soon after Boadicea's revolt. Tacitus is clear and plausible for example on the causes of Boadicea's revolt (greedy and overbearing Romans), he does detail the British atrocities (including crucifixions - presumably picked up from the Romans) and he is also clear that it was Boadicea who attacked the Romans in the final battle (with or without a stirring speech first). However, these lapses do not undermine the book's central point.

Finally, as the author says, several of the tribal kingdoms survive to this day, as Sussex, Kent and Essex for instance. So when these counties clash at cricket, they are prolonging a two thousand year old struggle.

In Why So Stupid? How the Human Race has Never Really Learned to Think, Dr Edward de Bono acknowledges the excellence of the thinking system provided by the Renaissance but maintains that it is not enough. He says that we have become too complacent with a system that is dangerously inadequate in some areas. That this system is so enshrined in society will make change more difficult - but more necessary. Dr de Bono outlines new thinking methods. He challenges us to open our minds to the potential of these methods and provides concrete examples of the remarkable results they achieve in practice.

GROWTH MAY BE EVERYTHING, BUT IT'S NOT THE ONLY THING

Economists have long been a natural constituency in favor of growth. Since even the richest country has limited resources, the central economic problem is choice: Shall we fund tax cuts for the rich or investment in infrastructure and research and development, war in Iraq or assistance for the poor in developing countries and our own? By providing more total resources, growth should, in theory, make these choices less painful.

The United States, however, has powerfully demonstrated that while growth increases supply, it also raises aspirations. Choices that rich countries have to make thus seem to be no easier than those confronting poor countries, even though the tradeoffs are more heart-wrenching in the case of the poor. Brazil, for example, must choose whether to use its limited health budget to pay full-market price for AIDS drugs; some AIDS victims may live as a result, but people in need of other health care will die, because money that could have been spent on their needs is simply not there. More growth-provided resources, in this instance, mean the difference between life and death.

Still, growth has had its critics. There is a well-developed populist antigrowth literature concerned with, among other things, the impact of growth on the environment and on poverty. In this major work, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman takes on such critics, positing that growth has not only obvious economic benefits, but moral benefits as well. He argues that it has the potential to improve the environment, reduce poverty, promote democracy, and make for a more open and tolerant society. But this is not to say that Friedman, a professor of economics at Harvard University, is simply a naive cheerleader for the market economy. His message is nuanced (though not, in some respects, as nuanced as I would have liked), and he realizes that growth has not always brought the promised benefits. The market economy does not automatically guarantee growth, social justice, or even economic efficiency; achieving those ends requires that government play an important role.

LET IT GROW

Historically, economists have questioned whether, at least in the early stages of development, growth is accompanied by societal goods such as greater equality and a better environment. Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets argued, based on experiences largely before World War II, that there is an increase in inequality in the early stages of development. Arthur Lewis, another Nobel economist, went further: greater inequality, he argued, is necessary to generate the savings that growth requires. A later generation of economists has posited the existence of an environmental Kuznets curve: the early stages of growth cause environmental degradation, not environmental health.

Kuznets and his descendants held out the prospect that eventually growth would bring more social justice (greater equality, less poverty) and a better environment. But there is nothing inevitable about this -- which means that even if it has been true in the past, it may not be in the future. Inequality did seem to fall in the United States after the Great Depression, but in the last 30 years it has increased enormously. Many forms of pollution have gone down as richer countries have turned their mind to air-quality issues, but greenhouse gas emissions -- with all the dangers they present for global warming -- have continued to increase with economic growth, especially in the United States.

Friedman emphasizes in particular the importance of externalities -- instances in which an economic actor's actions have consequences for others for which that actor does not pay (negative externalities) or for which he is not compensated (positive externalities). Almost everyone recognizes these "market failures" (when markets on their own do not produce efficient outcomes) and their implications, most notably damage to the environment. The United States' production of greenhouse gases imposes staggering costs on others -- especially low-lying islands that will be inundated in the not-too-distant future -- but American firms and consumers do not pay for these costs. Correcting such a market failure does not require subsidies to oil companies to increase oil production (there is no market failure in that direction); it requires more conservation. But externalities imply a more general argument as well: if growth has broad-based societal benefits that go beyond those captured by each individual or firm, then there is a role for government in promoting growth.

Although one of these broader societal benefits is a more open and tolerant society, Friedman explains carefully that the relationship between democracy and growth is two-way: growth affects democracy; democracy affects growth. Both aspects of the relationship are complex and often ambiguous. China -- not particularly democratic or open politically -- has had the most rapid and sustained growth of any country over the past quarter century. Conventional wisdom holds that democracies, since they are more accountable to the "masses," pay more attention to the poor. But China has done more to reduce poverty than most other countries. In recent periods, the United States has seen median real household income fall, and the rich have received huge tax cuts even as poverty has grown.

Unlike so many growth proponents, Friedman realizes that what matters is not simply growth; it is the policies that give rise to it. His work thus provides an important critique of those studies (such as at least one prominent World Bank study by Paul Collier and David Dollar) that correlate growth and poverty reduction or growth and integration into the global economy. For the most part, the policy decision facing governments is not to grow or not to grow or to integrate or not to integrate (though politicians often try to oversimplify in that way). The questions are more specific: whether or not to reduce tariffs, whether or not to liberalize capital markets, whether or not to invest more in research and development, whether or not to spend more on education. And the answers are less clear. Some of these policies may promote growth in ways that will increase poverty; others may promote growth in ways that will reduce it. Some growth strategies may be good for the environment; others may not be.

In short, the debate should not be centered on whether one is in favor of growth or against it. The question should be, are there policies that can promote what might be called moral growth -- growth that is sustainable, that increases living standards not just today but for future generations as well, and that leads to a more tolerant, open society? Also, what can be done to ensure that the benefits of growth are shared equitably, creating a society with more social justice and solidarity rather than one with deep rifts and cleavages of the kind that became so apparent in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

The problem is that most of the available empirical evidence comes from cross-country analyses, which are not very informative. Friedman's work provides an important reiteration of recent calls by the World Bank for more micro-level and case-study-based research on the potential tradeoffs between growth and poverty reduction and environmental quality.

THE INCOME SWEEPSTAKES

Friedman ends his book, which covers a delightfully wide range of topics, with an analysis of the kinds of policies that the United States might pursue to achieve his vision of moral growth. This discussion is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. The policies are clearly within our grasp. Yet they are a far cry from the policies the United States has been pursuing in recent years -- which have led to a double whammy, simultaneously stifling growth (the most damaging consequences of which may lie years in the future) and creating a society marked by greater social injustice.

Among the developed countries, the United States has been doing well in the growth sweepstakes -- or so you might assume if you focused exclusively on GDP. GDP statistics, however, can be very misleading. They do not really measure how well the country is doing or how much better off its citizens are becoming.

No one would look at just a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liabilities. That is also true for a country. Argentina grew rapidly in the early 1990s, mainly as a result of a huge consumption binge financed by international borrowing. But that growth was not sustainable and was not sustained. Similarly, the United States has been borrowing heavily from abroad, at the rate of $2 billion a day. It would be one thing if this were being spent on high-productivity investment. In fact, it has been used to finance increases in consumption and massive tax cuts for upper-income Americans.

Consider the following thought experiment: If you could choose which country to live in but would be assigned an income randomly from within that country's income distribution, would you choose the country with the highest GDP per capita? No. More relevant to that decision is median income (the income level that 50 percent of the population is below and 50 percent is above). As the income distribution becomes increasingly skewed, with an increasing share of the wealth and income in the hands of those at the top, the median falls further and further below the mean. That is why, even as per capita GDP has been increasing in the United States, U.S. median household income has actually been falling.

There are other reasons why someone might not want to look at just per capita GDP. He might worry about his security. What happens if he gets ill? If he loses his job? What happens when he retires? He might worry about crime. He might worry about the quality of his children's schooling. How do his children fare in competition with those who can afford the best schooling that money can buy or with those in countries such as Singapore that offer a first-rate public education? He might worry about the environment. Are there government regulations prohibiting arsenic in the water?

