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All of my colleagues in my studies were pustains, most of them from Afghanistan. That was the tradition because--and this is important to note--there is a school of Islamic jurisprudence and thought called the Diabundi school that began in India soon after Indian independence. It's a fairly strict orientation of Islam. It's also an attempt on the part of the Pakistani scholars to modernize and bring the Islamic teachings into the modern world. One of the Diabundis, Obidulcindi, actually lived in Afghanistan from 1919 to 1923. They have had extensive influence over the thoughts of the Taliban. Because so many of the Diabundi scholars were in Pakistan and they were known to be a high-quality, extremely well-educated people, many of the students from Afghanistan, who were of the madrasa system and were never really well developed, nor did they have the same quality of scholars, would go to Pakistan to study.

I was there. I sought out some well-known scholars. I studied with them. I learned the language of pusto while I was there. It made traveling through Afghanistan rather easy.

I'm sure things have changed since 1979, ten years of Soviet occupation, ten years of civil war. There is something about the relationship between the pustains and the Diabundis' ideas and the madrasa system that is not, in a sense, new. The Taliban may have come into the forefront in the 1990s. The foundation that was behind them, that brought them together, and that gave them an option after everything else was in place many years before that. This is not a new manifestation. I think that for the future they are not going to be a manifestation that's going to disappear either. I think we are going to have to somehow come to terms not necessarily with their brand of Islam, which is odious and not really preferred by a lot of people, yet I don't think it can be written off when we start thinking of new governments, coalitions. I think we will have to come to terms with these ideas. But realize it is not purely a creation of the last 20 years in Afghanistan.

Ray Peppers: May I just take a few seconds? I know everything you've said is absolutely true. I know also that the Islam of the Taliban has its roots in Diabundism. But Diabundism really would not recognize the Taliban's variety of Diabundism.

Gary Bertsch: Reoz, is there anything you would like to add to this conversation.?

Riaz Agha: There has been talk about this madrasa. Pakistan and Afghanistan are poor countries. There are about 7,000 madrasas in Pakistan. There are two kinds of them: one is a school which only gives religious education. Of the 7,000 about 5,000 give all the education up to a certain level. They provide food, clothing, and accommodations for the children. For a poor country, that is very rare and difficult. So about 300,000 to 400,000 children have been brought up in these madrasas.

The religious ones are the ones we talk about so much. We say they preach violence, they don't know women, but the majority of madrasas provide education to children who can't afford it. What I want to say is there is good and there is bad. Which one overtakes the other and at which time is hard to define. But by and large, the madrasas did play a role and they came in during the period of the 18th century when the Palestine war began. The U.S., with the help of the Pakistan Oriasa, set up these majorities. We called them the Freedom Fighters. Today they are terrorists.

The majority of them were poor. They had nothing else to do. There were no more means. They had no money coming in. They were not only from this part of the world; they were from about 20 countries. They were paid to fight against the Russians, and in 1991 when Russia and the United States withdrew, these large groups of people were left to fend for themselves. So the trouble began.

We tried to set up a government in Afghanistan. It lasted for about 2 1/2 to 3 years. Fifty thousand people were killed. They disintegrated, and then the Taliban, which was a student group with perhaps the help of Pakistan and American troops, rose to power. Today they control ninety percent of the very rigid un-Islamic way to teach, to preach, and to practice. History has never shown, from the days of the prophets until now, that there has never been that kind of teaching.

Gary Bertsch: What you're saying, Reoz, is that education is needed for these societies, like all societies? These madrasas were educational institutions that did educate, but they also trained future terrorists. Did they not? The Wall Street Journal reported that these schools were the training grounds for these warriors of this new class of people in Afghanistan. Ray and Reoz and Ken, what are these institutions doing today? Are they training terrorists?

