BEIJING—The increase in inequality in China has leveled off in recent years and could be less severe than previously thought, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says, suggesting that Beijing is starting to make progress in tackling one of its biggest social problems.

The OECD, in its economic survey of China published Tuesday, said more welfare spending in rural areas and increased migration to cities helped arrest a widening of the income gap. The Paris-based organization urged China to lower what is still a fairly high level of inequality by further boosting social programs and eliminating discrimination against rural residents.

The report is the OECD's second major study of China, which isn't a member of the organization. China's economy is on pace to surpass Japan this year as the world's second-biggest after the U.S. The OECD urged China to take a range of measures to liberalize its economy, such as freeing up interest rates to encourage banks to lend more to small companies, and privatizing state-owned enterprises. It also said that allowing the currency to appreciate would help the government manage the economy better.

In this op-ed, CISAC's Richard Rhodes argues that public health, a discipline that organizes science-based systems of surveillance and prevention, has been primarily responsible for controlling the effects of infectious disease. A similar campaign around public safety could help end the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons. Such a push would help create unity in common security and a fundamental transformation in relationships between nations, Rhodes argues.

Today, at the other end of the long trek down the glacier of the Cold War, the nuclear threat has seemingly calved off and fallen into the sea. In 2007, the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project found that 12 countries rated the growing gap between rich and poor as the greatest danger to the world. HIV/AIDS led the list (or tied) in 16 countries, religious and ethnic hatred in another 12. Pollution was identified as the greatest menace in 19 countries, while substantial majorities in 25 countries thought global warming was a "very serious" problem. Only nine countries considered the spread of nuclear weapons to be the greatest danger to the world.

The response was very different among nuclear and national security experts when Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar surveyed PDF them in 2005. This group of 85 experts judged that the possibility of a WMD attack against a city or other target somewhere in the world is real and increasing over time. The median estimate of the risk of a nuclear attack somewhere in the world by 2010 was 10 percent. The risk of an attack by 2015 doubled to 20 percent median. There was strong, though not universal, agreement that a nuclear attack is more likely to be carried out by a terrorist organization than by a government. The group was split 45 to 55 percent on whether terrorists were more likely to obtain an intact working nuclear weapon or manufacture one after obtaining weapon-grade nuclear material.

"The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is not just a security problem," Lugar wrote in the report's introduction. "It is the economic dilemma and the moral challenge of the current age. On September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the destructive potential of international terrorism. But the September 11 attacks do not come close to approximating the destruction that would be unleashed by a nuclear weapon. Weapons of mass destruction have made it possible for a small nation, or even a sub-national group, to kill as many innocent people in a day as national armies killed in months of fighting during World War II.

"The bottom line is this," Lugar concluded: "For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction."

It's paradoxical that a diminished threat of a superpower nuclear exchange should somehow have resulted in a world where the danger of at least a single nuclear explosion in a major city has increased (and that city is as likely, or likelier, to be Moscow as it is to be Washington or New York). We tend to think that a terrorist nuclear attack would lead us to drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons. I think the opposite case is at least equally likely: A terrorist nuclear attack would almost certainly be followed by a retaliatory nuclear strike on whatever country we believed to be sheltering the perpetrators. That response would surely initiate a new round of nuclear armament and rearmament in the name of deterrence, however illogical. Think of how much 9/11 frightened us; think of how desperate our leaders were to prevent any further such attacks; think of the fact that we invaded and occupied a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with those attacks in the name of sending a message.

Richard Butler, the former chairman of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons and the last chairman of UNSCOM, often makes the point that the problem with nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons. People don't always understand what he means. He means that it is the weapons themselves that are the problem, not the values of the entities that control them. U.S. nuclear weapons are just as potentially dangerous to the world as, say, North Korean nuclear weapons. More, I would say, since we have greater numbers of them and have not hesitated to brandish them--even to use them--when we thought it in our interest to do so.

