Lund, Sweden - When the Taliban attacked the International Islamic University in Pakistan this week, many were shocked that militants were targeting an Islamic school. In fact, the double suicide bombers were going after a university that is at the forefront of changing the way Islamic and Western knowledge are brought together in the Muslim world.

I also had some misconceptions before I had lectured in the very building where the second bombing took place. But the encounters I had there in 2007 utterly changed my understanding of Pakistan, as well as the future of Islam.

I had only landed in Islamabad just a few hours before I was scheduled to give my first talk at the university, and whether it was the 13-hour time difference with Los Angeles, two nights flying in coach, or walking through an arrivals lounge that had recently been attacked by terrorists, I felt more uneasy about being in Pakistan than Baghdad or Gaza during their own periods of intense violence.

Matters weren't helped when I was introduced to a group of male religious studies students by my host as someone who'd lived in Israel and speaks Hebrew. In fact, my stomach sank a bit – especially as their long beards and traditional dress reminded me a lot more of the Taliban than the graduate students I normally spend time with.

But as with most things in Pakistan, appearances were deceiving, and the situation was far more complex, and inspiring, than I'd imagined.

It turned out that the students with whom I was meeting weren't merely studying Islam, they were PhD students in comparative religion. They were situating Islam, its history, and its religious dynamics within the broader study of religious experience worldwide.

Moreover, the recently established program in which they were studying was a model for the pearl jewelry International Islamic University's drive to develop a new curriculum, one that would combine 1,000 years of Islamic learning with the latest developments in American and European humanities and social studies scholarship.

The students explained they were all learning Hebrew, as well as biblical criticism and contemporary approaches to religious studies as part of their course work. As we began to talk it became clear that neither students nor faculty had much time or desire to engage in spirited critiques of the United States or the West.

They were much more interested in discussing how to better integrate "Western" and Islamic methodologies for studying history and religion. And more telling, they were trying to figure out how to criticize the government without "disappearing" into the dark hole of the Pakistani prison system for five or 10 years, or worse.

Colleagues in the history and political science departments were just as eager to develop the most up-to-date curriculums possible, and in so doing lay a benchmark for the development of their fields, not just in Pakistan, but globally.

This is not to say that the members of the University community supported US policies in the Muslim world. Far from it. But as good social scientists (or social scientists in training), they understood the importance of the interplay of local and global dynamics, and of the problems in their own societies that contributed to the violent relationship between the US and many Muslim groups around the world.

Indeed, when I delivered my second lecture on globalization early on a Saturday morning, the room was filled with students, more women than men (upward of half the student body at the University are women), who grilled me about the assumptions underlying my research and methodologies. Would that most of my students back home were as interested in what I was teaching as were they.

As I walked around the campus, and met faculty and students who'd come from biwa pearl all over the Muslim world to study there, the role of the IIU in the larger context of Islam globally became evident.

The University was carving out a much-needed space in Muslim intellectual, and through it political, life through its bringing Muslim and Western traditions into dialogue.

Yet it was receiving, and continues to receive far less attention from scholars, commentators, or policymakers than the fully American-style universities being opened across the Persian Gulf. This is most recently evidenced by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, just established with great fanfare and a $10 billion endowment from the king in Jeddah.

Such a venture is surely important, not just for having one of the world's fastest supercomputers or giving every newly hired professor $400,000 in research money – I got $3,000 when I was hired at University of California, Irvine, and that was when the university was flush with cash.

Yet the singular focus of KAUST on hard sciences is ultimately myopic and will likely produce little in the way of the larger societal change in Saudi Arabia predicted by the new university's boosters. Such changes come only with a robust public sphere where citizens who are educated broadly and humanistically are equipped with the social knowledge and skills to challenge the dominant political and social-religious discourses.

Building such an active Pakistani citizenry was and – I imagine despite the bombing – remains a major goal of the IIU.

Sadly, it's just such a goal that probably made it a "legitimate" target for the Taliban, for whom a healthy public sphere populated by educated citizens willing and able to challenge, potentially democratize, and clean up their government would pose at least as big threat to its position in the country as the army they are now fighting in the country's northwest.

Not surprisingly, the core mission of the IIU would also not win it many friends among the country's corrupt economic and political elite, who, as many of the senior education and religious officials I met confided to akoya pearl me, share the Taliban's desire to silence any kind of critical scholarship or societal debate.

