Divorce proceedings bring out the worst in people. When Abdul Rahman tried to get custody of his daughters in Kabul, Afghanistan, his wife's family told the court that he was unfit to care for his children because he had converted from Islam to Christianity some 16 years ago. A zealous prosecutor, hearing of the case, charged Mr. Rahman with apostasy, a crime punishable by death under some interpretations of Islamic law. If Mr. Rahman does not repudiate Christianity, the judge in the case has said, he will get the death penalty.

Mr. Rahman's case is a discouraging illustration of the uneasy balance between the democratic norms Afghanistan's Constitution enshrines and the conservative Islamic values its judiciary upholds. On the one hand, the Afghan Constitution states that "followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of the law," and it requires the state to adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which clearly protects freedom of conscience and the right to change one's religion.

On the other hand, the Constitution also says that no law can be "contrary to the beliefs and provisions of Islam," and it gives judges broad power to interpret and apply Islamic law. Several schools of Islam do indeed prescribe the ultimate punishment for those who abandon the faith. And so Mr. Rahman's case may well come down to the interpretive leanings of the court.

Moderate Islamic jurists in some countries have attempted to balance or reconcile these often-conflicting interests. In Egypt, for instance, the Islamic Research Center decreed that although apostasy may be a crime, the time period for redemption is limitless - in other words, it is up to the individual, not the state, to adhere to divine will. The former chief justice of Pakistan, which has explicit anti-blasphemy laws, has written that the death penalty for apostasy is not required by the Koran and conflicts with other Islamic values.

Afghanistan's post-Taliban judiciary, however, has shown a propensity to use Islam as a political weapon. The country's chief justice, Fazil Hadi Shinwari, is a hard-line conservative associated with the Islamist parties of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Burhanuddin Rabbani. He has used the court as a bully-pulpit, issuing fatwas on a variety of issues outside his jurisdiction.

For instance, under Justice Shinwari's leadership the Supreme Court has variously attempted to ban co-education; tried to eliminate a rival to President Hamid Karzai from the 2004 elections; and jailed newspaper editors, all in the name of Islam.

In other words, the court has overstepped its bounds and contributed to the radicalization of Afghan politics in the process. To further his aims, Justice Shinwari has packed the lower courts with judges who have Islamic educations but no foundation in Afghan law or experience in the judiciary.

President Karzai has a unique opportunity to change this. Under the Constitution, Mr. Karzai must appoint a new Supreme Court this month, and he sent his slate of nine justices to Parliament for approval last week. Although the current chief justice has retained his position, there are some very promising choices among the eight other justices. They include known moderates, like the former chairman of the Judicial Reform Commission, Bahauddin Baha, and the deputy minister of justice, Qasim Hashimzai, who led a major corruption investigation involving members of President Karzai's cabinet.

These appointments mark President Karzai's first opportunity to compose Afghanistan's Supreme Court under a fully constitutional government. They are of momentous importance to the country's stabilization and the consolidation of its nascent democracy.

By creating a competent, professional and moderate judiciary, President Karzai will help to establish the rule of law. If, however, the court remains in the thrall of ideology and factionalism, Afghanistan's experiment in democracy will be compromised.

But the new judges will be powerless to reform the system unless they are given the political support and resources to do so. International involvement in Afghanistan's justice sector since 2001 has been inadequate. Both the Afghan government and its donors need a strategic vision for the judiciary's future and the political focus to make it a reality.

The new judiciary will need support to review the qualifications of the lower court judges, facilities to train new judges and functioning courthouses in the provinces. It will need to be able to share information, laws and legal decisions among officials throughout the country and to pay judges a living wage.

We must do more than simply react loudly to the most extreme cases, like that of Mr. Rahman. Instead, we must partner with the Afghans and other democratic governments in the Islamic world as they struggle to promote modernity and the rule of law. This means working with judicial systems on less controversial, bread-and-butter issues like criminal law and property disputes.

We have seen throughout the world, and in our own history, that competent and independent judges will stand up for the rule of law even when their decisions indict the powerful and defend the unpopular. Mr. Rahman's case should remind us of how important it is to help Afghanistan develop such judges if we want its democracy to succeed.

