"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

I'm watching "The Far Pavilions": what a blast from the past! Ben Cross, Amy Irving, a delightfully wicked Saaed Jaffrey (really, one of my all-time favourite actors), Omar Sharif, Art Malikm, Christopher Lee, Robert Hardy, and small parts for a very young Rupert Everett, Jeremy Sinden (from Brideshead Revisited) and Michael Cochrane (the horrid colonel from Sharpe's Eagle). And a star-turn cameo for Sir John Gilegud as the fussy Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari.

I loved the book very much, and the series quite a bit. I've always had a thing for Amy Iriving, who is still gorgeous at just short of 60. But the most beautiful character of all has got to be the amazing mountains in the background of the intro shots and which are visible from time to time, providing the very image that the story is named for.

I know that a lot of my interest in India and South/Central Asia in general comes from my dad's few stories and his greater unspoken fondness for the subcontinent. But a lot comes too from this very book, the series made from it, and the other stories like it that I then sought out (Kipling and his imitators, Indian writers and filmmakers, and eventually all things Desi).

500/500 for my term paper in Professor Thistlebottom's class. His comments on this and the last previous essay were quite friendly and devoid of picky grammar comments. Perhaps, as with horses, one just needs to be firm and decisive.

I won't bore you with the entire 11-page paper, but it raised an interesting question: if the Afghan security and intelligence system becomes weaker, what else can the US do to shore up the situation there? It's a hypothetical based on a counterfactual premise; while there continue to be problems with the military and police there, I think there's been tremendous progress. The problem, IMO is the national political part. Karzai has been compared to Diem in Vietnam, and I think it's a fair comparison. He's not very popular; he's not very capable; we more or less put him where he is. In addition, he seems to have lost confidence in the US and NATO--probably because we've been very frank about criticizing his government's corruption and election cheating--and is flailing around wildly for an alternative. But the terms that his enemies want before they will talk to him are higher than he's prepared to go. We can't possibly get rid of him, because we'll get just what we did when Diem went down--a chaotic mess where any hope of a credible national government supported by the people goes by the wayside.

My essay argued that we have to look at what is keeping the insurgents going. It's not popular support--people in Afghanistan HATE them, and while they don't like the Karzai government either, they're prepared to tolerate it *if* it can protect them and let them go about their business, even make things a little better here and there. I think we have to look at the basic nature of Afghan warfare and peel off the insurgent groups that can be peeled off. They're run by some pretty loathsome people, but loathsome people are who, in the final analysis, run things in that part of the world. If we can bribe (to be frank) the Hekmatyars, maybe even the Quetta Shura with NATO withdrawal and a chance to participate in ruling the country, I think we could get them to stop fighting (with guns).

But only if we don't have someone egging them on. And right now, Pakistan is doing that. They are afraid that if we withdraw, Afghanistan will go back to civil war, and so they want the major factions that will predominate in such a war to owe them. They are deathly afraid of India gaining a foothold there and surrounding them. And they have their own insurgents (that IMO have grown out of the vipers they've nursed in their bosom) that they do not have the resources to defeat. I think we need to engage much more fervently with Pakistan. Stop sanctioning them and making them question whether or not we support them. Pressure India (who owe us a lot IMO, after the boosts that they got from Bush) to make it clear they have NO ambitions in Afghanistan. And we need to provide serious (hands-off) COIN support to Pakistan to help them squelch their own Taliban. The people in the FATA don't like these folks, but if the only way the government can deal with them is to clear all the villages and drive people out of the hills, guess who they will like less? So we need to supply the Paks with helos, comms, and most of all training, training, training. We simply cannot send troops in there to partner with them the way we have in Afghanistan--they wouldn't be tolerated. So we have to help them learn how to do modern COIN: presence, patrolling, making friends with the population, building infrastructure that people need, working with local government instead of dictating to it, building local self-defense forces instead of insisting that "foreign" troops (Punjabis instead of Pathans) should guard them.

I think if we're prepared to throw our weight behind Pakistan, they can be convinced to stop supporting the Afghan Taliban. And if they AT don't have that support *and* they have a chance to participate in Afghan decisionmaking, they will talk.

Now, how we get the Paks to stop supporting LeT and the Kashmiri militants, which would probably be India's price for backing off, I have NO idea....

The DVD I'm watching tonight has a preview for this movie. I HAVE to see it! Romance, battles, India--total coolness!

(It sounds as if it's about as accurate as any Hollywood movie ("The director has admitted that about 70% of the movie is based on his imagination." If only some US directors would admit as much....) but it still looks like huge fun! Aishwarya Rai--rawr! Massive armies, huge palaces, spectacle--yay!

Netflixed!

ETA: The movie I'm watching (which had the trailer for Jodhaa Akbar) is Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal, which is proving to be a total kitsch gem. It's A Shot at Glory plus Bollywood, filmed in Brick Lane, with a touch of Mean Machine thrown in. The voice track is massively Hinglish, with Hindi sentences with English words thrown in and English sentences with a Hindi word or two stuck in.

I am imagining that I'm sharing the evening with my Dad. :-)

a China-Burma-India-theater issue of the Army weekly magazine Yank

I wonder if my Dad read it...

More here, along with a wealth of information about the CBI