With this attack, the Taliban has struck what until now was a sanctuary, however fragile and inchoate, where the emerging generation of Pakistanis and Muslims could determine on their own terms how best to bring together their cultures and traditions to grapple with the profound challenges faced by their societies.

I hope it doesn't weaken the spirit and resolve of the thousands of students who've come to the IIU from across the Muslim world to help build a better future. They are not just the future of Pakistan, or of Islam; they are the future as well.

Mark LeVine is a history professor at University of California, Irvine and currently a visiting professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author most recently of "Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam" and "Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989"

The decision by Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration's "pay czar," to slash executive compensation at America's seven biggest "bailout" companies is good politics. But is it good business?

The country will find out as Mr. Feinberg tests vogue ideas about pay and corporate governance in his laboratory of business guinea pigs: AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, General Motors, Chrysler, and the two automakers' financing arms.

(The nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve, will meanwhile police pay policies to discourage the kind of risk taking that contributed to the financial collapse.)

The federal government has so far injected $240 billion into the group of seven companies under Mr. Feinberg's watchful eye. Acting on a law passed by Congress, the Treasury Department's special pay master has examined the companies' salaries and bonuses and he has spoken: Senior executives at the companies will see their cash pay cut by an average of about 90 percent, while total compensation – which includes bonuses – will be cut by about 50 percent.

Main Street will like this, which is why the move amounts to smart politics. In 1965, the average US corporate executive earned 24 times what the average worker did. By 2007, the CEO advantage had spiraled up to 275 times.

The great recession was to have taught corporate America a akoya pearl lesson in excessive pay that bore little relation to performance – and in excessive risk taking. Both of those conditions contributed to economic calamity. But Wall St. must have skipped that class. Recovering financial institutions that were on the rocks just months ago plan to pay big bonuses for 2009.

"It does offend our values when executives of big financial firms, firms that are struggling, pay themselves huge bonuses even as they continue to rely on taxpayer assistance to stay afloat," President Obama said today.

As paymaster, the government has the right to cut compensation at the big seven, but it's not clear that this is the best way to return these companies to health.

The greatest talent may jump ship to European companies or Wall St. firms not under the government's thumb. The country will learn the outcome soon enough as this select group of 175 executives either stays – or goes to higher paying positions.

More intriguing, and perhaps more significant, is how the seven businesses will perform under Mr. Feinberg's changes in corporate governance. Among other things, he plans to pry apart the biwa pearl joint job of chief executive officer and chairman of the board, who are one and the same in many companies.

He also wants to create special corporate commissions to assess risk and to do away with entrenched staggered boards (directors on these boards are not all elected at the same time).

"Good governance" has been a topic in the boardroom for many years. The above measures – and others – are part of legislation in Congress. The aim is to remove conflicts of interest between boards and the publicly traded companies they govern so that CEOs respond more to long-term interests than short-term gains.

But each of these ideas has pluses and minuses. A CEO who is only a CEO can't run board meetings and set his or her own pay. On the other hand, what is the role of the chairman who is only chairman? Is a company setting itself up for a power struggle with this arrangement?

And while one has to wonder where the risk-assessment people were at the companies that fell under the spell of mortgage derivatives, don't most boards weigh the pros and cons of opening new plants or starting new lines of business? What about audits – don't they already perform a risk function?

The timing of board elections, too, has its positive and negative aspects. Staggered boards help prevent hostile takeovers, because it's not so easy for an outsider to topple everyone at once. But for shareholders who want more say over pay and other issues, being able to "throw the bums out" might be what's needed.

Might be. Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on the company, the board, the business culture, and many other factors. That's what makes this government intervention in pay and governance so interesting – and so problematic.

Generally, government should not be setting pay rates (Congress tried that in 1992, when it put a ceiling of $1 million on salary that companies can deduct as a business expense; companies responded by raising salaries to $1 million and issuing stock options). And government should tread carefully in pearl jewelry telling businesses how to run themselves.

What government can and should do is empower shareholders to influence compensation and governance decisions by making it much easier for them to elect and remove directors. Ultimately, it is the shareholders who have the long and lasting stake in a business. They will be looking closely at the federal government's real-life lab test.

New York - Recent polls show that a majority of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting. This is said to weigh heavily on President Obama as he considers Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request to focus on counterinsurgency and add 40,000 troops to the field.

