There are "no good options" for the United States to confront or contain North Korea's nuclear weapons proliferation, according to political science Professor Scott Sagan.

Sagan, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, was one of five foreign policy experts who joined a panel discussion Friday titled "It's a Mad, Mad World: Prospects for Security, Diplomacy and Peace on the Korean Peninsula." Presented by the Law School, the event took place in Dinkelspiel Auditorium as part of Reunion Homecoming Weekend.

Panelists Mi-Hyung Kim, Bernard S. Black, Gi-Wook Shin and Scott D. Sagan took turns weighing in on the difficulties of U.S. diplomatic relations with North Korea during a law school-sponsored discussion. Photo: L.A. Cicero

What makes the situation even more vexing is that the objectives of neither North Korea nor the United States are entirely clear, said law Associate Professor Allen Weiner, a former State Department lawyer and diplomat who moderated the panel.

"Is the United States intent on a regime change? Or putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle?" Weiner asked.

"North Korea feels threatened by the United States and believes nuclear weapons are the only way to protect its national sovereignty," said sociology Associate Professor Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Korean Studies Program in the Asia/Pacific Research Center.

The talk came one day after North Korea announced that it is prepared to "physically unveil" its nuclear program. By Sunday, President George W. Bush announced that he would provide written assurances not to attack North Korea if the country takes steps to halt its proliferation and if other Asian leaders signed, too. Bush, who counted North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," stopped short of offering a formal, Senate-approved nonaggression treaty.

Earlier this month, North Korea claimed to have finished reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium to build a half-dozen nuclear bombs. Faced with a collapsed economy and the legacy of 1.5 million deaths from starvation in the late 1990s, the North Korean government, led by Kim Jong Il, has overtly threatened to use its small arsenal as deterrence against U.S. aggression. Although it has been difficult to verify North Korea's capabilities, international experts have asserted that its main nuclear facility in Yongbyon could produce one or two bombs a year.

Tension first heated up last October when North Korea admitted to having abandoned the 1994 Framework Agreement brokered by the Clinton administration to shut down its nuclear reprocessing facilities.

Confirming U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons capabilities, the former director of the CIA under the Clinton administration, Jim Woolsey, said from the audience that in 1994 the CIA was confident North Korea had enough plutonium to make one or two bombs. Estimating that its current capabilities hover somewhere around six bombs, Woolsey explained North Korea doesn't have good delivery technology. The greater concern, he said, is that it would produce enough plutonium to sell to al-Qaida.

The amount of plutonium it takes to build a bomb is the "size of a grapefruit" -- making it difficult to monitor and stop weapons material shipments, Sagan said.

Believing North Korea is posturing for economic aid and bilateral security guarantees, the United States has sidestepped direct talks and instead joined South Korea, China, Japan and Russia in a round of six-party talks with North Korea last August. Bush's announcement is seen as an effort to jump-start the next round of regional talks that were expected by the end of the year.

The crisis has taken its toll on the longstanding alliance between the United States and South Korea. Panelist Mi-Hyung Kim, a founding member of South Korea's Millennium Democratic Party and general counsel and executive vice president of the Kumho Business Group, the ninth largest Korean conglomerate, said the relationship between the United States and South Korea is the "rockiest" it has ever been because of "Bush's hard-line policy on North Korea" and the fact that wartime control of the South Korean military reverts to U.S. hands. Bilateral talks would further alienate South Korea, which fears that Seoul will become a "sea of fire," she said.

"South Korea thinks Bush is a bigger threat than nuclear weapons 35 miles to the north," Kim explained, pointing out that South Korea will bear the brunt of a military conflict. "South Korea wants to avoid war and economic burdens it can't afford," she said.

Part of the problem has been the failure of the United States to explain its policy to the South Korean people. "The United States is bad at selling its policies to publics abroad," Weiner noted. We're used to dealing bilaterally with government officials; public diplomacy is a skill we've had to learn over the past 15 years."

"A PR campaign by the United States is not going to solve this," Kim countered.

"If North Korea collapses, how will South Korea survive?" asked law Professor Bernard Black, a panelist who served as an economic policy adviser to the South Korean government. "South Korea would have to devote 30 percent of its GDP to bring North Korea up to its standard of living and that's not sustainable.

"South Korea has lived under North Korean guns for the last 50 years. North Korea can destroy Seoul at any time. South Koreans are saying, 'What's changed?' The last thing South Korea wants is to provoke North Korea to attack."

China, North Korea's closest ally, may have the most leverage through trade sanctions and has a vested interest in halting regional proliferation, Kim said. "China does not need another nuclear neighbor. ... It has enough problems with India and Pakistan." North Korea's proliferation could lead to a nuclear Japan, South Korea and "its worst fear, a nuclear Taiwan."

Predicting that nothing would come of the next round of talks until after the next U.S. presidential election, Kim said ironically, "North Korea is expecting a regime change in the United States to an administration that is more reasonable."

"North Korea is not a crazy rogue state but a dangerously desperate state," said Sagan. "When you play poker with someone who's cheated in the past, you can expect them to cheat again."