When viewed through these lenses, the United States does not look as good. There are some dimensions in which it is outpacing others -- for instance, it boasts five to ten times the per capita prison population of other advanced industrialized countries and more working hours per week. It also has less job security, worse unemployment insurance, and fewer people covered by health insurance.

To be sure, the American dream still attracts millions from around the world. But some of that attraction may be based on a lingering myth of upward mobility in the United States and an underappreciation of the difficulties that confront the poor. And although there is still no comparing the U.S. standard of living and that of poor countries, these are not the laurels on which one wants to rest.

HALF STEPS AND MISSTEPS

In the debate on the impact of globalization on poverty, Friedman supports the view that even if globalization has been associated with increases in inequality within countries, it has led to reductions in poverty and inequality globally. There are three fundamental flaws in this analysis. The first relates to the definition of poverty. As the World Bank has emphasized at various points, poverty is not just a matter of income; insecurity and voicelessness are also part of its profile. Friedman's analysis completely ignores these other dimensions.

The second criticism relates to the point that what matters is not globalization per se, but specific policies associated with it. Capital market liberalization, for example, entails closer integration of capital markets, especially with respect to short-term capital flows. Modern economic theory and empirical analysis have shown that with imperfect capital markets, such integration may lead to greater economic volatility -- a conclusion that even the International Monetary Fund now supports -- and has a negligible effect on growth. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that the poor bear the brunt of the burden from increased volatility. In short, this particular aspect of economic integration increases poverty without much affecting growth.

The third is that Friedman relies too heavily on studies by Xavier Sala-i-Martin (The Disturbing "Rise" of Global Income Inequality) and Surjit Bhalla (Imagine There's No Country: Poverty, Inequality, and Growth in the Era of Globalization) that have been subject to enormous criticism, without warning the reader of the debate surrounding their numbers. (It should be said that having an article published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and its conclusions parroted in the media does not imply automatic certification of its validity.) The problem is easy to state but hard to rectify: studies of inequality and poverty are based on household surveys of expenditures and income, but the numbers gleaned from those studies tend to be inconsistent with national income accounts, an outcome that suggests massive underreporting in the household surveys. One simple solution to this discrepancy -- the approach largely used in the Sala-i-Martin and Bhalla studies -- is to blow up the numbers from the household surveys. If the average income reported is $3,000 and national income accounts show average incomes to be $4,000, increase everyone's reported income by a third. This immediately reduces the figure for the number of people living in poverty.

However, more sophisticated approaches observe that higher-income individuals are more likely to worry about tax collectors than are the poor. In this view, the shortfall in reporting is largely accounted for by those with higher incomes, and the number for those reportedly living in poverty according to the household surveys is roughly accurate. Assessments of reporting "errors" support this view -- a view that says the world still has a long way to go in meeting its goal of reducing poverty by half by the year 2015. (For a discussion of both sides of this issue, see the forthcoming Debates on the Measurement of Poverty, a volume produced by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, which I edited along with Paul Segal and Sudhir Anand.)

Meanwhile, Friedman's contention that growth brings with it the virtues of greater openness and tolerance invites these questions: Is the United States, as it becomes richer, becoming more open and tolerant? Do openness and tolerance entail putting equal weight on modern science and pre-Enlightenment views?

Friedman is right, however, in arguing that democracy is less sustainable in poor countries. Thus, if Bush were serious about his commitment to spreading democracy, he would invest more in these countries' development, living up to the agreement made by all the advanced industrialized countries to commit 0.7 percent of their GDP to foreign assistance. The money would make an enormous difference, both for the quality of lives in the developing world and for the prospects of democracy there. Of course, more than just money is required: nothing is more convincing than successful examples of open and tolerant societies that are able to bring the fruits of growth and democracy to all their people. How can the United States claim to provide such an example if it does not take care of its own?

THE MYTH OF THE INVISIBLE HAND

American economists tend to have a strong aversion to advocating government intervention. Their basic presumption is often that markets generally work by themselves and that there are just a few limited instances in which government action is needed to correct market failure; government economic policy, the thinking goes, should include only minimal intervention to ensure economic efficiency.

The intellectual foundations for this presumption are weak. In a market economy with imperfect and asymmetric information and incomplete markets -- which is to say, every market economy -- the reason that Adam Smith's invisible hand is invisible is that it does not exist. Economies are not efficient on their own. This recognition inevitably leads to the conclusion that there is a potentially significant role for government.

Friedman, as a good American economist, begins his discussion by paying homage to the usual strictures, identifying externalities of the kind that warrant government intervention. He goes on to point out the importance of investment, both in physical and human capital, and to note that huge government deficits ("dissaving" on the part of government) are hurting those investments. A perfect market economist would dismiss this claim as nonsense: private savings will eventually increase to offset negative government savings, and if citizens want to consume more and save less now, that is their prerogative -- just because Friedman wants to consume less today does not mean that he should be allowed to impose his preferences on the rest of us. Moreover, such an economist would say that it is not domestic savings that matter in our globalized world, but the global balance of supply and demand for funds.

Perhaps Friedman does not spend time refuting these perspectives because, notwithstanding the significant role they play in academic debates, they are so patently absurd. Of course private saving has not offset public dissaving on a one-to-one basis. Of course domestic saving matters for domestic investment, even in a globalized world. But it is important to grasp the reason why the predictions of the perfect-market models fall so short: market failures go well beyond externalities. Understanding these limitations of the market leads to an understanding of the necessary role of government in promoting growth and making sure that it is the right kind.

There is, for instance, a greater role for government in promoting science and technology than Friedman seems to suggest. A report by the Council of Economic Advisers (conducted when I was its chair) found that the returns on public investment in science and technology were far higher than for private investment in these areas and than for conventional investment in plant and equipment. So, too, with education, especially at a time of such concern with the quality of American schools, and particularly for low-income families. Vouchers -- what amounts to partial privatization of our elementary and secondary educational systems -- have been put forward as a free-market solution to the shortfalls in educational quality. But the advocates of vouchers have never made a convincing case that they can be designed to promote higher educational attainments and greater racial integration across the entire educational system, rather than just for those receiving the vouchers.

Friedman's book is thus an important antidote to the populist antigrowth movement and also to those who say that the free market is all we need. It joins a growing chorus calling for a change in the direction of U.S. economic policy -- toward achieving growth that is stronger and more sustainable. Whether or not you agree with Friedman's particular policy prescriptions, this much is clear: this kind of reasoned analysis is precisely what is necessary to put the United States back on the right track.

Social justice: an ideal, forever beyond our grasp; or one of many practical possibilities? More than a matter of intellectual discourse, the idea of justice plays a real role in how—and how well—people live. And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political thinking, has long left practical realities far behind.

The transcendental theory of justice, the subject of Sen’s analysis, flourished in the Enlightenment and has proponents among some of the most distinguished philosophers of our day; it is concerned with identifying perfectly just social arrangements, defining the nature of the perfectly just society. The approach Sen favors, on the other hand, focuses on the comparative judgments of what is “more” or “less” just, and on the comparative merits of the different societies that actually emerge from certain institutions and social interactions.

At the heart of Sen’s argument is a respect for reasoned differences in our understanding of what a “just society” really is. People of different persuasions—for example, utilitarians, economic egalitarians, labor right theorists, no­-nonsense libertarians—might each reasonably see a clear and straightforward resolution to questions of justice; and yet, these clear and straightforward resolutions would be completely different. In light of this, Sen argues for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives that we inevitably face.

Conventional wisdom has it that the commercial imperialism of the early English trading companies was intertwined with the political imperialism of the expanding British empire. In this reexamination of the English East India Company, Keay, an author and broadcaster specializing in Asian history, acknowledges that "but for the Company there would have been not only no British India but also no global British Empire." But he also shows that the triumph of imperialism helped bring about the downfall of the company by eliminating its monopolies and creating conditions for the 1857 Indian mutiny. .....