That the problem with nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons may seem counterintuitive, but two centuries ago governments began to think that way about disease, with untold benefits to humanity as a result. Epidemic disease had been conceived in normative terms, as an act of God for which states bore no responsibility. The change that came when disease began to be conceived as a phenomenon of nature without a metaphysical superstructure, a public health problem, a problem for government and a measure of government's success, was revolutionary. More lives were saved, and spared, with public health measures in the twentieth century in the United States alone than were lost throughout the world in all of the twentieth century's wars.

As my Scottish friend Gil Elliot wrote in his seminal book Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, "[These lives] are not saved by accident or goodwill. Human life is daily deliberately protected from nature by accepted practices of hygiene and medical care, by the control of living conditions and the guidance of human relationships. Mortality statistics are constantly examined to see if the causes of death reveal any areas needing special attention. Because of the success of these practices, the area of public death has, in advanced societies, been taken over by man-made death--once an insignificant or 'merged' part of the spectrum, now almost the whole.

"When politicians, in tones of grave wonder, characterize our age as one of vast effort in saving human life, and enormous vigor in destroying it, they seem to feel they are indicating some mysterious paradox of the human spirit. There is no paradox and no mystery. The difference is that one area of public death has been tackled and secured by the forces of reason; the other has not. The pioneers of public health did not change nature, or men, but adjusted the active relationship of men to certain aspects of nature so that the relationship became one of watchful and healthy respect. In doing so they had to contend with and struggle against the suspicious opposition of those who believed that to interfere with nature was sinful, and even that disease and plague were the result of something sinful in the nature of man himself."

Elliot goes on to compare what he calls "public death," meaning biological death, death from disease, to man-made death: "[I do not wish] to claim mystical authority for the comparison I have made between two kinds of public death--that which results from disease and that which we call man-made. The irreducible virtue of the analogy is that the problem of man-made death, like that of disease, can be tackled only by reason. It contains the same elements as the problem of disease--the need to locate the sources of the pest, to devise preventive measures, and to maintain systematic vigilance in their execution. But it is a much wider problem, and for obvious reasons cannot be dealt with by scientific methods to the same extent as can disease."

To advance the cause of public health it was necessary to depoliticize disease, to remove it from the realm of value and install it in the realm of fact. Today we have advanced to the point where international cooperation toward the prevention, control, and even elimination of disease is possible among nations that hardly cooperate with each other in any other way. No one any longer considers disease a political issue, except to the extent that its control measures a nation's quality of life, and only modern primitives consider it a judgment of God.

In 1999, for the first time in human history, infectious diseases no longer ranked first among causes of death worldwide. Public health, a discipline which organizes science-based systems of surveillance and prevention, was primarily responsible for that millennial change in human mortality. One-half of all the increases in life expectancy in recorded history occurred within the twentieth century. Most of the worldwide increase was accomplished in the first half of the century, and it was almost entirely the result of public health measures directed to primary prevention. Better nutrition, sewage treatment, water purification, the pasteurization of milk, and the immunization of children extended human life--not surgeons cutting or doctors dispensing pills.

Public health is medicine's greatest success story and a powerful model for a parallel discipline, which I propose to call public safety.

Where nuclear weapons--the largest-scale instruments of man-made death--are concerned, the elements of that discipline of public safety have already begun to assemble themselves: materials control and accounting, cooperative threat reduction, security guarantees, agreements and treaties, surveillance and inspection, sanctions, forceful disarming if all else fails.

Reducing and finally eliminating the world's increasingly vestigial nuclear arsenals may be delayed by extremists of the right or the left, as progress was stalled during the George W. Bush administration by rigid Manichaean ideologues who imagined that there might be good nuclear powers and evil nuclear powers and sought to disarm only those they considered evil. Nuclear weapons operate beyond good and evil. They destroy without discrimination or mercy: Whether one lives or dies in their operation is entirely a question of distance from ground zero. In Elliot's eloquent words, they create nations of the dead, and collectively have the capacity to create a world of the dead. But as Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist and philosopher, was the first to realize, the complement of that utter destructiveness must then be unity in common security, just as it was with smallpox, a fundamental transformation in relationships between nations, nondiscrimination in unity not on the dark side but by the light of day.

