An antibody for suicide bombers

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There is a cancer lurking in the Muslim world. It is the madrassa movement. It is creating suicide bombers on a production line basis. It must be checkmated, and it can be at a fairly low cost.

The madrassa movement is the establishment of schools dedicated to teaching the Koran by memorization. It teaches no marketable skills, and most graduates come out largely illiterate except for memorization and jihadist indoctrination. They are brainwashed candidates for the suicide-bombing program. In many poor Muslim countries, it is the only form of education that they will receive. In many areas, it is the only choice a parent has because it is available and free. Robert Kaplan's article on Bangladesh in the January issue of Atlantic Magazine describes this in some detail; if this cancer can radicalize the relatively laid-back Bangladeshis, it is very dangerous indeed.

In many Muslim countries where girl babies are discouraged and ultrasound technology has been able to discern the sex of a baby, girls are at a premium. An uneducated young man has no dowry has little prospects of a bride or a job. The promise of life everlasting and seventy-two virgin brides that these "schools" are teaching must be enticing.

Put yourself in their shoes; you are a young man with no job prospects and no education. You have no chance of attracting a wife. You are promised a ticket to paradise. What would you do? The question for us is, "how do we counter it?" Closing the schools is not the answer. The governments involved would only make martyrs of them or drive them underground; we need antibodies. We need positive ideas to counter this nonsense. To date, we have been using the combination of carrots and sticks to try to force our will on a culture that we do not well understand. I have run this idea through a number of respected Muslim-American scholars; they think it has potential.

We should fund a series of academies in each locality where a madrassa school exists. Its curriculum would be two pronged. Mornings would teach the three "Rs." Afternoons would be devoted to some kind of vocational training such as masonry, electrical work, and carpentry. The graduates would come out being able to read and write along with a marketable skill. The Madressssahas would not be able to compete.

Skeptics would claim that subsidizing foreign schooling will break the bank. This is not true. One of the problems in many developing Muslim countries is that they have a surplus of educated young men with no job prospects. We need to remember, that the Sept. 11 attackers were largely not illiterate peasants; they were educated middle class underemployed men who had too much time on their hands. The salary level that the candidates would accept is well within our budget as is the cost of half a day's time for local artisans to do vocational training.

We might even add some Muslim lecturers to the curriculum. We are referring here to those Muslim clergy who have a true view of the Koran's intent rather than the perverted view of the jihadists. The cost would be very affordable. We could run experimental programs in Bangladesh and Pakistan head to head with the Islamic schools to see if they would measurably drop jihadist institutions for about $4 million. This is "chump change" compared to the military hardware expended to date. I have enough government service to know that the best way to justify a program is a cost-benefit analysis. We should try a program such as this in Pakistan and Bangladesh in several provinces where there are heavy Madrassa influences. Pakistan is the near fight; Bangladesh is the future campaign. I'd poll the residents before the program is instituted and after a year of implementation. If the program does not poll well, we could abandon the experiment at low cost. If the polls are high, we press on and expend the program; that is the value of experimentation.

If we are truly in a long war, we need to think in the long term. We Americans are superb tacticians, but we often have cloudy strategic vision. The major exception to this was the bipartisan containment strategy of the Cold War, of which the Marshall Plan was a major non military component. If we can prevent making more terrorists early our tax dollars are better spent than risking lives and valuable munitions early, than trying to kill them later.

Gary Anderson, a retired Marine who has studied al Qaeda under U.S. government contract, teaches military affairs at George Washington University.