At a time of unusual US interest in south Asia it is useful to see how specialists there look at the two issues explored in this book -- the Kashmir conflict and south Asian nuclearisation. Twelve of the 15 contributors are US-based and therefore it is not surprising that the book is largely by Americans for Americans. But this does not detract from its value for Indians and Pakistanis, because the scholarship is impressive and analyses mostly free of bias. The volume contains 13 essays including a short introductory one by the editors. The remaining 12 are grouped into three parts.

The four essays in the first group (Pakistan: Politics and Kashmir) are "Islamic Extremism and Regional Conflict in South Asia" by Vali Nasr, "Constitutional and Political Change in Pakistan: The Military-Governance Paradigm" by Charles H. Kennedy, "The Practice of Islam in Pakistan and the Influence of Islam in Pakistani Politics" by C. Christine Fair and Karthik Vaidyanathan, and "Pakistan's Relations with Azad Kashmir and the Impact on Indo-Pakistani Relations" by Rifaat Hussain.

Vali Nasr provides a succinct account of how Islamic fervour and Islamic extremism grew in Pakistan after 1971 and how political players in the country, especially the army, tried to make use of it for domestic political and foreign policy gains. He provides a good analysis of how the Pakistani elite is torn between de-emphasising Islam for the sake of socioeconomic gains and stressing it for political advantage. In case of the army there is the additional factor of "jihadi" usefulness in pursuing regional strategic aims.

Charles Kennedy presents an interesting analysis of how the army captures power and holds on to it. He shows how Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and Musharraf have adopted essentially the same approach in this regard -- following the stages of making things legal, eliminating political opponents, becoming president, stressing local government, intimidating bureaucracy and judiciary, fixing the constitution and orchestrating elections. Two key observations he makes at the end are "the failure to develop a stable constitutional system is the fault of both Pakistan's military and civilian leadership" and that "constitutional stability can only be achieved if there is an accommodation between the interests of the two sets of actors."

Christine Fair and Karthik Vaidyanathan have tried to assess the influence of Islam in Pakistan partly on the basis of three polls conducted to gauge Muslim reaction to war against terrorism, and partly on the basis of interviews. Two noteworthy conclusions of the authors are that there is little popular support for extremist Islam in Pakistan (the good performance of MMA in the 2002 elections is rightly attributed to the political vacuum created by Musharraf and strong post-9/11 anti-Americanism), and that the Pakistan military's current effort to control, rather than eradicate, terrorism cannot work.

Rifaat Hussain has given a detailed account of India-Pakistan relations during 1979-2004, but his effort to explain Pakistan's relations with "Azad" J and K does not go beyond the little that is generally known. The lack of detailed, unbiased information about the society and politics of "Azad" J and K, which Pakistan pretends is not under its thumb, and of northern areas, which Pakistan has unabashedly incorporated into itself, is a major knowledge-gap that handicaps the search for peace in J and K.

The four essays in the second group (India: Politics and Kashmir) are "Who Speaks for India? The Role of Civil Society in Defining Indian Nationalism" by Ainslie T. Embrie, "Hindu Nationalism and the BJP: Transforming Religion and Politics in India" by Robert L. Hardgrave Jr., "Hindu Fundamentalism, Muslim Jihad and Secularism: Muslims in the Political Life of the Republic of India" by Barbara D Metcalf, and "Jammu and Kashmir in the Indian Union: Politics of Autonomy" by Chandrashekhar Dasgupta.

In his essay Ainslie Embrie has tried to explicate the complex relationship between the state and civil society in India. The tension and overlap between secular and Hindu nationalisms have been presented with deep understanding. The Gujarat massacres of 2002 have been explained in relation to the various constituents of the Sangh parivar. Indian attitudes to matters of sub-nationalism have been explained not only in relation to Kashmir but also to the north-east and Punjab.

Robert Hardgrave's essay covers much the same ground although the focus is more squarely on the BJP and the RSS. He speaks of sections within the RSS that want to align "Hindu" India with the west against Islam. At the same time he underscores how the demands of power have moderated the ideological temper of the BJP. Both Embrie and Hardgrave have written with western readers in mind and much of the ground they have covered would be familiar to Indians.

Barbara Metcalf's essay about Muslim Indians draws attention to the fact that the post-9/11 war against terrorism evoked no response from them, unlike the case with Muslims elsewhere. She has explained thoughtfully the reasons for this as well as for the rise in anti-Muslim sentiments in India from the 1980s. The contents of this essay can provide useful insights to Indians and Pakistanis. Metcalf warns that Hindu extremism can help recruit Muslim terrorists in Pakistan and Bangladesh and, in the long run, possibly within India itself. She also makes a case for declaring organisations like the VHP "terrorist" in the light of Gujarat killings.

