Studying South Asia
In the past decade, UMBC Associate Professor of Political Science Devin T. Hagerty’s region of expertise, South Asia, has gone from being an understudied corner of the globe to one of the most closely watched.
In 1998, India and Pakistan added nuclear weapon capability to what was already one of the tensest borders in the world. 9-11 made the world focus on Afghanistan, the Taliban, stopping the spread of Al Qaeda and the continuing search for Osama Bin Laden. Then Oct. 7’s devastating earthquake in the disputed Kashmir region added humanitarian disaster to the already volatile sociopolitical mix in this global flashpoint.
“It’s a horrible, horrible situation,” Hagerty said. “Comparisons of disasters are kind of ghoulish, but in terms of lives lost, the suffering of survivors, and the magnitude of the cleanup ahead, the earthquake will dwarf Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”
According to Hagerty, the earthquake’s aftermath will challenge the resiliency of both Pakistan’s citizens and its leader, President Pervez Musharraf. “ Pakistan is still a very poor country. The literacy rate is low, especially for women, and opportunities for women are scarce. Health care is generally poor. There’s also a big drug addiction problem plus many ethnic divisions and internal rifts.”
“It’s hard to think of a leader in a more precarious position than Musharraf,” said Hagerty. “The West perceives him as not doing enough to fight terror or find Bin Laden. But it’s important to realize that he sent Pakistan Army forces to the lawless border region to fight Al Qaeda and other violent fundamentalists. That’s something unprecedented in Pakistani history. I have more sympathy for him than most Western observers.”
According to Hagerty, while some criticisms of the U.S./Pakistan relationship are valid, national security concerns win out. “We need the Pakistanis’ information and access — something only they can give us right now in the Muslim world. If there were a rupture in our relationship with Pakistan, we would lose our ability to be effective on the ground in southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is reconstituting itself, for example.”
Hagerty’s writing and research continues to underscore the importance of South Asia. He recently completed two books: co-authoring with Sumit Ganguly Fearful Symmetry: Indo-Pakistani Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (Oxford University Press and the University of Washington Press) and editing South Asia in World Politics (Rowman and Littlefield). He is also the editor of Asian Security, a pioneering academic journal that takes a global, interdisciplinary look at security issues in the region.
“From the end of the Cold War to 9-11, we pulled back from the South Asian region and forgot about it, obviously in hindsight a terrible foreign policy mistake,” Hagerty said. “In my opinion, the Bush administration feels it has no choice right now but to ally with Pakistan. It’s a tough situation, but I always tell my students that if you like your answers nice and neat and consistent, then maybe international relations isn’t the field for you.”
Read more about Hagerty at www.umbc.edu/research.
(12/20/05)