The Changing Body uses the “plasticity, flexibility and responsiveness” of the human body to changes in nutrition, disease, work, and warmth to generate long-term insights on human development. The opening chapter lays out a series of claims that set up the book's narrative: (i) The nutritional status of a generation determines its longevity and ability to work. Individuals with a better nutrition status—manifest as height for age and weight for height; the result of the net accumulation of energy and nutrient intake, infection, care, and activity—have better brain development, maintain stronger immune systems, and are less likely to succumb to certain chronic diseases later in life. (ii) The work of that generation, when allied to technology (broadly defined), determines the generation's output. (iii) A generation's output, partly determined by its inheritance from past generations (i.e., malnourished mothers are more likely to give birth to malnourished babies), determines its standard of living through the enhanced ability to acquire material goods and to invest in technology. (iv) A generation's standard of living determines the nutrition status of the next generation (through the ability of adolescent girls, pregnant women, and parents to get access to food, health services, and care for themselves and their children). (v) And so on…

This circle underpins the book's central theory: “technophysio evolution,” a link between technological and physiological change. The authors explain that this differs from conventional forms of evolution in its emphasis on the control that humans have over its speed and their environment. Two chapters review the evidence behind these propositions (using equations and lots of data). The authors then devote three chapters to examining, in great detail (again providing much data), technophysio evolution in England and Wales, continental Europe, and the United States. Over the past 300 years, adult heights and life expectancies in all three regions have responded very rapidly to improvements in diet, disease prevention, and sanitation. Today, for example, adult males in the United Kingdom are, on average, 10 cm taller than their counterparts in the early 18th century, and their life expectancies at birth have doubled.

As my own work centers on the links among income, food consumption, and nutrition; the links between nutrition and productivity; and the distribution of food and other resources within households in developing countries, much of this territory is familiar to me. Nevertheless, the book makes several important contributions. First, a number of the authors are historians, and they introduce a long view into the relationships among different variables. Too often, researchers working on developing countries neglect these intergenerational effects (from grandparents to children through to their own grandchildren). Our need to understand long-wave phenomena will only increase as we tackle issues such as aging, chronic disease, urbanization, and climate change. The authors offer some insights into how to improve our grasp on long-term links and the added value of doing so. For example, are we using short-run estimates of the responsiveness of calorie consumption to changes in income (vital in projecting food needs and potential hunger crises) when we should, as the book argues, be using time series estimates (which are much lower)? If we did, our forecasts of the numbers of hungry people would be substantially reduced, with profound implications for public policy.

Second, the authors contrast experiences from the rich and developing worlds. This does not happen nearly enough. The two spheres are quite distinct in terms of research and policy communities. Yet the issues, methods, and policy prescriptions are very similar, and so the scope for cross-learning seems immense. For example, the evidence on how urbanization in the 19th-century United States and United Kingdom led to declines in average male heights (as disease and overcrowding overwhelmed any higher wages earned) should serve as a wake-up call to those who seem to be taking a rather casual view of the implications of the growth of cities for well-being.

Third, the book outlines a number of important questions that could shape the future research agenda. Two stand out: Why does it take more than one generation for changes in environment to manifest as improved adult height? Given that heights were not measured at the population level anywhere before the early 18th century, what laments will 22nd-century analysts express over variables that we should be measuring today but have not even considered?

But the book also frustrates. It fails to make the most of comparisons between developed and developing countries. The authors are not sufficiently familiar with the literature on developing countries, and their evidence relies too much on work by a small number of top U.S. academics. Thus they miss some opportunities to apply interesting findings from Europe and the United States to the developing world (and vice versa). For example, the insight about the extent to which heights can improve in one generation might explain the curious lack of response of nutrition status to sparkling economic growth in India. (The book mistakenly brackets China and India's progress in improving nutrition status.) Nor do the authors sufficiently challenge current notions of economic growth. While effectively critiquing the partiality of income as a measure of welfare (and arguing that, as a measure, nutritional status is “analogous to measures of capability”), they remain sanguine about the capacity of current economic growth patterns to generate “bads” such as carbon emissions, obesity, and inequality. The long-term perspective afforded by the intergenerational historical perspectives is also presumably one reason that the book is very light on policy implications, but surely the long view imposes a greater obligation to think about core policy mechanisms, unencumbered by electoral cycles. At the individual level, I have a nagging worry that the authors paid insufficient attention to people's ability to influence the impacts of long-term trends on their bodies. The body is more than a diagnostic tool, it is the servant of our agency.

Nevertheless, The Changing Body offers an authoritative summary of the field of technophysio evolution. The authors place the size and shape of the human body at the center of generational transitions. In doing so, they generate new insights into contemporary development processes—even if they understate our ability to do something about the trends that affect our bodies.

"As the result of two successful campaigns, of the employment of an enormous force, and of the expenditures of large sums of money," the secretary of state observed, "all that has yet been accomplished has been the disintegration of the State . . . and a condition of anarchy throughout the remainder of the country." A highly decorated general, recently returned from service in Kandahar, concluded, "I feel sure that I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us." The politician was Spencer Cavendish, Marquis of Hartington, the British secretary of state for India. The general was Sir Frederick Roberts, who eventually became a field marshal and the subject of three ballads by Rudyard Kipling. The year was 1880. As U.S. President Barack Obama tries to wind down the longest war in U.S. history, while leaving behind some measure of stability, he would be wise to keep in mind this bitter truth: most of Afghanistan's would-be conquerors make the same mistakes, and most eventually meet the same disastrous fate.

All serving consuls and prospective invaders interested in avoiding such an end would do well to read Peter Tomsen's magisterial new book, The Wars of Afghanistan. A career U.S. diplomat, Tomsen served as Washington's special envoy to the Afghan resistance in 1989-92, an experience that gave him almost unrivaled personal insight into Afghanistan's slide from anti-Soviet jihad into civil war. His account of the country's political dynamics before, during, and after this period is exhaustively researched, levelheaded, and persuasive. Throughout the book, he highlights two lessons that most of Afghanistan's invaders learn too late: no political system or ideology imposed by an outside power is likely to survive there, and any attempt to coax political change from within must be grounded in a deep knowledge of local culture and customs.

In Afghanistan, legitimate authority has traditionally been highly localized, a product of consensus rather than brute force, and firmly anchored in tribal, clannish, and kinship structures. Afghanistan only developed the barest bones of a centralized state in the twentieth century, and even today, Kabul's control over the country's periphery remains tenuous at best. These attributes make Afghanistan a difficult country for foreign military planners to occupy. Then again, as former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, under whose tenure the United States began its operations in Afghanistan, might have put it, you go to war in the country you have, not the country you want.

Tomsen compellingly argues that these salient features of Afghan political life will not disappear anytime soon. His conclusions about how Washington might stabilize Afghanistan, given the country's decentralization and independent culture, range from the uncontestable (better understand local practices) to the slightly contestable (do not hope to centralize power) to the problematic (reinvent the U.S. relationship with Pakistan). Whether one agrees with Tomsen, however, there is no denying that his descriptions of Afghanistan's society and politics are a valuable foundation for any discussion of how the country should be governed.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

Although the British and Soviet wars in Afghanistan may be the closest analogues to the United States' experience today, Tomsen starts his tale from the beginning. He usefully summarizes 3,000 years of Afghan history, during which the Greeks, the Romans, the White and the Black Huns, the Mongols, the Moguls, the Persians, and the Turkmens all tried to dominate the land. Every campaign eventually came to naught, either because the invader paid insufficient attention to local culture or because he sought to impose centralized control on ferociously independent tribes and clans. The pattern was basically the same each time: a brutally competent conqueror sweeps through Afghanistan, wreaking enough carnage to terrify all his enemies into submission, but he soon finds himself mired in a swamp of tribal customs and feuds that he does not begin to comprehend. When he loses enough in men and gold, he retreats -- not infrequently with fewer limbs than he had when he arrived.

