Via Belgravia Dispatch, I see that Greg is taking a look at William Dalrymple's piece in New York Review of Books on the role that madrassas play in international terrorism.

I take issue with Dalrymple's analysis on a number of points as far as the 7/7 bombers are concerned, most notably being that the madrassa at Muridke that Tanweer stayed at, for instance, wasn't just a religious school, it's the undisputed headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the group's "civil service wing," the Markaz ud-Dawaa wal Irshad. Once you understand and accept the connections between the LeT and al-Qaeda, it becomes pretty easy how Tanweer could have gone from being an Islamist into being a terrorist.

More broadly, what I think both Dalrymple and Bergen (whom I think influenced his perceptions of the madrassas) do not understand is that al-Qaeda does not simply a single organization that is always and exclusively focused on attacking Western targets but is instead a network of Islamic terrorist groups pursuing local conflicts (like the "Kashmir jihad" that Dalrymple mentions in the passing) as well as international ones and that this network includes a number of Pakistani organizations including the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Harkat ul-Mujahideen, and so on and so forth. For all of those latter groups, madrassa graduates provide most of the manpower and the cannon fodder and one can only distinguish at great pains between members of the LeT in particular and those of al-Qaeda at their own peril. Other instances of madrassa students providing cannon fodder for terrorist organizations linked to al-Qaeda are that of Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines, Basayev and Khattab's Chechen fighters, and most recently the terrorist groups that are carrying out their own bombing campaign in Bangladesh.

Dalrymple is quite correct to note that a lot of Islamic terrorists come not out of the madrassas but rather out of the hard science curriculums, many of them engineering graduates in the cases of the Egyptians. But I don't think that it's wise to adopt a mutually exclusive position with regard to where terrorists come from. The cannon fodder, particularly that used for guerrilla or at least paramilitary-esque style conflicts are usually made up of madrassa graduates, while many of the actual terrorists such as the bombmakers or the explosives experts tend to come out of the hard sciences. I also think that the US has a vested national security interest in minimizing the influence of or shutting down madrassas directly linked to groups like the Markaz ud-Dawaa wal Irshad if we are seriously interested in minimizing the pool of future al-Qaeda recruits.

One other thing I will say is that I think Marc Sageman's survey is being used far more broadly and authoritatively than I think he ever intended it to, particularly by people who are using it to "prove" that there was no major Iraqi component to international terrorism prior to the US invasion or that madrassa alumni are not a major component for al-Qaeda and its allies. It's a good book and an excellent study, but isn't the end-all be-all when it comes to al-Qaeda.