Chandrashekhar Dasgupta's essay on J and K and autonomy is "balanced" by Indian standards. He writes that New Delhi should "accommodate Kashmiri demands for autonomy to the maximum extent compatible with the legitimate regional interests of Jammu and Ladakh and with the requirements of democracy and good governance in the state as a whole. The interests of Jammu and Ladakh can be protected by a mix of regional autonomy; devolution of power to lower (district, sub-divisional and panchayat) levels; and an equitable inter-regional revenue-sharing formula." But while offering this sound advice, Dasgupta has carefully steered clear of examining its practical implications.

The four essays in the final group (India's and Pakistan's Nuclear Doctrines and US Concerns) are "The Stability-Instability Paradox: Misperception, and Escalation Control in South Asia" by Michael Krepon, "Pakistan's Nuclear Doctrine" by Peter R. Lavoy, "Coercive Diplomacy in a Nuclear Environment: The December 13 Crisis" by Rajesh M. Basrur, and "US Interests in South Asia" by Howard B. Schaffer. In the reviewer's view, this is the most interesting of the three sections in the book and merits careful reading in both India and Pakistan.

Michael Krepon has explored the ramifications of the use of force by south Asia's nuclear-armed adversaries. He stresses the danger emanating from the two sides drawing (largely for public consumption, in the reviewer's view) opposing lessons from tests-of-will like the Kargil war and Operation Parakram. A useful point to note is how Krepon has, over the years, shifted stress from nuclear confidence building measures(CBMs) to conflict resolution in reducing nuclear risks in south Asia. This can be seen from the following sentences in his concluding paragraph: "Much could go badly wrong on the subcontinent unless Pakistan's security establishment reassesses its Kashmir policy and unless New Delhi engages substantively on Islamabad's concerns and with dissident Kashmiris" and "The best chance of defusing nuclear danger and controlling escalation lies in sustained and substantive political engagement." Nuclear CBMs can only do so much.

Nuclear Doctrine

Peter Lavoy's essay is a good piece on Pakistan's nuclear doctrine. He has listed eight separate "uses" for Pakistan's nuclear weapons. In specific relation to India, there are four, viz (i) Last resort weapons to prevent military defeat or loss of territory; (ii) Deterrent to conventional military attack; (iii) Facilitators of low-intensity conflict; and (iv) Tools to internationalise the Kashmir issue. He has drawn attention to the fact that Pakistan's nuclear "redlines" are vague which, the reviewer might add, is true of all countries that reserve the right of "first use."

Rajesh Basrur's essay is about the coercive and nuclear dimensions of Operation Parakram. His narrative of events, diplomatic moves and public statements is valuable for separating chaff from wheat. He has drawn attention to how much India's "compellence strategy" was played out through the US, which had forces in close vicinity. During the confrontation both India and Pakistan sought to "create a fear of nuclear war in the global community, especially the US". He also highlights the fact that India decided to withdraw its forces when Pakistan ceased "responding" to Indian pressure.

The book has no conclusion. The last essay is by Howard Schaffer on US interests in south Asia. Schaffer writes about how the relatively low US interest in the India-Pakistan hostile relationship began to climb in the 1980s when the threat of nuclear war entered the calculus. He says "The US has now come to regard Kashmir less in terms of the equities of the issue -- the lot of the Kashmiri people, the morality or immorality of the insurgency in the Kashmir Valley. Instead it sees the dispute primarily as a tinderbox that could be the flashpoint of a nuclear conflagration." He concludes his essay with the comment that "Washington's view of US interests in the region and the way it goes about promoting them" is unlikely to become more consistent than in the past. Both are valid observations and Indians and Pakistanis would do well to mull over their many implications.

It is not stated in the book, but this volume had its beginnings in a conference at the Asia-Pacific Research Centre in Stanford in early 2003. This was soon after Operation Parakram and before India-Pakistan relations began to thaw in late 2003. Although contributors have updated their narratives to mid-2004, the milieu in which the arguments have evolved was a period of considerable tension. The peace possibilities that have opened up in early 2004 and have got slowly augmented since have, therefore, not been adequately factored in. The book has avoided making any kind of prediction about peace prospects in south Asia although the very title of the book leads the reader to expect some exploration in this area.