U.S. companies sent jobs to India to save money, but stayed because of the quality of the work. Rafiq Dossani is a senior research scholar at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. Dossani, along with Martin Kenney, a professor in the human and community development department at the University of California, Davis, published a 52-page research report entitled "Went for Cost, Stayed for Quality: Moving the Back Office to India." The paper is available for download below. The research is a comprehensive look at the driving forces behind the migration of "business process" work to India. These BP jobs include much of the so-called back-office tasks -- human resources, accounting and customer service -- that are being outsourced to India. General Electric Co., for example, employs 9,000 BP workers in India, saving the company $340 million per year. It's little wonder why GE anticipates employing 20,000 workers in India by next year. Biz Ink editor Dennis Taylor spoke with Dossani from his Stanford University office about the dynamics of the offshoring trend. Q: What are the key business needs being outsourced to India today? A: There are really two practices: [information technology] and business process outsourcing. BP is expected to overtake IT by next year. IT outsourcing has been growing in India by about 15 percent per year. BP is growing at 100 percent a year. There are different dynamics involved. Q: On the IT side, what work is being done in India? A: There are four distinct processes to IT development -- project determination, architecture, system design and [programming]. About 25 percent of that is programming, quality assurance and Web services. India has about 15 percent of that. It's a small percentage, but it's growing fast. Q: Why does that type of technology flourish in India? Is it the education focus? A: The education policy as such hasn't made much of a difference. India doesn't have a lot of technically educated people, relative to its population. There are 0.3 scientists and technicians per 1,000 people, which ranks India 42 out of 62 nations surveyed by the World Bank in 1998 in the per-capita number of scientists and technicians. What it does have is a billion people. What has helped India is everyone speaks English. Q: What was the most surprising finding coming out of your research? A: By far, India's biggest skill is business management. It is very hard to manage these projects remotely. Yet American companies are lifting a key component of a process and shipping it off to India and it is being managed well. You need to understand that 96 percent of these programming projects are complex coding for banks, insurance companies and a host of manufacturing companies. This is complex software being created on demand and most of it -- because it's banks and manufacturing [not tech companies] -- is coming from mainstream America, not Silicon Valley. Q: How much of the work being outsourced to India comes from the United States? A: About 70 percent. How is the phenomenon of "offshoring" affected life in tech hubs such as Bangalore? Q: In a sense IT has not had an impact on these places. It's like an ivory tower. In March 2003, there were 230,000 employed in the [IT] industry. In Bangalore that may represent one-third of the population, but 30,000 out of a population of 5 million creates a buzz, but that's about it. A: But BP outsourcing is having a completely different impact. There are many recent graduates who have never been able to get a job so easily. Now they have well-paid jobs with multinational firms because they speak English and have good interactive skills. With more people employed, it's beginning to hit mainstream India and move out of Bangalore and to smaller cities. That in turn affects other sectors, such as construction management skills. Shoddy buildings in India are becoming a thing of the past. Q: Is offshoring causing any Indian engineers here in the valley to consider returning to India? A: What happened is India liberalized in 1991 -- allowing foreign firms to do business. But it took them five or six years to adjust, so in 1996 the first foreign company was established and now it's quite common. But IT outsourcing still only comprises 4 percent of the business, but it is growing so there will be an impact to the valley. Q: There are roughly 30,000 Indian engineers in the valley, and I'd estimate no more than 300 have gone back. A: Will the rapid growth in offshoring continue as long as there is a substantial wage disparity between the two countries? Q: Oh, yes. The wage disparity is too much. Someone working in a BP tech support call center will make $1.50 [U.S.] an hour, including benefits. Over here, even if you paid $15 an hour, you wouldn't get happy workers. There it is viewed as a good career. The supply of labor is so huge for call-center work, it will take many years before the difference is cut to even half as much, probably 10 to 15 years. With IT outsourcing, in India you would be paying $3.50 an hour for a Java programmer versus $25 an hour here, so the eight-times differential still exists. Q: Is the practice paying off for valley companies? Any early report cards? A: Oh yeah, big time, especially on the BP side. You save 80 percent in costs. On the IT side it is beginning to pay off, now that it's a matter of in-house offshoring to your own subsidiary. Product software doesn't source out well because of the [feared loss of] intellectual property associated with it. Q: Is there a downside to offshoring work to India? A: A big concern for companies is the loss of knowledge. The last time that happened was in consumer electronics and the U.S. lost the lead. And business continuity is a big concern. You need to have payroll done at a certain time of the month, but if there is a power outage, which is more likely to happen in India than here, what are you going to do? And of course there is a very real concern over the loss of intellectual property.

August was a bloody month. There was barely time to mourn between the exploding bombs: first at the Marriott hotel in Jakarta on Aug. 5, at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and on a bus in Jerusalem on Aug. 19, then the two in Bombay on Monday. These were the latest sites in a chronology of carnage running from Casablanca through Riyadh and Bali to Manhattan's crumbling towers.

