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Jihad and Jihadism

By Husain Haqqani
The Pakistani governmentâs decision to bar 1,400 foreigners from studying at the countryâs madrasas is not the solution to terrorism. None of the terrorists involved in international attacks linked to Pakistan, even tenuously, over the last several years have been regular foreign madrasa students. Pakistanâs real problem is the training camps established by Jihadist groups in the country, which were tolerated by the Pakistani state for strategic reasons. Some of these camps operated under the cover of madrasas. By focusing on madrasas, and then only on foreigners within the madrasas, Pakistani officials are again missing the opportunity to move forward with a complete roll back of Jihadism.

Blaming foreigners has become a convenient excuse in Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, to avoid condemning the extremist Jihadistsâ ideology of hatred. It is not necessary for everyone in Europe or the Muslim world to agree with all aspects of US or British policy to acknowledge that many Muslims have been so consumed by hatred of the West that they have lost their moral compass. Terrorism is reprehensible. Extremist ideologies that feed, justify or condone terrorism deserve unequivocal condemnation. Instead, non-steps such as expulsion of foreign madrasa students continue to distract Gen Musharrafâs regime.

Pakistanâs madrasas breed hostility towards modernity, produce students without contemporary knowledge, and feed obscurantism. But madrasas have existed for centuries without generating terrorists. Producing theology is not the same as producing radicalism. The reason so many Islamist radicals from all over the world congregated or passed through Pakistan was the strategic decision by Pakistanâs rulers to use Jihad as an instrument of influence in Afghanistan and Kashmir. If Pakistan is to move beyond the phase of officially tolerated Jihadism, it is not the madrasas but the training camps and the militias spawned by them that need to be shut down.