In the old popular song about the rout by Americans at New Orleans during the War of 1812, the British "ran so fast the hounds couldn't catch 'em." Even allowing for patriotic hyperbole, it can hardly be argued that the British extricated themselves with a great deal of dignity, particularly given that another battle in the same war inspired the American national anthem.

The impact of that defeat on the British national psyche is now obscure, but nearly two centuries later, as the Americans and their British allies seek to extricate themselves from Iraq, the story of how a superpower looks for a dignified way out of a messy and often unpopular foreign conflict has become a historical genre of sorts. As the pressure to leave Iraq increases, that genre is receiving new and urgent attention.

And in the shadow of the bleak and often horrific news emerging from Iraq nearly every day, historians and political experts are finding at least a wan hope in those imperfect historical analogies. Even in the absence of a sudden and dramatic shift on the battlefield toward a definitive victory, there may still be a slight opening, as narrow as the eye of a needle, for the United States to slip through and leave Iraq in the near future in a way that will not be remembered as a national embarrassment.

Most of the recent parallels do not seem to offer much encouragement for a confounded superpower that wants to save face as it cuts its losses and returns home. Among them are the wrenching French pullout from Algeria, the ill-fated French and American adventures in Vietnam, the Soviet humiliation in Afghanistan and the disastrous American interventions in Beirut and Somalia.

Still, there are a few stories of inconclusive wars that left the United States in a more dignified position, including the continuing American presence in South Korea and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. But even those stand in stark contrast to the happier legacy of total victory during World War II.

The highly qualified optimism of these experts about what may still happen in Iraq - let's call it something just this side of hopelessness - has been born of many factors, including greatly reduced expectations of what might constitute not-defeat there. The United States already appears willing to settle - as if it were in a relationship that had gone sour but cannot quite be resolved by a walk out the door, punctuated with a satisfying slam.

Alongside the dampening of hopes, there has also been a fair amount of historical revisionism regarding the darker tales of conflicts past: a considered sense that if the superpowers had made different decisions, things could have turned out more palatably, and that they still might in Iraq.

Maybe not surprisingly, Vietnam is the focus of some of the most interesting revisionism, including some of it immediately relevant to Iraq, where the intensive effort to train Iraqi security forces to defend their own country closely mirrors the "Vietnamization" program in South Vietnam. If Congress had not voted to kill the financing for South Vietnam and its armed forces in 1975, argues Melvin R. Laird in a heavily read article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Saigon might never have fallen.

"Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975," wrote Mr. Laird, who was President Nixon's defense secretary from 1969 to 1973, when the United States pulled its hundreds of thousands of troops out of Vietnam.

In an interview, Mr. Laird conceded that the American departure from Vietnam was not a pretty sight. "Hell, the pictures of them getting in those helicopters were not good pictures," he said, referring to the chaotic evacuation of the American embassy two years after Vietnamization was complete, and a year after Nixon resigned. But on the basis of his what-if about Vietnam, Mr. Laird does not believe that all is lost in Iraq.

"There is a dignified way out, and I think that's the Iraqization of the forces over there," Mr. Laird said, "and I think we're on the right track on that."

Many analysts have disputed the core of that contention, saying that large swaths of the Iraqi security forces are so inept they may never be capable of defending their country against the insurgents without the American military backing them up. But Mr. Laird is not alone in his revisionist take and its potential application to Iraq.

William Stueck, a history professor at the University of Georgia who has written several books on Korea, calls himself a liberal but says he buys Mr. Laird's basic analysis of what went wrong with Vietnamization.

Korea reveals how easy it is to dismiss the effectiveness of local security forces prematurely, Mr. Stueck said. In 1951, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway felt deep frustration when Chinese offensives broke through parts of the line defended by poorly led South Korean troops.

But by the summer of 1952, with intensive training, the South Koreans were fighting more effectively, Mr. Stueck said. "Now, they needed backup" by Americans, he said. By 1972, he said, South Korean troops were responsible for 70 percent of the front line.

Of course, there are enormous differences between Iraq and Korea. Korean society was not riven by troublesome factions, as Iraq's is, and the United States was defending an existing government rather than trying to create one from scratch.

Another intriguing if imperfect lesson can be found in Algeria, said Matthew Connelly, a Columbia University historian. There, by March 1962, the French had pulled out after 130 years of occupation.