Riaz Agha: I do not think the term terrorist is the correct word. Reuters, the largest news agency in the world , said they would never use the word terrorist. They would use the word murderers, but the word terrorists is an undefined word. There have been groups in Nigeria for the last 60 years; there are groups in Ireland. Are they terrorists? For the groups that are fighting in Ireland, in Nigeria, in Algeria, in Egypt, the Philippines, Indonesia--in most countries there are these groups. Similarly, in the madrasa or out of a number of places grew these people who did not know anything better. And they were paid. OK, they were told, OK, you should die in the name of Islam. If it's a holy war, you go to heaven. Most of them are young., innocent boys, and they went and probably did damage and joined the Taliban. Once you joined the Taliban, you couldn't get out. Those are very restricted, very difficult surroundings. You can never come out. But basically, I don't like the word terrorists. It's hard to define. There is no country where there aren't groups of dissenters.

Gary Bertsch: Let me ask each of you what is the most important thing you would like to share with the students, the citizens here today, to help us understand what's happening in this part of the world, one of the things that we should recognize.

Professor Kenneth Honerkamp: I did not like the Wall Street Jounral's article because it says they were raising a new caste of warriors. The pustains have been a caste of warriors for a thousand years. This is nothing new that you need a madrasa to make a pustain warrior. That's their life. That's how they live, that's the pustain code of honor. The madrasas do not produce this.

The madrasas released pictures, young boys memorizing the Koran, which from our point of view this almost seems extreme. But in their point of view of their world, this was their life. I personally don't believe these madrasas are training terrorists. Camps in Afghanistan, well-organized paid people with particular agendas--yes, without a doubt. But the madrasas have been around for hundreds of years. In fact, the madrasas of Islam are the models around which the universities of Europe were built.

Ray Peppers: And they are absolutely legitimate means of education--they have been throughout existence. But many of hundreds of hundreds of madrasas set up for the refugee children of Afghanistan were not madrasas. I know you know that.

Gary Bertsch: Thank you. Reoz, or Seema, or Reatipuh, what would you like to share?

Riaz Agha: I would first like to thank you for giving us an opportunity to come and talk with you. We have lived here for 23 years and I have not heard the word Pakistan so much as I have in the last 3 weeks. Secondly, there has been a good attempt to speak the word Islam. In the last 33 years, there has been a number of lovely programs explaining Islam. So if there is knowledge, interaction, meeting people, and understanding irrespective of race, color, and religion, I think the world will become closer together. We are a multi-national culture here today. We see a number of us from a number of countries. I think interaction and understanding each other helps people to know and live together. There should be less hate. I think the media should project less hate and more love. In our world there should be more love.

Dr. Anupam Srivastava: To change the tenor of the conversation, I think we are talking about something very important here. On the community level, we need more tolerance and a better understanding of each other. But I am a practitioner, a policy maker. I work with policy makers. I would like to say a couple of general things.

One of the things I teach my students is that one of the hardest things to do is to convince the ruling leadership in any country to legislate change which would undermind their own bases in power. They have no intent to make changes because they are the priviledged lot. This translates across countries, across lines, across issue areas.

The second point is that the people we are discussing in madrasas, the shades of opinions, the kind of indoctrinate training versus the more widely-held view of education that we provide--I think this boils down to the pragmatic level and comes down to the following:

There is a need, regardless of the merits of why they are doing what they are doing and who are the children who are being educated--the fact of the matter is that this is an intellectual breeding ground and I use that connotation deliberately. It has become a breeding ground for an intellectual cognitive thinking that manifests itself later on in very vitriolic forms, in violence, in other things. This is not only happening in Pakistan, in Afghanistan; this is happening all across central Asia right up to Chechnya, some parts of Ismar, down into southeast Asia. There are some dangerous things that are going on down there. The point I'm making is if in an age of globalization, in an age of economic interdependence, when you look at these impoverished countries, you have to look at the bottom line. People would put their money into these countries if there was investor confidence, if there was political stability. Why would you put your money there when you can put your $5 in Belgium where it was safer? In order to attract general economic development of these places, you will need to create political and economic conditions, which requires difficult structural reforms of that country, which is not on the agenda of this discussion or any other discussion that I hear. But it's critical to actively search for viable, pragmatic enduring forms of rehabilitation of those regions.