Unlike previous invaders, the British troops that marched into Afghanistan in 1839 did not come to conquer; such a goal would have been far too expensive for the frugal bureaucrats back home. Instead, they aimed to place a puppet on the Afghan throne, or at least to establish a buffer between British India and the expanding tsarist Russia. The newly installed monarch would govern far more justly than his ousted rival: his British patronage was proof of his enlightenment. The British, much like the Soviets and the Americans decades later, were amazed to discover that Afghans did not believe in their benevolence. Suspicion quickly flared into insurgency, and when the British pulled out of Kabul in 1842 with a convoy of 16,000 troops and camp followers, only a single survivor (the assistant surgeon William Brydon) reached the border town of Jalalabad alive. Still, the lesson did not sink in. The British intervened in Afghanistan again in 1878 to compel the Afghan emir to at least accept a British diplomatic mission, and within just two years, they were left with some 3,000 dead or wounded. The Third Anglo-Afghan War, waged just after World War I to repel an ill-advised Afghan raid into British-held territory, lasted barely three months but killed 236 Britons in action. In each case, the colonial power arrived with increasingly modest goals -- and left with those goals only barely met.

At first, some Afghan city dwellers may have welcomed the Soviet invasion of 1979 as a respite from half a decade of coups and near coups, and those in the countryside may barely have known that it was happening. But any warm or neutral feelings were quickly swept away by the Soviets' attempts to impose their communist ideology and their conducting of a counterinsurgency campaign through carpet-bombing. By conservative estimates, more than one million Afghans were killed during the decadelong Soviet presence in the country -- many times the number of Afghans who have died as a result of the NATO-led war since 2001.

Tomsen, a Russian speaker who served as a political counselor in the U.S. embassy in Moscow immediately prior to the Soviet invasion, makes clear that there is no moral equivalence between the Soviets' occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and the ongoing U.S.-led campaign there. He points out, however, that the Soviets made the same core mistakes that have haunted invaders before and since them: they attempted to impose a centralized order on a highly decentralized nation, and they displayed complete ignorance about the realities of Afghan society. There were few nations in the 1970s less ripe for a Marxist-Leninist revolution than Afghanistan. The country had no proletariat; indeed, it had little capitalist structure of any kind.

Yet even as communism failed to catch on, Moscow refused to jettison its ideological framework and instead tried to shore up its puppet government by patching together the two rival factions of the ruling national communist party. The Khalq faction was overwhelmingly made up of members of the Ghilzai Pashtun tribes, and the other, the Parcham faction, was mostly made up of Tajiks and Durrani Pashtuns, the Ghilzais' traditional foes. The feud between the two groups was coated with a thin veneer of socialist rhetoric, but it was really only a continuation of centuries-old tribal struggles. The result was a government in Kabul wholly uninterested in governance, utterly removed from the day-to-day concerns of the Afghan people, and consumed with petty struggles over the spoils of rule. Meanwhile, the government simultaneously parroted and plotted against its foreign patron. If this doesn't sound familiar, it should.

THE ENEMY WITHIN

To a specialized reader, the most valuable parts of Tomsen's book are those in which he recounts what he actually witnessed. His recitation of the political maneuvering of the Soviet era in Afghanistan may strike some as overly detailed: the Ghilzai warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar betrays the Tajik warlord Burhanuddin Rabbani, Rabbani betrays the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, Dostum betrays everyone, and so on. But it is precisely with such detail that Tomsen breaks the most new ground. For this reason alone, The Wars of Afghanistan should have a place among the indispensable books on the topic.

The general reader will also find much to ponder in Tomsen's firsthand accounts. It is here that Tomsen most fully articulates his criticisms of the United States' own Afghanistan strategy, which he sees as having been remarkably static over the last few decades. Of the Clinton administration, he writes that the White House seemed not to have had any policy at all, "only a strategy that [was] marginally adjusted in reaction to events." (The critique also applies, in varying degrees, to every modern U.S. administration before and since.) As the United States' war in Afghanistan went from cold to hot, Washington made the same mistakes again and again.

According to Tomsen, another recurrent problem has been the United States' incoherent implementation of its policy, with every White House failing to enforce unified action across all branches of the government. Tomsen describes the CIA, in particular, as having conducted a foreign policy of its own, sabotaging U.S. attempts to build a unified moderate Afghan front and instead channeling support to Pakistan-based extremists. Meanwhile, U.S. presidents have been unwilling to devote sufficient time, attention, and political capital to formulating an effective Afghanistan policy. Most damaging of all, Tomsen argues, the United States has essentially outsourced its strategy to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), funneling billions of dollars and military equipment to rabidly anti-American military officers and their jihadist proxies. The result, he argues, is that the United States has been continuously hoodwinked as Pakistan has taken the money for nothing in return.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan, for example, praised the anti-Soviet mujahideen as "the moral equivalent" of George Washington and looked the other way as the ISI funneled most of the American money and arms to Hekmatyar and other incompetent, anti-American figures while sidelining more capable and more broadly representative ones, such as the resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. Tomsen is kinder to George H. W. Bush, who appointed him as special envoy to the region, than to other U.S. presidents, but he writes that he himself lacked the bureaucratic support to rein in the CIA when it undermined agreed-on policies, such as supporting the development of a moderate and broad-based government. During Bush's tenure, Tomsen writes, the agency continued to call all the shots, and money kept flowing to the ISI. Clinton made a few diplomatic feints, such as limited outreach to the ISI-backed Taliban, and lobbed a few cruise missiles when the Taliban continued to shelter al Qaeda, but he otherwise largely ignored Afghanistan. And even after 9/11, George W. Bush failed to wrest power from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the ISI. Tomsen sees traces of promise in Obama's 2009 decision to renew top-level emphasis on Afghanistan, but he is skeptical that such a commitment will work without a wholesale reexamination of U.S. policy. In sum, Tomsen sees most outside potentates, whether politiburo chairmen or presidents, as making the same set of errors.

UNCOMMON COMMON SENSE?

Trying to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, today's war planners have settled on a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy that is supposed to create enough security to help a civilian government establish legitimacy among the local populace. Observers with longer memories will recall, of course, that the principles of counterinsurgency have been discovered many times before: by the British in Malaya, the French in Algeria, the United States in Vietnam and the Philippines, and even the Soviets in Afghanistan. And discovering (or rediscovering) a principle is easier than implementing it. Ten years into the current counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, the military piece of the mission seems to have progressed far more rapidly than the civilian portion. Troops have pacified the major cities enough to allow for the formation of a central government. But the government of President Hamid Karzai seems to have little more popular support than did that of the Soviet puppet (and eventual light-post adornment) Muhammad Najibullah. As General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, candidly noted in his 2009 assessment of U.S. progress in Afghanistan, the military piece of counterinsurgency can do little more than provide the time and space for a civilian government to take root. It remains to be seen whether in 2014, by which time U.S. troops will have withdrawn from their combat role in Afghanistan, the Afghan government will resemble a stable oak or a flimsy reed.

Tomsen's policy recommendations are the flip side of his critique. He calls on the Obama administration to ensure a coherent policy by relegating the U.S. military and intelligence agencies to "policy-implementing, not policymaking." He also urges the administration to stay engaged in Afghanistan for the long haul but to "de-Americanize the Afghan war across the board as rapidly as possible" by disentangling the United States from Afghan governance and development, finding Afghan moderates worth backing, and helping the Afghan regime build its governance capacity so long as its practices are "honest and effective." If some of Tomsen's recommendations are common sense (who could object to greater policy coherence?), others are somewhat contradictory (how should one stay engaged enough to back moderates and build the regime's capacity, all while shifting responsibility for security to Afghan forces?). The government in Kabul may not inspire much confidence today, but Tomsen avoids the question of what the United States should do if Afghan politics are as corrupt and dysfunctional in 2014 as they are in 2011.

