Taming Pakistan: Modi Effect

[Dayuhan]

What constitute American interests are subjected to how the US establishment comes to understand the world we all live in. And this is where the problem starts for America (and others).

"American interests" are also defined, and continuously redefined, by competition among divergent interests and divergent perceptions of interest. That competition, and its rather ephemeral outcomes, are often baffling to Americans and utterly incomprehensible to non-Amercians, particularly those who are committed to a particular perception of interest and thus less able to see the possibility of competing interests.

There are two major questions (among a few) of interest to us that come to define the civilization we are part of:

Do we understand how functional democracies are built and sustained?

Do we understand what causes Muslim radicalism?

Informed observers would concede that we do not know the answers to both.

I am not convinced that the origin of Muslim radicalism constitutes a civilization-defining issue. I agree that we don't know the answers to those questions, and I suspect that any effort to propose simple, generic, or universally applicable answers to those questions is going to come up.

Of course, if one asks our political scientists, they would tell you that these are complex issues subjected to various causes and influences.

Yes, and they'd be right.

As a physical scientist I would state a fundamental observation that complex causes are unlikely to lead to prolific and repeatable patterns. In other words, there are likely well-defined processes that might shed light on the above two questions.

It's hard to read much history without observing that prolific and repeatable patterns often do have complex causes. An analogous example might be the spread of communist/socialist revolutionary movements in much of the formerly colonized world in the post WW2 decades. That was certainly a prolific and repeatable pattern, but anyone familiar with any of the movements in question knows the causes in any given case were far from simple or consistent. There were of course consistent patterns on the broadest scale, but attempts to extrapolate universal answers or solutions have rarely been of much use. Attempt to define simple, generic, or universal causes for broad geopolitical events are often satisfying but rarely useful.

The bottom line is that poorly understood phenomena of potential strategic significance lead to "difference of opinion" at every level -- from their perceived extent of significance to what to do about them.

Much confusion arises when people, often people with widely divergent views, assume that their own understanding is correct and everyone else's is flawed.