That long colonial occupation, and the million European settlers who lived there before the bloody exodus, are major differences with Iraq, Mr. Connelly noted. But there were also striking parallels: the insurgency, which styled its cause as an international jihad, broke down in civil war once the French pulled out; the French, for their part, said theirs was a fight to protect Western civilization against radical Islam.

Like President Bush in Iraq, President Charles de Gaulle probably thought he could settle Algeria in his favor by military means, Dr. Connelly said. In the short run, that turned out to be a grave miscalculation, as the occupation crumbled under the insurgency's viciousness.

Over the long run, though, history treated de Gaulle kindly for reversing course and agreeing to withdraw, Mr. Connelly said. "De Gaulle loses the war but he wins in the realm of history: he gave Algeria its independence," he said. "How you frame defeat, that can sometimes give you a victory."

The Americans in Beirut and the Soviets in Afghanistan are seen, even in the long view, as cases of superpowers paying the price of blundering into a political and social morass they did not understand.

For the Soviets, that mistake was compounded when America outfitted Afghan rebels with Stinger missiles capable of taking down helicopters, nullifying a key Soviet military superiority. "I don't think they had a fig leaf of any kind," said Henry Rowen, a fellow at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford who was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 1989 to 1991. "They just left."

In Beirut, the Americans entered to protect what they considered a legitimate Christian-led government and ended up, much as in Iraq, in the middle of a multipronged civil conflict. In October 1983, a suicide attack killed 241 American servicemen at a Marines barracks, and four months after that, with Muslim militias advancing, President Ronald Reagan ordered the remaining marines withdrawn to ships off the coast, simply saying their mission had changed. The episode has been cited by Vice President Dick Cheney as an example of a withdrawal that encouraged Arab militants to think the United States is weak.

Today, even as expectations for Iraq keep slipping, some measure of victory can still be declared even in a less-than-perfect outcome, said Richard Betts, director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia. For example, he said, an Iraqi government that is authoritarian but not totalitarian might have to do.

The key point, he said, is that under those circumstances, the outcome "doesn't look like a disaster even if it doesn't look good."

For over five years the war in Chechnya has occupied a central and neuralgic place in Vladimir Putin's political agenda. In unleashing a renewed military campaign in September 1999-abrogating the cease-fire agreement that had terminated the earlier 1994-1996 war launched by then president Boris Yeltsin-President Putin sought to win American and Western acquiescence in, if not support for, Russia's military campaign by framing the conflict as a war on international terrorism.

However, far from extinguishing the conflict, or confining it within the territory of Chechnya, these policies have contributed to the spread of violence and instability far beyond the borders of the Chechen republic. Instead of pursuing strategies that would address the larger socioeconomic crisis of the predominantly Muslim regions of the Northern Caucasus, marginalize extremists, and win broad support from the population of the region, the brutality of Russian military forces and their local allies in the war in Chechnya and the repressive actions of the security services in neighboring republics have fanned the flames of hostility to Moscow and created conditions for the spread of radical Islamist ideologies and the recruitment of new adherents across the Northern Caucasus.

President Putin has treated the problems facing Russia as a product of state "weakness" and has called for strengthening Russia's unity and state power in response. Ostensibly in order to better combat terrorism, he has introduced a series of measures aimed at strengthening Russia's political unity and executive power at the expense of political pluralism, freedom of information, and civil society development. But by weakening or undermining Russia's fragile and weakly developed system of institutional checks and balances on central power, and reducing the transparency and accountability of official behavior, these policies may well be exacerbating rather than mitigating the challenges facing Russia today.

What began as a secular conflict over the political status of Chechnya has progressively been transformed into a wider struggle involving more radical fighters from other Muslim republics with an avowedly Islamist agenda that now threatens to destabilize the broader region of the Northern Caucasus. The past few years have also seen a rising tide of terrorist actions directed against local authorities and security services in other republics of the Northern Caucasus as well as against the Russian government and population more broadly, including terrorist acts aimed at targets in the city of Moscow itself.

From the dramatic seizure of some 800 hostages in a Moscow theater in October

2002, in which 129 hostages died from the effects of a lethal gas used by Russian security services in a bungled rescue operation, to the September 2004 horrific siege of an elementary school in Beslan, Southern Ossetia, in which over 300 civilians died-over half of them children-these episodes have not only challenged the official assertions that the war could be confined to Chechnya alone but have dramatized the inability of the Russian government to adequately protect the security of its population.

