Asia: Soft States

Nearly a third of the world's people live in the great arc of eleven nations that stretches beneath the southern rim of Russia and China. From Pakistan to Indonesia, the countries of South Asia seem, however, to have more than two-thirds of the world's problems: grinding poverty, ruinous population growth, feeble economies, the burden of colonial pasts and, in Southeast Asia, armed Communist aggressors. In a new book published this week, Asian Drama, Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal suggests that the bulk of South Asia's troubles lie not so much in history or...