By Scott Snyder

Scott Snyder directs The Asia Foundation’s Center for U.S.-Korea Policy. His latest book, “China’s Rise and the Two Koreas: Politics, Economics, Security,” was published by Lynne Rienner earlier this year. He can be reached at ssnyder@asiafound-dc.org.

North Korea did exactly what it said it would do on May 25, 2009, when it conducted a nuclear test as promised in its April 28 statement in response to UN sanctions imposed on three North Korean firms in accordance with an April 13 UN Security Council Presidential Statement condemning North Korea’s April 5, 2009, missile test. The test furthers North Korea’s strategic objective of making permanent its status as a nuclear weapons state. North Korea’s announcement of the test shows that a primary political target of North Korea’s nuclear test is domestic, as was the case with North Korea’s April 5th missile launch.
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By Scott Snyder

Scott Snyder directs The Asia Foundation’s Center for U.S.-Korea Policy. His latest book, “China’s Rise and the Two Koreas: Politics, Economics, Security,” was published by Lynne Rienner earlier this year. He can be reached at ssnyder@asiafound-dc.org.

The death of Roh Moo-hyun, the 16th president of the Republic of Korea (2003-2008), is a huge shock to South Korea’s political world. A human rights lawyer with no college degree, Roh campaigned to revolutionize Korean politics and society by promoting clean politics, fighting corruption, and challenging personal and elite ties as the basis for advancement in Korean society. His political idealism was both profoundly attractive and disappointing to the South Korean public since he ultimately became a victim to the flaws in the Korean system he had set out to overcome. His apparent suicide on May 23, 2009, following revelations of personal corruption is a shocking political and personal tragedy, with very mixed reverberations for Korean politics.
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By V. Bruce J. Tolentino

Bruce Tolentino is The Asia Foundation’s Chief Economist and can be reached at btolentino@asiafound.org. He just returned to San Francisco from Pakistan, where he was working for several weeks.

Each day, from sunup to sundown, at the Wagah border gate between India and Pakistan, the complex, intertwined, and still painful histories of these neighboring countries are replayed in scenes of joy, reunion, patriotism, belligerence, and battle.

At sunup, the border gates trundle open and travelers hurry in both directions across the border, which has divided the village of Wagah and the countries Pakistan and India since the British-mandated “Radcliffe Line,” and the bloody “Great Partition” of 1947.

There are joyous scenes of reunion where families split by politics, citizenship, or faith – yet united by blood and kinship – embrace. Some kneel to kiss the ground. Others take soil – foreign, yet treasured – into their pockets as souvenirs.

Wagah is the only official border crossing between India and Pakistan, the link between the historic, ancient cities of Lahore in Pakistan and Amritsar in India. These crossings and scenes are repeated many times throughout the day.
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By Melody Zavala and Syed Zahid Abbas

Melody Zavala is The Asia Foundation’s Books for Asia Program Director. Syed Zahid Abbas is the Books for Asia Director in Pakistan. They can be reached at mzavala@asiafound.org and zahid@pk.asiafound.org, respectively.

Book Fairs take place all over the globe. In some places, such as at this weekend’s Book Expo America in glitzy New York City, the purpose is to promote beautiful new books from America’s top publishers. In grittier places, such as Pakistan’s volatile North West Frontier Province and Balochistan, the goal of book fairs is to spark an interest in higher education and extend much needed books to the country’s hardest-to-reach areas. In these remote areas of Pakistan, The Asia Foundation puts brand new textbooks donated by American publishers on display to help university students and teaching staff understand the resources available to them for free through our Books for Asia program. For over 50 years, the Books for Asia program has provided more than 3 million books to Pakistan’s students, researchers, and marginalized groups. While these donations present numerous transport challenges, the results are worth the extra effort and much appreciated. This week, our colleague, Mr. Syed Zahid Hussain, was interviewed during a three-day book fair held at the University of Balochistan. His remarks in The Asia Pulse capture just how valuable these donated books are.
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By Almerio Borges and Hugo Fernandes

Almerio Borges is The Asia Foundation’s Mobile Library Project Officer and Hugo Fernandes is the Foundation’s Books for Asia Manager in Timor-Leste. They can be reached at aborges@asiafound.org and hfernandes@asiafound.org, respectively.

Last summer, we drove a mobile library – a specially equipped mini-bus fit for travel on our small island nation’s rugged roads – outfitted with books, audio recordings, and visual media from Dili to remote parts of the country. Nothing like it had ever existed in Timor-Leste before, and what we saw on our travels to all 13 districts of the country confirmed the deep intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm this young nation has for books.