Ideally, when leaders deliberate over a proposed foreign policy, they consider whether it furthers the national interest, not whether the public supports it at the moment. A paradox of US democracy is that people expect their officials to ignore them from time to time.

Leaders generally depend on two assumptions when making foreign-policy decisions: (1) that the public will support what emerges as good policy over the long term, and (2) that a foreign policy's effectiveness is divorced from domestic public support.

Under normal circumstances, the public could expect Mr. Obama to focus only on the question of whether the war's goals are worth its costs, ignoring the transitory polls.

The situation in Afghanistan, however, throws this model out the window. Today, the American public is the newest front in winning the conflict in Afghanistan.

Obama's consideration of public opinion shows that the pearl jewelry administration recognizes that the public might not support even a successful long-term effort, and this lack of support might doom an otherwise effective mission.

What are some of the reasons for lagging support?

Because the war's goals are vague and abstract (e.g., building democracy and stability) and difficult to measure (e.g., making terrorism less likely), the public might deem any long-term mission obscure and wasteful – even an effective one.

It is also possible that the public is able to comprehend and measure the goals, but disagrees with the president that they are achievable or worthy enough. Or it may simply be that Americans are worn out – tired of sending soldiers to fight and tired of spending billions in faraway lands to liberate people who do not want us there entirely.

The nature of the war's goals makes it difficult to maintain public support – a point to be considered before entering into such conflicts in the future.

No matter the reasons for declining support, it seems a president should ignore public opinion to execute a necessary war – a term Obama applies to the Afghanistan conflict. In Afghanistan however, the viability of any counterinsurgency strategy depends upon continued support from the American public.

The US government must convince our existing and would-be Afghan allies that US commitment to developing a stable nation is resolute. Among the Iraqi Sunnis, Washington won allies not by being friendly, but by convincing them that US-Iraqi interests dovetailed and that the US was committed to and capable of biwa pearl winning.

Washington will see no such parallel in Afghanistan if Afghans believe US troops leaving early is likely. But if public opinion stays negative, Afghans may be justified in their skepticism.

American leaders can resist the public's wishes for only so long. If the public continues to oppose the effort in Afghanistan, the US may have to pull out early – even if the counterinsurgency is working.

This is crucial, because under a counterinsurgency strategy Afghanistan is either worth fighting until our goals are achieved, no matter how long it takes, or not worth fighting at all. A middle ground – where the US spends billions more, American soldiers and Afghan civilians continue to die, and we place yet more credibility on the line, only to leave early and have the Taliban return to power – would be worse than if the US pulled out in the first place.

For these reasons, when Obama analyzes McChrystal's plan he needs to consider not only if it would work had he five to 10 years of steady support, but also – despite the vague nature of some of the goals – whether it will deliver results tangible enough to convince a weary public to provide that very support.

Should he choose prolonged escalation, Obama has to walk a fine line between managing and raising expectations. While telling the truth, he needs to raise expectations so people believe the goals are worth the costs. But he needs to manage expectations so people won't lose faith if the strategy doesn't deliver immediately.

He needs to make the public aware of the absurdity of nation-building on two and four-year election-cycle time frames. It took America 12 years to replace the unworkable Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. Americans seem to forget that when we complain about the lack of progress in Iraq or Afghanistan.

After eight years of war, there are now three fronts in the conflict against the akoya pearl Taliban, Al Qaeda, and associated regional movements, commonly called "AfPak."

The first is in Afghanistan. The second is in Pakistan. And the third is in America, where the public needs to maintain a high enough level of support for our commitment to the Afghan people to have credibility and sufficient longevity.

It is now the age of "AfPakAm."

Jacob Bronsther, a law student at New York University and former Fulbright scholar, writes for ThePublicPhilosopher.com. Shalev Roisman, a Harvard Law School graduate, recently completed a clerkship on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City.

Los Angeles - Growing youth violence in the United States will not be resolved until we find the moral courage to address the racial issues that underlie it.

During a Chicago school visit earlier this month to the site where a black honor student was beaten to death by a mob of black students, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that growing youth violence in America is not just "a black problem," but a problem for all races. The trouble with this statement is that it is statistically untrue.

Youth violence may not be solely a black problem, but it akoya pearl is primarily a black problem.

Consider, by race, the contributing factors of prison incarceration and school suspension. Blacks are imprisoned and suspended three times more frequently than the rest of the US population, and as much as six times more frequently than their white, Asian, and Latino counterparts.