Each atrocity involved local actors and local motives. Each was perceived differently by the local populace, and the local repercussions of each terrorist act varied widely. Yet all were attributed to a single global menace: jihad. For three years now, acts of violence done in Allah's name have made terrorism and Islam almost synonymous, not just in Westerners' vocabularies but around the world.

From this blight, who will rescue Islam?

The nearly reflexive association of Islam and terrorism is not simply the creation of rush-to-judgment pundits and politicians. Not when the terrorists proudly proclaim religious inspiration for their acts. Both Jerry Falwell and Osama bin Laden have maligned Islam. But it is, above all, the jihadists who have distilled their faith to sacred hatred - of Americans, Christians, Jews and the millions upon millions of moderate or secular Muslims who disdain this perversion from within.

Muslims respond in different ways to Islamist violence. In Jakarta a few days after 11 Indonesians and a Dutchman were killed in the blast at the Marriott, I met up with two Muslim friends. They were brimming with conspiracy theories. Why, they asked, had 20 Americans reportedly canceled their reservations before the bomb went off? Could these no-shows have known in advance of the attack? Why was the severed head of the alleged perpetrator later found on the hotel's fifth floor? Had the CIA planted it there? Why were arrests made so soon? Could the U.S., or perhaps the Indonesian military, have staged the event?

Behind their questions lay an unspoken one: How could Muslims have done such a thing?

It would be convenient if my two friends despised Americans and were products of Islamist schools. But both men hold advanced degrees from top universities in the U.S. and exhibit no obvious animosity toward Americans. That two such people could give voice to such dark misgivings about U.S. intentions shows that Islam is not alone in its association with violence.

The flip side of denial is demonization. For some in the West, the enemy is not jihadists but all Islamists. Never mind that the vast majority of Muslims who promote their faith do so peacefully. The PowerPoint charts of counter-terrorism experts that ignore Muslim diversity and feature the evil genius Bin Laden reinforce a distorted, top-down view of Islam.

Al Qaeda's responsibility is all too real. But local context matters. For jihad to succeed, an outside agitator needs inside sympathizers, and their receptivity to recruitment will depend on local circumstances. Recognizing that Muslim societies are autonomous and heterogeneous is a necessary first step to realizing that Bin Laden and his version of Islam aren't absolute control.

Defenders of Islam in the West stress the fact that most of its billion-plus adherents are moderates who reject violence. Such reassurance is far preferable to demonization. But understanding is not served by exaggerations - that Islam or Muslims are always peaceful, or that jihadists entirely lack sympathy in the Muslim world. In Muslim communities, extremist and mainstream views intersect in many places, including schools, mosques and organizations. It is in these myriad local settings that Islam's connection to violence will or won't be broken.

Regrettably, reassurance sometimes lapses into denial. In Indonesia recently, several leading Muslim figures urged journalists to stop using the words "Islam" and "Muslim" in their coverage of the Marriott bombing. I've even heard Muslims object to the phrase "moderate Muslims" because it implies the existence of immoderate ones. Islam will never be rescued by language inspectors who would substitute deflection for introspection.

Can reform rescue Islam? In principle, yes, but in practice, not necessarily. There are at least a few individuals and groups in every Muslim society striving to make the practice of their faith more tolerant of difference and dissent, less restrictive toward women, more compatible with secular democracy and less preoccupied with imposing Islamic law. Liberal American observers tend to celebrate these reformers as rescuers of Islam.

Yet the sheer diversity of Muslim societies suggests that efforts to liberalize Islamic doctrine will face varying prospects of success. Before assuming that liberals and jihadists have nothing in common, one should remember that both advocate far-reaching changes that threaten the conservative views and habits of many mainstream Muslims. Reformers deserve American support. But preventing the status quo from getting worse may be a more realistic goal of such help than winning "hearts and minds" for humanism, let alone making the Muslim world look as secular and democratic as, say, Turkey.

Is America responsible for Islam's predicament? Some U.S. actions have fueled jihad. The American presence in Iraq could become a magnet for holy warriors comparable to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Muslims pressed by Washington to oppose the hijacking of Islam by jihadists may instead decry the hijacking of U.S. foreign policy by hard- liners around President Bush.

But jihadists were fighting enemies long before the United States was born. The drive to create Islamist states is more than an attempt to check American hegemony. Different U.S. policies might shrink Muslim hostility toward U.S. actions. But intransigent theocrats will not be assuaged by the compromises necessary to resolve the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Nor will either the failure or success of U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq remove the reasons for Islamist violence in other Muslim societies.

Also shaky is the notion that "they hate us for our values." The democracy Americans espouse remains popular in the Muslim world. American notions of equal treatment for women are less welcome. But a woman's opportunities vary among Muslim-majority countries, including those in Asia that preceded the U.S. in having female heads of state.

Americans are disproportionally responsible for a modern world most Muslims feel they never made. Extremists have used such alienation to justify jihad. But it is not up to Americans to rescue Islam.

Non-Muslims can avoid unnecessary provocations and false reassurances. They can facilitate liberal reform. But it is Muslims, acting in diverse local circumstances, who will or won't break the cycle of jihadist demonization and naive denial that is ruining the image of their religion. Whether to rescue their faith is a choice only they can make.