Violence originates in vulnerability brutalized: It is vulnerability's corruption, but also its revenge. "Perhaps everything terrible," the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." As we extend our commitment to common security, as we work to master man-made death, we will need to recognize that terrible helplessness and relieve it--in others, but also in ourselves.

US President Barack Hussein Obama's speech on 4 June 2009 in Cairo, the second of three planned trips to Muslim-majority countries, was outstanding.

First, it opened daylight between the US and Israel. Israeli settlements on the West Bank are impediments to a two-state solution and a stable peace with Palestine. Obama did not split hairs. He did not distinguish between increments to existing settler populations by birth versus immigration with or without adding a room to an existing house. The United States, he said, does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. Period.

The American Israel Political Affairs Committee, which advertises itself as America’s pro-Israel lobby, cannot have been pleased to hear that sentence. But without some semblance of independence from Israel, the US cannot be a credible broker between the two sides. It is not necessary to treat the actions of Israeli and Palestinian protagonists as morally equivalent in order to understand that they share responsibility for decades of deadlock. New settlements and the expansion of existing ones merely feed Palestinian suspicions that Israel intends permanently to occupy the West Bank. Nor did Obama’s criticism of Israeli settlements prevent him from also stating: Palestinians must abandon violence. Period.

Second, alongside his candor, he showed respect. The most effective discourse on controversial topics involving Islam and Muslims is both sensitive to feelings and frank about facts, as I argue in a forthcoming book (Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam). Inter-faith dialogues that rely on mutual self-censorship–an agreed refusal to raise divisive topics or speak hard truths – resemble sand castles. Empathy based on denial is unlikely to survive the next incoming tide of reality. Respect without candor, in my view, is closer to fawning than to friendship.

As Obama put it in Cairo, ‘In order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. As the Holy Quran tells us, ‘Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.” His listeners applauded – most of them, perhaps, because he had cited their preferred Book, but some at least because he had defended accuracy regardless of what this or that Book might avow.

In the partnership that Obama offered his audience, sources of tensions were not to be ignored. On the contrary, we must face these tensions squarely. He then followed his own advice by noting that extremists acting in the name of Islam had in fact killed more adherents of their own religion than they had Christians, Jews, or the followers of any other faith. In the same candid vein, he noted with disapproval the propensity of some Muslims to repeat vile stereotypes about Jews, the opposition of Muslim extremists to educating women, and the fact of discrimination against Christian Copts in Egypt, the very country in which he spoke.

Third, his speech was notable for what it did not contain. The word ‘terrorism’,’ a fixture of the Manichean rhetoric of George W. Bush, did not occur once. Back in Washington, in his 26 January televised interview with Al Arabiya, Obama had used the phrase Muslim world 11 times in 44 minutes – an average of once every four minutes. In the run-up to his Cairo speech, the White House had repeatedly hyped it as an address to ‘the Muslim world.’ Yet in the 55 minutes it took him to deliver the oration, the words ‘Muslim world’ were never spoken. He must have been advised to delete the reference from an earlier draft of his text.

I believe the excision strengthened the result, but not because a ‘Muslim world’ does not exist. Admittedly, one can argue that 1.4 billion Muslims have too little in common to justify speaking of such a world at all. But the already vast and implicitly varied compass of any ‘world’ diminishes the risk of homogenization. One can easily refer to ‘the Muslim world’ while stressing its diversity. Many Muslims and non-Muslims already use the phrase without stereotyping its members. No, the reasons why Obama avoided the phrase were less definitional than they were political in nature.

Had Obama explicitly addressed the Muslim world in Cairo, he would have risked implying that his host represented that Muslim world, as if Egypt were especially authentic–quintessentially Muslim–in that sphere. That would have been poorly received in many of the other Muslim-majority societies that diversely span the planet from Morocco to Mindanao.

Several years ago a professor from Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, which co-sponsored Obama’s appearance, told me in all seriousness that Indonesian Muslims, because they did not speak Arabic, were not Muslims at all. Obama did not wish to be read by the followers of ostensibly universalist Islam as endorsing such a parochially Arabo-centric conceit.

