http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/08/unholy-war-culture/

The Mumbai massacre postmortem is wide of the mark. Of course, it’s Pakistan. And of course it’s Pakistani extremists. We knew that before the siege was over by talking to Pakistani sources in Islamabad and Peshawar. But it’s not one group; it’s a culture that the United States helped create during the Cold War.

Almost 100,000 young boys are graduated every year from some 12,000 madrassas, Koranic schools in which the sole discipline is the Koran, which they have to learn by heart.

The curriculum is larded with slogans about the hated American, Indian and Israeli infidels who are out to destroy Islam. Sons of poor and jobless parents who can’t afford school fees, they get a free meal and learn how to read and write in a dirt-poor country with low literacy, high unemployment, and still higher inflation.

Madrassas are free, including one meal a day. Most of them leave these religious schools at 16 and are easy prey for recruiters from politico-religious extremist movements.

It all goes back to the clandestine war the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan fought together against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89). The coalition’s secret weapon: Islam and the cult of jihad.

In the early stages of the Soviet invasion and occupation, many of the Soviet troops were drawn from the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. It was a colonial configuration: brown faces with white officers.

The anti-Soviet resistance, funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia to the tune of $1 billion a year (which was real money in those days), flooded towns occupied by the Soviets with Korans and pamphlets declaring jihad, or holy war, against the Russian occupier.

These also appealed to potential recruits for jihad throughout the Arab world. That was Osama bin Laden’s main contribution to the anti-Soviet war effort. Using family funds from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden paid for their trips to Peshawar where he kept a roster of volunteers and their next of kin. Al Qaeda propaganda to the contrary, bin Laden didn’t see much action against the Red Army. But it wasn’t long before Moscow decided to replace its brown faces with more trustworthy Soviet Caucasians.

At the same time, Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq (killed in a mysterious place crash in 1988) decided to erect what he called ideological and religious barriers against the penetration of communist ideology. Hence, the creation of madrassas, Koranic schools, along the Pakistani-Afghan border. Zia also took advantage of the clash of ideologies to appoint Islamic chaplains at battalion level throughout the army in a drive to Islamacize the armed forces.