Further madrassa musings

As kind of a follow-up to my earlier post in response to William Dalrymple's thoughts on madrassas in the New York Review of Books, the Pakistani newspaper Daily Times, as part of its ongoing and excellent coverage of the "Talibanization" of northern Pakistan over the last several years notes that Pakistani colleges like the Government Degree College in Mir Ali, North Waziristan are breeding grounds for al-Qaeda support and that a student from that university was among those fighters killed alongside senior al-Qaeda leader Abu Hamza Rabia, an event that sort of raises some questions in and of itself.

This anecdote is particularly telling:

A senior teacher at the college said that at least one in four families had lost a member to ‘jihad’ and the youth were inspired by the tribesmen against forces fighting the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “The tribal youth are the biggest casualty of the war on terror in FATA. As you know the best education one can get is at home and there is no tribal family without pro-jihadi sentiments,” the teacher told Daily Times.

Now just to be clear, the Government Degree College in Mir Ali isn't a madrassa - I believe it focuses on the hard sciences, which fits with the documented trend in other parts of the world from Egypt to Indonesia on the appeal of Islamism among engineering students for reasons I leave to the sociologists to determine. Most of these guys are never going to carry out terrorist attacks in Western countries, but they are going to serve as the backbone for the next generation of recruits for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their allies like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which I have long argued is all but impossible to disentangle from bin Laden's global network without a great deal of semantics and rhetorical hair-splitting - take a look at this article and try to say with a straight face that the LeT is just focused on Kashmir (with the implications of such a view being that it's okay for them to kill Indians). Unless the war on terrorism involves a comprehensive program, both military and non-military, to completely eradicate these organizations they are just going to regenerate and the conflict is going to be prolonged. A major part of that non-military aspect has to involve efforts to combat the radicalization that is known to occur at any number of Pakistani madrassas known to be under the control of al-Qaeda allies like the Markaz ud-Dawaa wal Irshad or sponsored by the political parties Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islami, both of which are the most radical member groups (and that's saying something right there) of the pro-Taliban MMA coalition that controls the local governments of northern Pakistan.

I should mention, incidentally, that undercutting the influence of nasty NGOs like the Markaz ud-Dawaa wal Irshad was one of the reasons why I called for a major US commitment to humanitarian aid following the South Asian earthquake. Simply speaking, given the impotent and in many cases non-existing nature of the Pakistan health care system to accommodate the disaster, if the US and its allies didn't help the earthquake victims, the jihadi groups and their NGO proxies would, with the end-result being that al-Qaeda would be just as or perhaps even stronger than it was in Pakistan pre-quake, enabling it and its allies to easily recoup from the manpower and logistical losses suffered as a result of the disaster. All of which is, obviously, not in our national security interest.