Lessons from a Decade of Conflict

Looking back at the last ten years, it is tempting to wonder if the world has not learned anything at all about conflict and conflict resolution in that time.

Afghanistan may have been a war of necessity after 9/11, but the international community continues to under-value the need for functioning government institutions to deliver services and justice free from corruption, and consequently the insurgency is now stronger than ever. Pakistan, where millions of people have been displaced by militancy and counter-terrorism activities, enjoys no more stability than ten years ago. Iraq, a thoroughly avoidable war justified through a political abuse of the memory of 9/11, took the lives of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,400 US military, far more Americans than were killed on that fateful day in September 2001.

In monetary terms, these wars alone have cost trillions of US dollars and played no small part in the crippling government debt crisis in America today.

Equally worryingly, universal values took a serious hit over the past decade. We witnessed extrajudicial renditions and imprisonment at the hands of Western governments supposedly dedicated to universal human rights. Even worse, torture became an issue of public debate rather than a moral red line.

Pakistan: Still Schooling Extremists

This is a piece I wrote with my Crisis Group colleague, Samina Ahmed, following the London 7/7 bombings, and which we published in The Washington Post on 17 July 2005.

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Although investigations into the terrorist attacks in London are still at an early stage, it is already clear that at least one of the bombers attended a radical Islamic school, or madrasa, in Pakistan. For those in the West who believed President Pervez Musharraf's promises to clean up the militant religious schools, it is time to think again.

Shehzad Tanweer, who police say killed six people and himself on the Circle Line train near Aldgate station on July 7, recently spent as long as four months in a madrasa reportedly run by the avowedly militant group Lashkar-i-Taiba in Lahore, Pakistan. The madrasa and the organization operate freely despite an official ban on their activity since 2002.

Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, the link between Pakistan's religious education system and international terrorist organizations came under intense scrutiny. Musharraf clearly felt the pressure to be seen as doing something, and in January 2002 he gave a televised speech promising a series of measures to combat extremism by, among other things, bringing all madrasas into the mainstream. Musharraf pledged increased oversight of the religious schools through formal registration, control of their funding and standardization of their curricula.

The world welcomed those promises, but few then checked back to see if they were ever fulfilled.