Tomsen also urges a get-tough approach with Pakistan: "The most valuable contribution that America can make to Afghan peace," he writes, "lies not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan." In addition to enforcing existing conditions on military aid more strictly, Tomsen argues, Obama should threaten to designate the country a state sponsor of terrorism if the ISI does not cut its ties to militants. Some readers will wholeheartedly endorse Tomsen's call, even if following it might lead to a severing of relations between the United States and Pakistan. Others will question the wisdom of trading a potential disaster in Afghanistan (a country of 40 million people and of dubious strategic interest to the United States) for a potential disaster in Pakistan (a nation of 185 million and with the world's fifth-largest nuclear arsenal). Even those who share Tomsen's intense frustration may scratch their heads trying to figure out what leverage the United States could possibly hold over the Pakistani military as long as the Pentagon remains so logistically dependent on it: half the supplies for U.S. troops in Afghanistan (and almost all the lethal equipment, from ammunition to the weapons that fire it) are transported daily by the convoys that come through the Khyber Pass and Spin Boldak, a town right on the border with Pakistan.

And even those who agree with the basic elements of Tomsen's approach will remain hungry for a fallback option if his approach fails. "Afghanistan is an unpredictable place," Tomsen writes. "Things almost never turn out as planned, especially when the planning is done by foreigners." How should U.S. policy deal with this problem? If the Afghan National Security Forces are unable to provide security by 2014, should the United States delay the withdrawal of its troops indefinitely? If the Karzai regime fails to address corruption and poor governance, should the United States continue to give it money? And if Pakistan continues to be "fireman and arsonist," which Tomsen says it has been consistently over the past three decades, should the United States disengage from it completely and accept the consequences? As bad as things are now, they could easily get much worse.

Inevitably, any book with the breadth of The Wars of Afghanistan will have a few nits for the picking, but there are two reasons to read Tomsen's book carefully. First, it is extremely well written; an entire career spent drafting State Department cables miraculously failed to grind down the author's narrative spirit. Second, and more important, Tomsen has often been right in the past -- even, or especially, when many others were wrong.

Before 9/11, for example, he was in favor of cooperating with the two moderate mujahideen leaders Massoud and Abdul Haq when the U.S. government was against doing so. He was against working with the decidedly nonmoderate Hekmatyar and Hamid Gul, the ISI head who helped create several of the worst terrorist groups still operating in the region today, when Washington was for it. He was also right to sound the alarm about an obscure figure named Osama bin Laden at a time when the U.S. government was turning a blind eye to the ISI's support for him. Tomsen writes of the al Qaeda chief's sanctuary in Pakistan, "[Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf and the ISI practiced plausible deniability concerning bin Laden's whereabouts. They knew exactly where he was." This is a bold claim, and much more so for having been written long before the May 2 U.S. raid in Abbottabad that killed bin Laden.

It is also worth quoting at length a prediction Tomsen made while testifying to Congress in 2003:

The stunning American-led military victory in Afghanistan which ousted the Taliban-al Qaeda regime has not been followed up by an effective, adequately funded reconstruction strategy to help Afghans rebuild their country and restore their self-governing institutions. The initial enthusiasm genuinely felt by the Afghan people that peace was returning has clearly faded. . . . If present trends continue, five years from now Afghanistan is likely to look very much like it does today: reconstruction stagnation, a weak central government starved of resources, unable to extend its influence to the regions where oppressive warlords reign, opium production soars, and guerrilla warfare in Afghan-Pakistani border areas generated by Pakistan-backed Muslim extremists continues to inflict casualties on coalition and Afghan forces.

Today, he writes, even this take is overly optimistic.

Given Tomsen's track record, Americans should give a respectful hearing to his call for a thorough policy reformulation -- something beyond tweaks to troop numbers and counterinsurgency tactics. And given the merits of his book, they should heed his warning not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

In her new book, Farhat Taj demolishes some of the basic assumptions about terrorism in KP and FATA and challenges several authors on their earlier findings

The book seeks to establish that: 1) the Afghan Taliban plus Al Qaeda Arabs and Uzbeks and their local supporters were made to become dominant inside Pakistan under a considered policy by Pakistan Army; 2) local leadership opposed to them was allowed to be decimated and political agents were subordinated to the terrorists after the destruction of the local tribal jirga; 3) loyalty to the Taliban was obtained through intimidation allowed by Pakistan; 4) local lashkars willing to fight the terrorists were discouraged and allowed to be destroyed; 5) this was facilitated by 'peace treaties' between the Army and the Taliban; 6) there were no FC desertions and FC Pakhtuns felt no ethnic attachment with Taliban; 7) local marriages of Pakhtun girls to Arabs and Uzbeks remain unproven; drone attacks by the CIA are popular with the local population; 9) Pakistan's pro-Taliban policy was a part of the 'strategic depth' Pakistan sought against India, aimed at controlling Afghanistan; and 10) Taliban attracted individuals of dubious moral character, joining terrorism with the criminal underworld.

What did Nek Muhammad, the Wazir warrior, say at the ceremony which shows General Safdar Hussain, FATA secretary Brigadier Mehmood Shah and Nek Muhammad, in an ecstatic pose on the cover of the book? He said: 'Pakistan's authority has become a thing of the past; now the Taliban will rule' (p.67).

The 14 chapters in this volume provide a sweeping overview of the gains and setbacks in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crisis. The fundamental changes have been the shift to a politically circumscribed market economy and the consolidation of the communist regime. This phantasmagoric formation, which Barry Naughton describes in his chapter as a harsh and “elite-dominated form of state capitalism,” has produced two decades of explosive economic growth -- without democratization. The state has instead suppressed the history and memories of the June 4 massacre, strengthened the patriotic education of Chinese youth, expanded the policing of the population, and made little progress toward the rule of law. Chapters on foreign policy argue that Chinese leaders are wielding their newly gained economic power to shape international norms and institutions (such as those concerning human rights) and pressure Western countries and companies for political concessions. These trends have even adversely affected the democracy movement in Hong Kong. The authors trace the origins of these changes to Chinese leaders’ responses to the June 4 crisis and their determination to avert another Tiananmen-style protest. Although a few contributions cover the changing strategies of political and intellectual dissent and new types of citizen activism, by and large the volume offers little hope that China will move toward democracy anytime soon.

Christensen takes a fine-grained look at several key episodes during the Cold War in Asia, including the Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954–55 and 1958, and the Vietnam War. He uses them to refine existing theories of alliance politics and coercive diplomacy. One lesson is that weakly coordinated alliances send out mixed signals that court miscalculation by the rival camp, as was the case with the murky U.S. commitment to the defense of South Korea and Taiwan in 1950 and the uncoordinated Soviet and Chinese responses to General Douglas MacArthur’s Inchon landing the same year. Another lesson is that internally divided alliances generate competitive escalation among their members, as was the case in the 1960s with China and Russia, each of which sought to outdo the other in Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. Even though rivals feel more threatened when an alliance is monolithic, a unified enemy can be easier to deal with than a divided one. Sometimes, a strong alliance system can trigger conflict, as was the case in 1954 when the United States spearheaded the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. That act motivated Mao to launch artillery attacks in the Taiwan Strait in an attempt to deter the United States from signing a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. Christensen suggests that in the past decade, during part of which he served in the U.S. government, the United States has made its signaling to Beijing credible by making its commitments to Taipei and Tokyo clear.

Are the two most powerful states in the world moving toward the creation of a functioning global order? Or are international norms and institutions just a new arena for the old game of realpolitik? Foot and Walter compare U.S. and Chinese compliance with five sets of norms, governing the use of force, mutual surveillance of macroeconomic policy, nuclear nonproliferation, climate change, and global financial flows. With careful attention to detail, the authors are able to show that China’s compliance has increased as its economy has become more interdependent with the rest of the world, although in selective ways that reflect particular economic and security interests. Although the United States created the initial institutions, it has performed inconsistently, unable to rein in important domestic constituencies that have an interest in seeing certain norms violated. In both Beijing and Washington, compliance seems to be strongest when the distribution of its costs and benefits is perceived as fair. But this is a hard equilibrium to achieve, given the asymmetries of power, culture, and development that mark the international system.