The US president could, of course, have mentioned the Muslim world and in the next breath denied that it was represented by Egypt, a country under an authoritarian regime with a reputation for corruption of near-Nigerian proportions. But it was far smarter and more effective for Obama to have shunned the phrase altogether, thereby avoiding the need to clarify it and risk implying that his hosts were somehow less than central to Islam, less than paradigmatically Muslim. Such a candid but insensitive move would have triggered nationalist and Islamist anger not only in his Egyptian audience, but in other Muslim-majority countries as well. Indonesian Muslims, for example, would have wondered with some apprehension whether to expect comparably rude behavior were he to visit their own country later this year.

Obama’s listeners at Cairo University were, instead, subjected to twin eloquences of absence and silence: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s not being present, and Obama’s not mentioning him at all. Eloquent, too, was the absence of Israel from his itinerary. This omission was not a sign of hostility toward Tel Aviv, however. He termed the US-Israel bond ‘unbreakable.’ Not visiting Israel merely signaled that Washington on his watch would not limit its foreign-policy horizon to what any one country would allow.

Obama mispronounced the Arabic term for the head covering worn by some Muslim women. The word is hijab not hajib. But that small slip was trivial compared with the brilliance and timeliness of what he had to say. Rhetoric is one thing, of course; realities are quite another. The tasks of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum and improving relations with the heterogeneous Muslim world are more easily discussed than done. Illustrating that Muslim world’s extraordinary diversity are the many and marked differences between Turkey, where Obama spoke on 6 April on his first overseas trip, his Egyptian venue two months later, and Indonesia, which he is likely to visit before the end of 2009.

Before his choice of Cairo was announced, several commentators advised him to give his Muslim world speech in June in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. Rather than risk legitimating Mubarak’s autocracy, they argued, he should celebrate Indonesia’s success in combining moderate Islam with liberal democracy.

Following their advice would have been a mistake. Not only did speaking in Cairo enable Obama boldly to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a podium close to its Middle Eastern epicenter. Had he traveled to Indonesia instead, his visit would have been tainted by an appearance of American intervention in the domestic politics of that country, whose President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is up for re-election on 8 July.

Earlier in his career, Yudhoyono completed military training programs in the US, at Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth, and earned a master’s in management from Webster University in St. Louis. No previous Indonesian head of state has had a closer prior association with the United States. Yudhoyono’s rivals for the presidency are already berating him and his running mate as neo-liberals who have pawned Indonesia’s economy to the capitalist West. Obama could feel comfortable keeping the autocrat Mubarak at arm’s length in Cairo, but in campaign-season Indonesia the US president would have been torn between behaving ungraciously toward his democratically chosen host and appearing to back him in his race for re-election.

Yudhoyono’s popularity ratings among Indonesians are even better than Obama’s are among Americans. The July election is Yudhoyono’s to lose. But the winner’s new government will not be in place until October. The US president was wise to postpone visiting Indonesia until after its electoral dust has cleared and the next administration in Jakarta has taken shape. A gathering of leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, which Obama is expected to attend, is conveniently scheduled for mid-November in Singapore. He could easily visit Indonesia en route to or from that event.

An Indonesian journalist in Cairo interviewed Obama shortly after his speech. The president virtually confirmed this November itinerary by saying that his next trip to Asia would include Indonesia. He said he looked forward to revisiting the neighborhood in Jakarta where he had lived as a child, and to eating again his favorite Indonesian foods – fried rice, bakso soup, and rambutan fruit among them.

A trifecta happens when a gambler correctly predicts the first three finishers of a race in the correct order. Obama appears to have bet his skills in public diplomacy on this sequence: Ankara first, then Cairo, then Jakarta.

One can ask whether his actions will match his words, and whether the US Congress will go along with his prescriptions. But with two destinations down and one to go, Obama is well on his way to completing a trifecta in the race for hearts and minds in the Muslim world.

A version of this essay appeared in AsiaTimes Online on 6 June 2009.

Since 2005, research teams comprised of participants from across East Asia have been working on a collaborative survey project known as the East Asian Social Survey (EASS).¹  The participating research teams include the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Renmin University in China; Osaka University of Commerce in Japan (JGSS); SungKyunKwan University in Korea (KGSS); and the Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS) at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan. The plan of the project is to conduct a survey with different topics for every two years. The first EASS survey, which focused on Family, was conducted in 2006. KGSS had now integrated the data that the four research teams compiled by the end of 2008. This data set is now ready for research use, both by members of the teams and by other interested parties. The topic for the 2008 survey is Globalization and Culture.