The inept and chaotic handling of many of these terrorist attacks has brought into stark relief the poor performance of the security services, the incompetence of local officials, serious intelligence failures, and above all widespread official corruption. In the Beslan episode, to take just one example, the siege was carried out by some thirty-two terrorists, of several different nationalities, who were apparently able to bribe their way across a series of checkpoints to enter the republic and to utilize weapons and explosives stored on the site beforehand. The local authorities and the federal security services proved incapable of coordinating their actions to control the situation, and the Moscow-appointed president of the republic proved completely inept. Indeed, the most courageous and effective actor was Ruslan Aushev, the former president of Ingushetia, a figure removed from power by Moscow for resisting pressure for more coercive policies.

The Putin government has used these events to justify a series of measures which

are ostensibly intended to more effectively combat terrorism but which appear to

have little relation to the real terrorist threat. First, it has refused to seek a political solution to the conflict in Chechnya and has deliberately sought to undermine possible negotiations or international mediation and to delegitimize potential negotiating partners by demonizing a broad array of Chechen political figures within the country and abroad as "terrorists."

Conflating Chechen resistance with international terrorism, President Putin has explicitly refused to distinguish between more moderate figures and extremists and has exaggerated their ties to international terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda.

Domestically, the Russian government has used security concerns to justify ever greater restrictions on freedom of information, on civil rights, and on the role of nongovernmental organizations, particularly those engaged in the defense of human rights. The military and the organs of law enforcement have been given an ever freer hand, rarely if ever held accountable for their abusive behavior and atrocities against civilians.

Refugee camps in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia were closed and the international non-governmental organizations providing medical care and humanitarian assistance to refugees there were compelled to depart. The mass media have largely lost their independence and editors and journalists have been dismissed or attacked for expressing critical views.

A whole series of measures aimed at further centralization of political power and the strengthening of the executive branch have eroded the already fragile elements of federalism and separation of powers in the Russian political system. The autonomy and political influence of regions and republics has been sharply reduced. Parliament, now dominated by a single pro-presidential party, no longer acts as an independent check on executive power, and liberal political parties and their leaders have been marginalized. Most recently, the popular election of regional governors was abolished in favor of their appointment by Moscow, and a discussion is now under way of bringing even local government under tighter central control by eliminating the election of mayors as well.

Moreover, a high proportion of President Putin's appointees to key positions in

the regions are drawn from the military and security services, selected for their presumed loyalty to the president but often lacking political skills or understanding of local conditions. But the substitution of appointed for elected officials does not necessarily guarantee either loyalty or competence.

In the absence of a competitive party system in which political parties help create a web of ties between the central government and local populations, Putin's centralizing measures could well widen the chasm between state and society.

This growing emphasis on centralization, unity, repression, and secrecy is arguably exacerbating rather than mitigating the problems and making state power even more dysfunctional. In Chechnya and in the broader Caucasus region the brutality as well as the corruption of Russian military and security forces and their local allies-and their extensive reliance on torture, mass roundups, indiscriminate executions, disappearances of civilians, and simple extortion-has embittered many toward Moscow and made it increasingly difficult to win "hearts and minds" and build popular support. Indeed, the lack of transparency, and the difficulty of holding Russian officials accountable for abusive behavior, has led unprecedented numbers of Russian citizens frustrated by the unresponsiveness of their own government to seek redress at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Lacking a positive agenda for ameliorating socioeconomic conditions in the Northern Caucasus, the expanding operations of security forces across the Northern Caucasus, the closure of mosques, and the wave of often indiscriminate arrests have served to drive Islam underground and facilitated the spread of extremist ideologies. Without a coherent and sustained program of economic development that would create employment, housing, and education and offer alternative opportunities to an impoverished and alienated population, particularly young males, and absent a serious effort to eliminate corruption, these trends are likely to worsen.

Russia under Putin is facing a somber future.

In the post-9/11 world there is an urgent the need for Americans to understand the Muslim world, and vice versa. Yet precisely when they should be visiting Muslim countries, Americans are kept at home by fears of terrorism. War zones aside, those fears are overblown. It is time their government and their media helped would-be American travelers gain a more realistic understanding of the typically minor risk of anti-U.S. violence that awaits them in the Muslim world.