This is the authoritative guide to the part of the Chinese military that most worries the West: the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Since the first edition of Cole’s book was published a decade ago, the PLAN has made the transition from a coastal defense organization to a nascent blue-water force. Its signal strengths are its submarines and its antiship cruise missiles, both of which were acquired with an eye to a possible conflict with the United States over Taiwan. The navy is close to fielding one aircraft carrier, presumably the first of many, and has built a large naval base on Hainan Island, which signals Beijing’s commitment to defend its sweeping claims in the South China Sea. All the while, the Communist Party’s top-to-bottom control of the service has remained vigorous. In Cole’s judgment, the PLAN is still far from being able to dominate the U.S., the Japanese, the Indian, or even the South Korean navy. But it already has enough strength to seize the initiative in selected scenarios. As for its future, farther shores beckon, since China depends on sea-lanes that reach all the way to the west coast of Africa. The naval ambitions of political leaders in Beijing are unknown, but there is no end in sight to the PLAN’s development.

Su adds a new chapter to the doleful register of twentieth-century mass killings by revealing the previously unknown story of some 1.5 million innocent deaths that occurred in China’s rural villages in 1967–68. The Cultural Revolution was not just an urban phenomenon, as previously believed. People classified as coming from bad “class backgrounds” were murdered in groups, often whole families at a time, in front of mass meetings. The slaughter was especially intense in Guangdong and Guangxi, southern provinces with histories of clan conflict. The perpetrators were “ordinary men,” anxious to demonstrate their fealty to Mao’s line on class struggle and filled with panic about a supposed counterrevolutionary conspiracy that had in fact been fabricated by the leaders in Beijing. Although the state did not carry out the killings or order them, it created the lawless environment that made them possible. Su tells a heart-rending story and contributes new insights to the burgeoning academic literature on contentious politics and genocide.

In this nuanced analysis, three leading political scientists ponder the mystery of how democracies that contain strong, territorially concentrated minorities can manage not just to hold together but also to inculcate strong loyalty to national institutions. Their research demonstrates the vigor of both national and subnational identities in India and other countries with similar political systems, such as Belgium, Canada, and Spain. The institutions that give political leaders the best chance to promote cohesion include asymmetric federalism (granting different powers to different territorial units), the strong protection of individual rights, and parliamentary government. The authors show how other institutional frameworks that give too little autonomy to territorially concentrated subgroups (as in Sri Lanka) or too much (as in Yugoslavia) tend toward secessionism and civil war. And they argue that U.S.-style federalism should be avoided in all “robustly multinational” societies because of its legislative malapportionment, indivisibility of executive power, and plethora of veto points. Since few countries in the world are homogenous nation-states along the lines of France or Japan, these arguments have broad practical relevance.

The age-old European tendency to refer to the Ottoman Empire as “Turkey” obscures how revolutionary a change it was when remnants of that venerable empire became the Republic of Turkey following World War I. The coup de grâce was administered not by the victorious Allies, who were content to leave a truncated Ottoman Empire in place, but by an Ottoman general, Mustafa Kemal, who adopted the richly symbolic title Atatürk (meaning “father of the Turks”). Atatürk does not lack for biographers, most of whose books are adulatory, but none has so thoroughly brought to life the ideological climate that molded the man as has Hanioglu. And few have presented Atatürk with such objectivity. Hanioglu’s Atatürk is a product of Young Turk nationalism, Enlightenment secularism, and scientism. Hanioglu depicts a pragmatic Atatürk who could use Islamic or socialist symbolism as needed (one chapter is titled “Muslim Communism?”) but who was, most of all, a zealot pushing a surcharged agenda of a secularizing, modernizing Turkish nationalism. The many top-down changes that Atatürk imposed in religion, language, dress, and even the arts make for fascinating reading today. Nearly nine decades after the end of the Ottoman era, Turkey and the post-Ottoman Middle East are still digesting and resisting the ideas of Atatürk.

The Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979 and the imbroglio that followed were seminal events in the Cold War’s last years. Others have told the story of how the decision was taken, the war conducted, and the international politics of it handled, but the details of the war’s painful ending have remained obscure. Kalinovsky goes over the whole story briefly and then, with a large cache of archival material, firsthand accounts, and interviews, takes the reader deep inside the Soviet decision-making process as first Mikhail Gorbachev’s aging predecessors and then Gorbachev and his circle struggled awkwardly to settle on an exit strategy that would not bring the roof down. Listening to their tortured internal arguments, watching the KGB and the Soviet military battle each other, witnessing the confusion stirred by half-clear, shifting strategies, and seeing how the hopes of salvaging some fragment of stability in this ravaged country strung out the inevitable outcome and led to an ongoing entanglement even after the last Soviet soldier had left should have a haunting familiarity.

Written by: Narayanadas Upadhyayula

August 27th, 2011

Had Chānakya been a Western philosopher (like Plato or Aristotle), history probably would have treated him with much more respect. His Arthaśāstra is easily the Earth‘s first treatise on statecraft, which dealt with economy and governance, foreign policy and war strategy. Indian history, written first by the aliens and then by the left-liberal crowd, with its obsession with a nebulous ‘composite culture’, has not done justice to the great political-philosopher. Westerners, in their ineffable arrogance, used to refer to Chānakya as the Indian Machiavelli although the former preceded him by about two millennia.

Writing a novel steeped in history is no easy task, because the author has to balance historical accuracy with an engaging plot. Ashwin Sanghi’s Chānakya’s Chant is a fascinating saga of two Chānakyas, the original political-philosopher of the fourth century BCE and his modern incarnation, Gangäsagar Mishra. As the story swings to and fro with a gap of 2300 years, the reader is gripped by its enthralling narrative, delicious irony and accurate rendering of Indian idiom into English, without losing the flavour of either, which is no mean task. The novel is characterized by meticulous research, great felicity of expression and suave story-telling.

The story of the original Chānakya runs parallel to the known history of the political philosopher with subtle adlibbing to make it an interesting read. As Chānakya fulfills his vow to banish Dhanananda and coronate Chandragupta, he meets his childhood love, Suvasini after prolonged separation but sacrifices his love for the sake of Bharat, which he strove hard to build. For the great political philosopher it was country before self. In return he earns her wrath and curse. She however offers him a means of redemption that was to come several thousands of years later. It ordains that a man should meditate upon a mantra Suvasini cites, and ‘use it to advance a woman’. Two thousand three hundred years later Chānakya’s modern incarnation Gangäsagar Mishra, a professor of history, chances upon the mantra (Chānakya’s Chant) in the form of an inscription on a granite block.

Gangäsagar engineers for his protégé, Chandini Gupta the daughter of a poor pan vendor to become the prime minister of the world’s largest democracy. The novel begins with Chandini’s swearing in as the Prime Minster of India, watched on television by her terminally ill mentor from a hospital bed. The rest of the story was told as a flash back. It lays bare every nuance of contemporary politics: caste, gender and religion and of course the Indian brand of secularism. Careers were made and broken; reputations made and willfully sullied. Human life is worth nothing if does not suit someone’s political ascendance and no strategy too mean. Favours were granted and called; honeytraps laid to bring enemies into submission and hemlock flowed to eliminate them. If a fellow politician were to be sacrificed to swing public sympathy and electoral gain, well, it was worth doing it. There is a hijacked plane, engineered riots and stage-managed shootouts. There is the nexus between industrialists and politicians. Industrialists were used to bankroll elections and the recalcitrant ones were brought into submission with the aid of pliant trade unions and law enforcement agencies. Secret service personnel were used for political ends. Honest journalists were trapped and manipulated to perform sting operations on political enemies. And there is even mention of land allotment to SEZs and the telecom scam. The rumour about a former prime minister’s illegitimate child, sensationalized by his political secretary in a tell-all book about palace intrigues and amorous exploits, was used with thin disguise.