In Timor-Leste, 36 percent of the population is under the age of fourteen, 61 percent is between the ages of 15-64, and nearly 50 percent of the total population is illiterate. In this new, democratic nation with no lending library and no postal system, pervasive poverty and a lack of public access to information hampers the development of a culture of reading.
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By Bishnu Sapkota

Bishnu Sapkota is The Asia Foundation’s Program Advisor in Nepal. He can be reached at bishnu@taf.org.np.

Nepal’s peace process has seen significant achievements in the last three years, but not all has gone well. In retrospect, Local Peace Committees (LPCs) feature as one of the most prominent failures.

Initially, the peace committees were designed to sustain peace by providing a common forum for people to locally implement national peace agreements. LPCs were to promote the notion that the responsibility to maintain peace at the local level lies with the people. They would bring together political parties, NGOs, and relevant local government agencies to prevent potential conflict, resolve them as they arise, and promote peace in the district. Following intense discussions, the LPCs were officially approved by the Cabinet in late 2006.  The Cabinet made provisions for peace committees to be created in each of the 75 districts of the country. However, the committees never could quite achieve any of the stated objectives.

Here’s what I think went wrong.
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By Melody Zavala and Sukla Dey

Melody Zavala is The Asia Foundation’s Books for Asia Program Director. She can be reached at mzavala@asiafound.org. Sukla Dey manages the Foundation’s books program in Bangladesh.  She can be reached at sdey@asiafound.org.

Dhaka University has one of the oldest and most respected law programs in Bangladesh; its graduates go on to become champions of justice and equality in a country where both are in short supply. As Bangladesh’s largest public university, its students arrive from all corners of the country – from thatched houses in rural villages to the bustling apartment blocks of downtown Dhaka. Yet, despite its national prestige, the university lacks sufficient resources to provide its students access to critical, contemporary legal reference books. Without a lending library, the university’s 900 law students vie for a limited supply of outdated texts in a cramped reading room, which allows for only a modest round table and 12 chairs. 
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By Tugsjargal Anand

Tugsuu is The Asia Foundation’s Program Officer in Mongolia. She can be reached at tugsuu@asiafound.mn.

The story of Bat-Erdene, who lives in remote eastern Mongolia, chronicles the impact that the Books for Asia program has made here. Growing up in the late 1990’s, Bat-Erdene was thirsty for knowledge and information about the world around him. The books that were distributed through The Asia Foundation’s Books for Asia program were among the scarce English language resources he had access to through his school.  With the support of these resources, Bat-Erdene learned English, earned his graduate degree in Ulaanbaatar, and went on to become elected as a local governor. Today, he runs the branch office of a nation-wide youth initiative. 
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By Rajendra Abhyankar

Rajendra Abhyankar, former Indian Ambassador, is currently The Asia Foundation’s Director of India Programs in New Delhi. He can be reached at rabhyankar@asiafound.org.

Observing from the welcome shade of a neem tree in the quadrangle of this school, I watched clusters of colorfully dressed women, undaunted by the 43 degree Celsius (109.4 degree Fahrenheit) temperatures, stride up to the polling centre. I was in Bhilwa, a small village on the edge of the Great Indian Desert in Rural Jaipur. India’s Election Commission had invited me – along with Election Commission officials from Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines – to witness the election process in this part of the country. As the women moved to vote, we were struck by the depth to which democracy has seeped into India’s polity. These women voters were part of the Dausa constituency, a region that has recently seen clashes between and protests by the region’s two main tribes, the Meenas and Gujjars.

The results of India’s mammoth, one-month-long General Elections were finally known on May 16th. 714 million Indians registered to vote; and 57 percent of them voted. This represents, in the democratic world, the acme of political mobilization and organizational complexity. The suspense and dire predictions of a hung Parliament are now over. All of the political parties were hoping to gain leverage in this election, yet the perceptive Indian voter has, once again, ignored the rhetoric of religion, caste, and personality and put stability and governance first.
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By Sagar Prasai

Sagar Prasai is The Asia Foundation’s Deputy Country Representative in Nepal. He can be reached at sagar@taf.org.np.

Just nine months after taking office, Nepal’s Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal (known as Prachanda) resigned on May 4, 2009, citing the president’s lack of cooperation on his efforts to establish “civilian supremacy” over the Nepali Army. The events that led to his resignation unfolded quickly and predictably. On April 20, the Maoist government asked for an explanation from the Chief of the Army Staff (CoAS) citing three incidents of insubordination. The incidences cited were controversial administrative decisions, but whether they amounted to insubordination is debatable, given how serious a meaning the term carries in civil-military relations lexicon.
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