Recently my wife and I spent a week strolling the streets of Beirut and traveling by bus in its hinterland. The trip was a fool's amusement in the scary light of official and media images of the Middle East as a dangerous place. Yet everywhere we went we felt welcomed.

I own a t-shirt that spells out "CANADA" in large letters beneath a maple leaf. Before leaving California I thought, only half-facetiously, of bringing it along. I'm glad I left it behind. The Lebanese we met were hospitable not hostile.

I am not advising naivete; Lebanon's horrific civil war in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s destroyed much of this city. Washington intervened. More than 200 American soldiers died in a building shrunk to rubble, apparently by Hezbollah -- a self-described Party of Allah that the U.S. still considers a terrorist organization. Beirut became a synonym for mayhem.

Echoes of Beirut's frightening reputation were heard this year in a series of bombings that killed nearly two dozen Lebanese, including Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February, scholar-journalist Samir Kassir in May, and opposition politician George Hawi on 21 June, only two days after we had left the country.

An American visitor's initial impressions of Beirut today are ambiguous. Inspiring confidence are the relaxed atmosphere at the new, ultra-modern, and just-renamed Rafiq Hariri Airport and, seen through taxi windows, the attractively renovated downtown area. But then one's taxi skirts the burned-out hulk of the St. George Hotel and, alongside it, behind police tape and armed guards, the twisted carcasses of cars -- detritus from Hariri's assassination.

This juxtaposition of alarm and assurance has become the unnerving natural condition of American travel to and in Muslim or mostly Muslim countries. Survey research shows approval of the United States among the world's billion-plus followers of Islam near an all-time low. The U.S. is viewed unfavorably by 58 percent of Lebanese, according to a just-released Pew Research Center opinion poll. Lebanon and other Muslim-majority societies account for more than half of the 29 countries to which the State Department discourages American travel. Yet in these mainly Muslim destinations the odds that a prudent American tourist will become a casualty of terrorism remain infinitesimal.

I went to Lebanon to do research, to lecture at the American University of Beirut, and to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of my high-school alma mater, the American Community School. For decades, Arab sons and daughters have vied for entry into these and comparable institutions elsewhere in the Middle East, including the American University in Cairo. In Lebanon, in the upland village of Deir al Qamar, I found a small photo shop whose owner had proudly posted a sign identifying himself as a "U.S.A. GRADUATE, BOSTON."

These signs of American popularity must seem incomprehensible to Americans fearful of Muslim wrath. But what really makes no sense is the apocalyptic vision of the Muslim world that America's media tend to purvey, a vision that encourages would-be travelers to stay in Indiana and skip Indonesia.

Overseas Muslims in my experience have a split-level view of America. Most of them dislike -- some detest -- U.S. policy while simultaneously admiring the freedom and openness that Americans, at their best, represent. Many Americans feel the same way. Meanwhile, security concerns have encircled U.S. embassies with enough protective barriers and identity checks to make diplomacy resemble self-imprisonment.

As relaxed interactions at the official level have become a casualty of the war on terror, people-to-people contacts have become more vital than before. The fewer Americans Muslims meet, the less contested will be the image of the U.S. as a cruel montage of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

A task force ought to brainstorm ways of overcoming unrealistic fears of travel. The Bush administration has acknowledged the need to win Muslim hearts and minds abroad. It is time to win back overfearful American hearts and minds as well.

It remains painfully true, more than three years after Sept. 11, that even highly educated Americans know little about the Arab Middle East. And it is embarrassing how little our universities have changed to educate our nation and train experts on the wider Middle East.

For believers in a good liberal arts education, it has long been a source of consternation that faculties in political science, history, economics and sociology lack scholars who know Arabic or Persian and understand Islam. Since Sept. 11 it has become clear that this abdication of responsibility is more than an educational problem: It also poses a threat to our national security.

The case for bolstering faculty and curriculum resources devoted to the Muslim Middle East is, of course, obvious from an educational perspective. The region is vast. Islam represents one of the world's great religions and provides not only an intellectual feast for comparative study in the social sciences and humanities but also an indispensable comparison and contrast for more familiar religions and ways of life. Particularly in the era of globalization and the information revolution, there is little excuse for universities' continuing to betray the liberal ideal of educating students in the ways of all people.

Our national security interest in this area should also be obvious. As in the Cold War, the war against Islamic extremism will not be won in months or years but in decades. And as in the Cold War, the non-military components of the war will play a crucial role.