India did pay a great tribute to the author of Arthaśāstra by naming the diplomatic enclave in Delhi ‘Chānakyapuri’, but, how one wishes India had a foreign policy mandarin of the calibre of Chānakya or his modern incarnation, Gangäsagar! While Chandini as the suave foreign minister wows her own party and opposition members on the floor of parliament, her mentor pulls ‘RAW’ strings to play China against Pakistan by having the Chinese arrest a Pakistani spy who was ‘about to foment trouble in China’s Uyghur minority province’. It is certainly feasible, for Xinxiang is China’s ‘Achilles’ heel’ and Pakistan is the world’s crucible and exporter of Jehadi terror. Another stratagem pulled off by the wily Gangäsagar was to have adopted Russian designs for gas centrifuges (presumably for nuclear reactors) sold to North Korea and Libya, both pariahs for the US, making them believe they were actually buying them from Pakistan. If only India could pull off such a stratagem to sow dissension between Pakistan and the US!

Contrast these coups with Jawaharlal Nehru’s starry-eyed idealism in being obsessed with NAM (a body comprising of tin-pot dictators and banana republics) or I. K. Gujral’s idiocy in giving away India’s ‘assets’ to Pakistan. It takes years for intelligence agencies to place and cultivate assets in the higher echelons of an enemy nation, not to speak of great personal risks its officers take.

Sanghi’s otherwise meticulous research was marred by a few factual errors. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar used to send eighty five and fifty four representatives respectively to parliament (p.392), but before these states were bifurcated in 2001. After the creation of UttaraKhand (5) and Jharkhand (14) the no constituencies in UP and Bihar were reduced to 80 and 40 respectively. Similarly, in the Indian constitution, there is no provision for President’s rule at the centre (p. 404). However, this error was corrected two pages later with a reference to a ‘caretaker prime minister’.

Sanghi did not bother to please the left-lib crowd by highlighting filth, poverty and squalor. Nor did he use ‘adultery, incest and masturbation’ to make it to a Booker’s list, although the novel is not devoid of sex. There is just a modicum of it, natural and otherwise, that is germane to the story and no more.

Chānakya’s Chant is the story of contemporary India told boldly with sardonic humour. And for once, the blurb about the book being ‘cracker of a page-turner’ is true! As the story winds down to a stunning dénouement it makes readers hold their breath.

In New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism, Barry Cooper applies the insights of Eric Voegelin to the phenomenon of modern terrorism. Cooper points out that the chief omission from most contemporary studies of terrorism is an analysis of the "spiritual motivation" that is central to the actions of terrorists today. When spiritual elements are discussed in conventional literature, they are grouped under the opaque term religion. A more conceptually adequate approach is provided by Voegelin's political science and, in particular, by his Shellingian term pneumopathology-a disease of the spirit.

"Virtually alone within the flood of volumes on September 11 and its aftermath, this study brings us inside the terrorist mind-set. It does this by taking seriously what terrorists say as a guide to the motivations for their horrendously inexplicable actions. Where most of the instant scholarship that has appeared is still floundering to find the appropriate mode of analysis, Cooper has identified the new terrorism as a form of apocalyptic political religion."--David Walsh

The idea that nuclear weapons can and should be completely eliminated has achieved a degree of interest and credibility that it has not enjoyed since the first decade of the nuclear age, not least because of some high-profile supporters. This means that it is also starting to get high-level academic attention. Kelleher and Reppy have collected an impressive group of scholars who assume the objective of a nonnuclear world and then explore how this might be achieved and what it might mean. The chapters cover individual countries and a range of practical, institutional, and conceptual problems. Getting to Zero contains plenty of unavoidable skepticism, and readers will not finish it sure about the way ahead, but the book moves the debate to a more serious level.

Coming 50 years after 1961, with Berlin now the capital of a unified German state, Kempe’s compelling, lively (and unusually well-illustrated) account is a reminder that the city was once at the heart of a crisis that almost turned the Cold War hot. The awkward division of Germany in 1945 left West Berlin as a Western strategic outpost behind the Iron Curtain and a bolthole for Germans stuck in the communist East. The crisis grew as more and more of them escaped during the first half of 1961, in part because they feared that the Soviet Union and its East German clients might succeed in controlling the city. The crisis ended with the construction of the Berlin Wall, leaving East Germans stuck but making possible an uneasy coexistence between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Kempe demonstrates the interplay of character and calculation as he describes how the main protagonists, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy, tried to manage a conflict that seemed to have no resolution other than war but was not really worth a war. Some irritating muddles on the associated conflict over Cuba aside, this is a skillful work of Cold War history.

The rules of terrorism and counterterrorism have been written around Israel’s struggle for statehood and security. As Byman reminds readers in this comprehensive, balanced, and sharply written history, Jewish militants relied on force from the start to push the British out and keep the Arabs at bay. As the security threat took new forms, the Israelis remained determined not to even hint at weakness. And as Byman shows, they enjoyed some notable successes in disrupting Palestinian terrorist campaigns, especially in the early years of this century. Targeted assassinations have now become established as a legitimate counterterrorist tactic beyond Israel, despite misgivings about their legality and effectiveness. Undertaken with sufficient ruthlessness and regularity, they can do serious damage to a militant organization. But they can also prompt retaliation, and whatever the operational gains that targeted killings reap, they can involve severe political costs. Byman makes a similar judgment about the physical barrier separating the Palestinians from the Israelis; an operational case for it can be made, but the political downsides are substantial. Indeed, Israel’s persistent security predicament suggests that when it comes to counterterrorism, as with other aspects of strategy, the core problem is the failure to integrate the military and the political.

Marquand has had a long and distinguished political and academic career: he has been a member of the British parliament, an adviser to the European Commission (the EU’s executive body), and an honorary fellow at Oxford University. In that time, he has tended to support political causes -- notably the British Social Democratic, New Labour, and Liberal Democratic movements -- only to turn on them later. He has also supported European integration, and in this book he turns on it, too. He does so for a reason that has led many other Europeans to reject integration: he cannot tolerate its ambiguity. The EU’s unique structure, half state and half international organization, has facilitated success and growth for over a half century -- longer than most nation-states in the world today have existed. Yet now, Marquand believes, only transforming the EU into something more like the United States, with stronger central institutions and direct democratic representation, can save it from dissolution. In the end, Marquand gives no reason why this will -- or, indeed, should -- take place. Perhaps what Europe needs instead is a new, more decentralized vision. Yet the mere fact that so many books of this kind are written testifies to the controversy over the meaning of the European experiment.

Hamilton has made something of a career of stating an obvious truth that most observers willfully ignore: Europe is the world’s largest economic power. In most respects, such as trade, investment, research, and development assistance, Europe dwarfs China and India and continues to surpass the United States. Yet the generally antigovernment bias of most economic analyses, the tendency to treat Europe as a set of small countries rather than as a whole, and salient events such as the recent euro crisis lead many to question whether the European model is sustainable. This data-rich volume evaluates Europe’s global competitive position and suggests ways to strengthen it. The advice is sensible: European policymakers should focus on services, knowledge-intensive sectors, and green technology and work collectively through the EU to liberalize markets, streamline regulations, and promote innovation. To be sure, the recommendations are somewhat technocratic. For example, liberalizing immigration laws, promoting intergenerational equity, and deregulating public services appear as economic objectives, not as contested social and political issues. Yet this optimistic prognosis is an important corrective to the prevailing pessimism.

