Published in conjunction with the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), Georgia Institute of Technology.

From the Introduction:
"The election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1997 signaled renewed interest in IT and the Internet. The BJP advocated economic liberalization and listed IT as one of the government's top five priorities, along with more traditional issues such as the provision of potable drinking water and education [10]. "Indian IT has had many small voices, but the BJP is attempting to give IT a national voice" [10]. In May 1998, Prime Minister Vajpayee organized a national IT task force to make recommendations for a comprehensive policy overhaul. The task force's recommendations were instrumental in initiating wide-ranging and fundamental changes in Indian IT policy.

The speed with which the Indian National Task Force on Information Technology and Software Development moved was indicative of the changing government attitude. Within 90 days of its establishment, the Task Force produced an extensive background report on the state of technology in India and an IT Action Plan with 108 recommendations [10,11]. The Task Force could act quickly because it built upon the experience and frustrations of state governments, central government agencies, universities, and the software industry. Much of what it proposed was also consistent with the thinking and recommendations of international bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and World Bank. In addition, the Task Force incorporated the experiences of Singapore and other nations, which implemented similar programs. It was less a task of invention than of sparking action on a consensus that had already evolved within the networking community and government.

Prime Minister Vajpayee captured the changing attitude toward technology in India in his claim that "IT is India's Tomorrow" [13]. This assessment offers a vision of a 21st century India substantially different from that of the 20th century. With its high levels of poverty, bloated and corrupt bureaucracies, protectionist policies, and large size, 20th century India was like the Asian elephant, plodding and turning slowly. At the dawn of a new millennium, Vajpayee and a growing number of politicians, bureaucrats, industry leaders, foreign investors, and bright-eyed entrepreneurs are trying to teach this Asian elephant to dance [14]."

China is India's largest and most important neighbor, and despite recent efforts at improving relations between the two countries, the over half-century-old border dispute remains unresolved. While the prospects of a Sino-Indian border war are remote, it is essential that India understand the security implications of the rapidly modernizing Chinese military. It is in this context that this paper attempts to assess the airpower balance and the growing strength of the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). The paper argues that even if the pace of its modernization remains slow, the PLAAF will have decisively surpassed regional air forces in strength and capabilities by the end of the current decade.

Air Commodore Ramesh V. Phadke is an active duty officer of the Indian Air Force, currently working as Senior Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses, New Delhi, India. He has held five command positions and many important staff appointments. He is a postgraduate in Defence Studies and has been working on airpower issues. His current interests include China's military modernization and India's national security.

He was a CISAC visiting fellow in 2001 as part of the project "Strategic Stability: China and South Asia."

The proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is now the single most serious security concern for governments around the world. Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James J. Wirtz compare how military threats, strategic cultures, and organizations shape the way leaders intend to employ these armaments. They reveal the many frightening ways that emerging military powers and terrorist groups are planning the unthinkable by preparing to use chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in future conflicts.

Distinguished specialists consider several states and organizations that have this weaponry: Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel, as well as the Aum Shinrikyo cult. The contributors expose plans for using unconventional weapons, highlighting the revolutionary effects these arsenals might have on international politics and regional disputes.

The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project was initiated in 1997 to study the diffusion and absorption of the Internet to, and within, many diverse countries. This research has resulted in an ongoing series of reports and articles that have developed an analytic framework for evaluating the Internet within countries and applied it to more than 25 countries. (See http://mosaic.unomaha.edu/gdi.html for links to some of these reports and articles.)

The current report applies the analytic framework to compare and contrast the Internet experiences of Turkey and Pakistan, through mid-2000. Although historically these countries have not been closely related, there are significant parallels between the two that make them well suited for a comparative study of the absorption of the Internet. Turkey and Pakistan are among the largest non-Arab Muslim countries in the world. In contrast to most of their Arab counterparts, their governments were founded as secular, parliamentary democracies. Both countries have had stormy political histories, however, with periodic coups and authoritarian governments. Each country has firmly entrenched bureaucracies with closed and, to varying degrees, corrupt processes.

Their economies have been similarly troubled, with periods of relative hopefulness punctuated by stagnation and decline. Both countries have suffered from erratic growth rates, high inflation, and high deficits. For most of their histories, their economies were rather closed and autarkic.

In recent decades, each country has taken substantial steps to move toward a more open, market-oriented economy and made expansion of the telecommunications infrastructure a high priority. Each country has sought, less successfully than had been hoped, to attract foreign investment and integrate itself more fully with the global economy.

Each country has a number of national security concerns. Turkey and Pakistan both have histories of serious domestic terrorism and persistent conflict with a non-Muslim neighbor.

In spite of the macro-similarities, there are numerous differences between the two countries. Pakistan is considerably poorer and less developed than Turkey; it has had more coups and assassinations, deeper economic troughs, greater heterogeneity within its population, and more endemic corruption.