During the past two decades, the export-oriented economies of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan experienced strong economic growth and rising income levels. More women entered the labor markets and obtained better-paid jobs. However, in the regions surveyed, men and women often do not equally share in economic prosperity and there still exists a sex gap in earnings. A paper recently co-written by this author and Paula England,²  using the 2006 EASS data, may be the first attempt to explore the size of the sex gap, the factors that explain the gap, and the variations among Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.³

To explain the disparity between the pay of men and women in the survey nations, we used regression analysis to predict the hourly wage from various characteristics, using separate regressions for men and women in each nation. Then we assessed how much human capital factors may contribute to the sex gap in pay. For each factor, there are two estimates of how much it explains, reflecting whether we use male or female slopes, or rates of return. The table below summarizes some of the paper’s preliminary findings. The last row of the table shows that the sex wage gap is highest in Korea, with Japan coming in second place. In Taiwan, women earned about 82 percent of what men earned. For comparison, in the United States in 2003, the comparable wage ratio of female-over-male was 79.4 percent.

What factors might explain the sex gap in earnings? In Japan, the table shows (20 percent for the make slope and 34 percent for the female slope) that education is a key factor—notably, women are less likely to be college graduates. Another key factor is that women are more likely to work in contingent or temporary jobs than in permanent, full-time employment. In the Korea case, the difference between the male or female slopes is small, and 37 percent (male) to 32 percent (female) of the gap is explained, again, by education, as fewer Korean women have completed college than men. In Taiwan, a much lower share (6 percent for men and to 0 percent for women) is explained, mainly due to potential work experience, followed by employment status. In Taiwan, women actually have more education than men, as more women than men have completed college. This education imbalance supports our finding that the sex gap is largest in Korea, where women are less educated than men, and smallest in Taiwan, where the reverse is true.

Human capital factors (education and potential work experiences) seem to explain smaller proportions in the societies with a smaller gap. On the one hand, if we were to attribute all the elements of the gap not explained by mean differences in our supply-side measures to be sex discrimination, this would imply that a higher portion of Taiwan’s (albeit smaller) gap can explained by pay discrimination. On the other hand, women in Japan and Korea are disadvantaged, both in their educational achievements and their opportunities for regular employment. The contingent or part-time jobs that these women do pay less per hour than do the permanent or full-time jobs in which their male counterparts are employed. The EASS survey indicates, thus far, that economic prosperity and advancement in human capital factors may not naturally bring about sex equality in earnings.

Notes

¹  More information on the EASS can be found at http://www.eass.info.

²  Chin-fen Chang and Paula England "Gender Inequality in Earnings in Industrialized East Asia," to be presented at the Beijing RC28 Meeting, Renmin University, Beijing, China, May 14-16, 2009.

³  In this paper, we excluded Chinese data because the other three societies are more comparable to one another in terms of their economic development.

 

 

CISAC's Paul Kapur and Sumit Ganguly of Indiana University discuss the importance of probing the sources of the violence in Mumbai, and consider the attacks' implications for regional security in South Asia.

Security officials and cleanup crews are now combing through the carnage in Mumbai, following last week’s terrorist attacks in the city. As the citizens of this vast metropolis seek to restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives, it is important to probe the sources of the violence in Mumbai, and consider the attacks’ implications for regional security in South Asia.

How and why did the Mumbai attacks occur? Information at this stage is still incomplete. Nonetheless, a few points seem clear.

There is considerable evidence that Pakistan-based entities were behind the Mumbai attacks. The sole surviving terrorist is Pakistani. He claims that the attackers trained with the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba for months inside Pakistan prior to launching their assault. And Indian officials have determined that the terrorists took a boat from Karachi to the Mumbai coast, leaving behind cell phones that had been used to call Pakistan.