Is conflict between the West and Islam the result of mistaken ideas about the Islamic world? Do Europeans (and Americans) portray Islam as static, monolithic, and reactionary? This volume, edited by a French researcher at Harvard, examines whether such “cultural talk” triggers Western overreaction and inflames Muslim opposition both inside and outside Europe and the United States. It is something of a grab bag of perspectives, heavier on speculation than on hard sociological, economic, and political data. Yet the general tendency -- oddly enough, given the premise of the book -- seems to disconfirm the notion that Western perspectives on Islam matter much. One contribution finds such hostile stereotypes mainly among extremists. Another points out that European efforts to combat terrorism have been largely successful. Still another points out that such views are more prevalent in the United States, where Muslims have been more fully integrated than in Europe. One comes away with the impression that the integration of minorities reflects a far more complex range of factors than cultural stereotypes.

Are terrorists mad, bad, or a combination of the two? It takes a special sort of mind to prepare to kill large numbers of people on the basis of a highly speculative political analysis. Orsini’s remarkable book gets as close as any to understanding this sort of thinking. Although it can be hard going at times, with dollops of pedantic sociology, the book is sustained throughout by stark and candid quotes from past members of the Red Brigades, an Italian terrorist group active in the 1970s. The Red Brigades were animated by a simplistic Marxism, and Orsini is at pains to stress the importance of ideology in legitimating terrorism. It is not hard to recognize similar tendencies in other groups: the conviction that the group has a vanguard role that enables its members to see the struggle with unmatched clarity, the belief that unswerving devotion to the cause creates a right to do anything for it, and a readiness to deny the humanity of all opponents. Although Orsini does not compare his leftist terrorists with Islamists, he does show elements of the same mindset in past Marxist groups and also in contemporary neofascists.

Whereas Orsini manages to paint a disturbing portrait of a vicious group, Miniter looks at one of the key figures in al Qaeda, Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Mohammed was a pioneer of mass-casualty terrorism, involved in both the 1993 and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and he proved his “toughness” by beheading the bound journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Miniter’s research is meticulous, and his revelations about Mohammed’s time in the United States are interesting, but the portrait of Mohammed remains shallow. That might be because Mohammed himself is shallow; his motivations appear more secular than spiritual, bound up with a sense of the injustice faced by his native Baluchistan in Pakistan and by the Palestinians. Miniter uses Mohammed, who was waterboarded, to attempt to assess the pros and cons of extreme interrogation techniques. The United States might gain valuable intelligence from it, he concludes, but in doing so abandons the moral high ground.

"Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Univeralism"

by Rajiv Malhotra

http://beingdifferentbook.com/synopsis/

Being Different highlights six distinct and fundamental points of divergence between the dharmic traditions and the West. These are as follows:

1) Approaches to difference: The West’s pervasive anxiety over personal and cultural differences have resulted in the endless need for the appropriation, assimilation, “conversion” and/or digestion and obliteration of all that does not fit its fundamental paradigms. The roots of this anxiety lie in the inherent schisms in its worldview. Dharmic traditions, in contrast, while not perfect, are historically more comfortable with differences, both individual and collective; they are not driven by mandates for expansion and control.

2) History-centrism vs. Inner Sciences: The Judeo-Christian religious narrative is rooted in the history of a specific people and place. Further, the divine is external rather than within and guides humanity through unique and irreplaceable revelations. The dharmic traditions, in contrast, emphasize a series of sophisticated techniques of meditation and related inner sciences to achieve higher states of embodied knowing.

3) Integral unity vs. synthetic unity: Since the time of Aristotle, the West has assumed an atomic partitioning of reality into distinct and unrelated parts. The Judeo-Christian worldview is based on separate essences for God, the world and/ human souls. Additionally, there is an unbridgeable gap between Greek reason and religious revelation. The result has been a forced unity of separate entities, and such a unity always feels threatened to disintegrate and remains synthetic at best. In dharmic cosmology all things emerge from a unified whole. In Hinduism this integral unity is the very nature of Brahman; in Buddhism there is no ultimate essence like Brahman, but the principle of impermanence and co-dependence provides unity. Dharma and science are enmeshed as part of the same exploration. Every aspect of reality mirrors and relates to every other aspect in a web of interdependency.

4) The nature of chaos and uncertainty: The West privileges order in its aesthetics, ethics, religions, society and politics, and manifests a deep-rooted fear of chaos, uncertainty and complexity. The dharmic worldview see chaos as a creative catalyst built into the cosmos to balance out order that could become stultifying., and hence it adopts a more relaxed attitude towards it

5) Translatability vs. Sanskrit: Unlike Western languages, in Sanskrit the fundamental sounds have an existential link to the experience of the object they represent. This makes Sanskrit a key resource for personal and cultural development. It also implies that the process of translation and digestion into Western schemas is unavoidably reductive.

6) Western universalism challenged: In the “grand narrative” of the West, whether secular or religious, it is the agent or driver of historical unfolding and sets the template for all nations and peoples. This book challenges this self-serving universalism. It contrasts this with dharma’s non-linear approach to the past and multiple future trajectories.

The very openness that makes dharma appealing, however, often makes it vulnerable to invasion, appropriation and erosion by a more aggressive and externally ambitious civilization. The book uses the metaphor of digestion to point to the destructive effects of what is usually white-washed as assimilation, globalization or postmodern deconstruction of difference. For complex reasons, which are analyzed at length, the dharmic traditions have been a particular target of digestion into the West, and Being Different challenges the uncritical acceptance of this process by both Westerners and Indians.

If moral clarity about decisions to wage war ever existed, it is certainly missing today. As the wars of conquest and territorial defense that marked earlier eras have given way to “wars of choice,” limited military actions, and humanitarian interventions, the moral principles that leaders might wish to invoke when contemplating the use of military force have become increasingly murky. In this thoughtful treatise, a former British defense official provides a welcome restatement of the “just war” tradition in the context of current security challenges. In part, the book is a survey of religious and secular thinking about morality and war. But Fisher’s main interest is in identifying the changing moral choices and circumstances that confront contemporary would-be war-makers. Preemptive war, humanitarian intervention, strategic bombing, torture -- Fisher probes these and other controversial areas of modern-day warfare, arguing for the relevance of just war principles. The book eloquently makes clear that no one, from the soldier in the trenches to the commander in chief, can escape moral choice. The only question is whether one’s choices are worthy and well reasoned.

Until 9/11 and the war on terrorism, few scholars systematically explored how religious beliefs and movements shape global politics. In this impressive volume, a group of mostly younger academics does just that. Snyder argues that religion can alter the basic patterns of international relations: who the actors are, what they want, what capacities they have to attract support, and what rules they follow. Islamic groups, Christian fundamentalists, and the Falung Gong all impinge on world politics in various ways. Religious movements can reinforce state authority or undermine it, and religion can reinforce the territorial boundaries of states or mobilize loyalties that cut across borders. Timothy Samuel Shah and Daniel Philpott trace the rise and fall of secularism in international relations. Monica Duffy Toft explores the connections between religion and war, arguing that religion, not unlike nationalism, can help its devotees rationalize self-sacrifice in support of a larger community. Il Hyun Cho and Peter Katzenstein argue that Confucianism in East Asia survived the region’s modernization and is now an important tool for bolstering state authority and regional identity there.

From time to time, it is useful to stand back from the weekly reports of crises around the world and ask how the human race is really doing. Kenny, a World Bank economist, does this magnificently in this well-written book. Its main message is simple: that quality of life has improved greatly almost everywhere over the past century, even in places (such as Africa) where per capita incomes have stayed relatively flat. Looking at improvements in that measure, which is favored by economists, is in fact a poor way to gauge improvements in overall living conditions. Infant and maternal mortality have plummeted, and people today enjoy better nutrition and protection against disease, more education, better access to infrastructure, and greater personal freedom than ever before. To be sure, there is much room for improvement. But making progress need not be vastly expensive, since it mainly involves transmitting ideas and information. Kenny offers a lighthearted critical survey of what economists have had to say about the determinants of economic growth, but he argues that growth, although important and desirable, should not be the main objective.