Chris Mason is professor of national security affairs and the director of the Study of Internal Conflict (SOIC) at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he researches, writes, and teaches on civil wars, insurgencies, and modern and historical India. He has published extensively on South Asia, focusing on Afghanistan, India, and the nineteenth and twentieth century borderlands between them. Dr. Mason is a retired Foreign Service Officer with a PhD in imperial and colonial history from the George Washington University in Washington, DC.