The question is not whether young blacks, particularly males, get involved in violent incidents more frequently than other races. The question is why.

White and black liberals blame this disparity on a racist society that misinterprets and discriminates against black culture.

White and black conservatives explain these statistics as the result of biwa pearl less respect for the law, caused solely by poor parenting. They cite as proof that high-achieving blacks have been well-parented.

This is not a new problem. Consider a memo written in 1965 to President Lyndon Johnson from Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Moynihan in which the secretary expressed his great concern over the high rate of out-of-wedlock births among blacks (25 percent at that time). Unaddressed, Mr. Moynihan predicted, this large number of fatherless children would result in increasing school failure, criminal delinquency, and joblessness. Sadly, because liberals across the board condemned this call for action as racist propaganda, President Johnson didn't want to risk heated public debate and so did nothing.

The recent Chicago incident, and countless others that occur daily, are the result of not heeding Moynihan's warning 44 years ago. The previous out-of-wedlock birthrate has almost tripled, and 7 out of 10 black children now grow up not only without a father, but also in disproportionate poverty. That means millions of young kids lack adequate parental guidance to make the transition to become successful adults.

So of course unparented black kids act up and get in trouble more. Any racial group would do the same. The starting point for reducing our nation's youth violence must begin at home. We need our elected public officials to acknowledge this.

President Obama – himself black, well-parented, and successful – has a unique opportunity to start reducing youth violence by addressing this key issue. The president needs to condemn the disparity in out-of-wedlock birthrates and antisocial behavior between black youth and their peers of other races. He needs to specifically address the habit of blaming racism alone for the failure to instill proper behavior in black children.

A specific call for black parental accountability would be a akoya pearl strong first step in avoiding future tragedies like the one in Chicago.

Paul D. White is a career public educator from Ventura, Calif., and the author of "White's Rules – Saving Our Youth One Kid at a Time."

Los Angeles - Growing youth violence in the United States will not be resolved until we find the moral courage to address the racial issues that underlie it.

During a Chicago school visit earlier this month to the site where a black honor student was beaten to death by a mob of black students, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that growing youth violence in America is not just "a black problem," but a problem for all races. The trouble with this statement is that it is statistically untrue.

Youth violence may not be solely a black problem, but it is akoya pearl primarily a black problem.
 
Consider, by race, the contributing factors of prison incarceration and school suspension. Blacks are imprisoned and suspended three times more frequently than the rest of the US population, and as much as six times more frequently than their white, Asian, and Latino counterparts.

The question is not whether young blacks, particularly males, get involved in violent incidents more frequently than other races. The question is why.

White and black liberals blame this disparity on a racist society that misinterprets and discriminates against black culture.

White and black conservatives explain these statistics as the result of biwa pearl less respect for the law, caused solely by poor parenting. They cite as proof that high-achieving blacks have been well-parented.

This is not a new problem. Consider a memo written in 1965 to President Lyndon Johnson from Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Moynihan in which the secretary expressed his great concern over the high rate of out-of-wedlock births among blacks (25 percent at that time). Unaddressed, Mr. Moynihan predicted, this large number of fatherless children would result in increasing school failure, criminal delinquency, and joblessness. Sadly, because liberals across the board condemned this call for action as racist propaganda, President Johnson didn't want to risk heated public debate and so did nothing.

The recent Chicago incident, and countless others that occur daily, are the result of not heeding Moynihan's warning 44 years ago. The previous out-of-wedlock birthrate has almost tripled, and 7 out of 10 black children now grow up not only without a father, but also in disproportionate poverty. That means millions of young kids lack adequate parental guidance to make the transition to become successful adults.

So of course unparented black kids act up and get in trouble more. Any racial group would do the same. The starting point for reducing our nation's youth violence must begin at home. We need our elected public officials to acknowledge this.

President Obama – himself black, well-parented, and successful – has a unique opportunity to start reducing youth violence by addressing this key issue. The president needs to condemn the disparity in out-of-wedlock birthrates and antisocial behavior between black youth and their peers of other races. He needs to pearl jewelry specifically address the habit of blaming racism alone for the failure to instill proper behavior in black children.

A specific call for black parental accountability would be a strong first step in avoiding future tragedies like the one in Chicago.

Paul D. White is a career public educator from Ventura, Calif., and the author of "White's Rules – Saving Our Youth One Kid at a Time."