None of this directly implicates the Pakistani government in the Mumbai attacks. It does, however, suggest that Pakistan bears some measure of responsibility for recent events; the Pakistani government is either unable or unwilling to prevent its territory from being used to launch terrorist attacks against India.

In fact, Pakistan has a long history of supporting anti-Indian militancy. For example, during the 1980s, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) began to provide training, arms, and financial and logistical support to insurgent groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. This transformed what had been a mostly spontaneous, local uprising into a low-intensity Indo-Pakistani war. Despite repeated Indian diplomatic entreaties and military threats, Pakistan has never fully ended its support for such groups.

These outside links notwithstanding, the complexity and organization of the Mumbai attacks suggest that they also employed local Indian support. Thus, even if the operation originated in Pakistan, the terrorists may well have had the assistance of disaffected Indian Muslims.

Since independence, many Muslims have thrived in India, availing themselves of educational opportunities, achieving high levels of prosperity, and blending into the country’s vast, pluralistic society. On a day-to-day basis they have faced little religious discrimination.

Less affluent segments of the Muslim community, however, have not been so fortunate. They have long endured discrimination in aspects of everyday life ranging from employment to housing opportunities. Past generations acquiesced in these humiliations. Today’s lower middle class Muslims, however, are better educated and more politically aware than their predecessors, and thus less prone simply to accept their fate.

Against this social backdrop, two incidents have helped to spur a process of Islamist radicalization within India. The first was a spate of anti-Muslim riots that swept across much of northern and western India after Hindu zealots destroyed the Babri Mosque in 1992. Hundreds of Muslims died at the hands of Hindu mobs while the police looked on. The second episode was a 2002 pogrom in the state of Gujarat that occurred after Hindu pilgrims died in a train fire allegedly set by Muslim miscreants. Few, if any, individuals involved these incidents have been prosecuted. Not surprisingly, these two episodes helped to radicalize a small but significant minority of Indian Muslims.

The Indian government has failed to devise a set of policies to address these social roots of Islamist zealotry. In addition, many of India’s state-level police forces have not mustered the requisite intelligence, forensic and prosecutorial tools necessary to suppress the resulting violence. Instead they have resorted to the random arrests of young Muslims, employed tainted evidence, and abused draconian anti-terrorist laws. Such actions have only worsened the situation, making it easier for foreign militants to recruit domestic sympathizers inside India.

What are the Mumbai attacks’ implications for South Asian security? The Manmohan Singh government has sought to avoid confrontation with Pakistan in the wake of several recent terror attacks with potential Pakistani links. Instead, it has preferred to maintain regional stability in hopes of achieving continued economic growth. The Mumbai attacks, however, undercut this rationale for restraint; by attacking international targets in India’s financial hub, they threaten to inflict significant harm on the Indian economy. Also, considerable domestic political pressure for strong anti-Pakistani action is likely to emerge, both from the opposition Bharatia Janata Party (BJP), which has long accused the government of being soft of Pakistan, and from ordinary voters outraged by the attacks.

In 2001, a failed assault on the Indian parliament by Pakistan-backed militants managed to kill only five people and was over in the space of a morning. In response, India mobilized roughly 500,000 forces along the Indo-Pakistani border, triggering a major militarized crisis with Pakistan. The Mumbai attacks killed and wounded hundreds, and lasted for nearly three days. Given the scale of the violence, as well as the economic and domestic political factors discussed above, the Indian government will be hard-pressed to avoid a reaction similar to 2001 – particularly if the evidence from Mumbai continues to point toward Pakistan. Given that both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons, the stakes in any ensuing confrontation will be enormous. Nuclear weapons will give both sides strong incentives to behave at least somewhat cautiously, in order to prevent a crisis from escalating too far. But they will also leave less room for error, making the costs of miscalculation potentially catastrophic.

Will a serious Indo-Pakistani crisis emerge from the Mumbai attacks, or will the Indian government manage to continue its policy of restraint, even in the face of such a brazen provocation? The pieces would appear to be in place for a serious regional confrontation. But only the coming days will tell for sure.

Sumit Ganguly is the director of research at the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, Bloomington, and an adjunct senior fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles.

Paul Kapur is an associate professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and an affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.