In physics, we talk about how people resist inertia. You resist change. That is because of a lack of a proper understanding of the other. You want to distinguish yourself from the other, from all other values. That will be an increasingly difficult thing to marry or juxtapose with an economic interdependent world in which we live. Cultural influences flow across borders, capital flows, technology flows, and all kinds of things happen. When we look at Afghanistan or the region in general, we will need to focus on the kind of eclectic secular conception or a more liberal conception of these things and how they should define themselves. In other words, what extent of a state's religious identity should be defining its government function and its function with the rest of the world? We need some sort of separation of church and state. I think that is a very critical issue here. I will leave you to think about that.

Dr. Seema Gahlaut: I would like to pick up and speak to you about some of the economic issues that Dr. Srivastava has brought up. From the experience of India, I tend to see these situations in the longer perspective. I tend to see them as social, political, sometimes economic movements where the terrorists represent certain types of demands. And then at some point in time, there are leaders who always involve religious identities in order to mobilize groups for whatever political or economic goals they have in mind. No matter how many times this happens, the situation always turns into a monster. Leaders have not stopped doing this. I can give you numerous examples where every time a leader has involved a religious or ethnic identity to mobilize their supporters for any cause, it's just gone out of hand. And that's how I tend to see what's happening in south Asia right now.

In a related issue, yes, we should not call everyone who is taught in a madrasa a terrorist. And we should also be very clear that no religion, including Islam, calls upon its people to commit horrible acts on other people. No religion supports terrorism. It's usually a special intrepretation by some people of any religion evoking it in the name of some other goal that causes these kinds of things.

I would like everyone to understand that the acts we have seen perpetrated are not necessarily unique. In fact, in south Asia there are a number of people who have died from these kinds of attacks. Everything from leaving bombs in children's toys, or in crowded areas, or getting into random shootings. All of these things have been of the south Asian scene for a long time. The ebb and the flow--these are movements. If they're given enough publicity and attention, they tend to feed them. The whole point of a terrorist act is to create terror, which means you paralyze the government. You convince the local people to lose faith in their government since they have no ability to administer. You also quiet them down. Basically, you kill all the voices that may be sympathetic to your cause but disagree with your means. That makes you the sole spokesperson for that particular cause. You're basically killing off your own opposition .This has happened time and time again.

Finally, you try to get international attention because you want to internationalize the issue. How the international community responds is important. If they respond with fear, then the terrorist has won, as President Bush keeps saying. In that sense, it should be seen as a movement. Depending upon how we respond to these actions, the terrorists will be encouraged or discouraged. It's a larger process. There is nothing uniue about Islamic fundamentalism, or Muslim fundamentalism, or Jewish fundamentalism. It's not even fundamentalism. It's an acute understanding of religion and using it for political purposes. That's how we're supposed to understand it. This would be my request to all of you.

Gary Bertsch: Let me open the floor to some questions. I would like to ask a quick question though. Can Osma bin Laden be brought to justice?

Riaz Agha: I suppose he can be, but will he? That's a pretty neutral answer.

Ray Peppers: Yes, he can be, but not by our own hands. You have to have good local intelligence, which is someone who is willing to betray him--not a member of his own organization, but someone who knows a member who knows where he is. Someone said finding bin Laden is like finding a needle in a haystack, but that's wrong. You can find a needle in a haystack if you have enough patience.

Dr. Anupam Srivastava: I have a more depressing answer. I think you can find him but it wouldn't make a difference. This is ethnocentric warfare where there are groups of four or five who do not communicate with one another. You cannot track them back. These are not hierarchical systems, and this runs across some 20 countries. He is the most visible and one of the wealthiest and smartest lieutenants in this fight. But like a hydra, you cut off one head and another grows.

Professor Kenneth Honerkamp: I believe there is an opposite of extremism and actually a solution of it. And that's materialism. I believe globalization has a tendency in the same way that possibly American policies in South America tended to generate communism in certain places. In that same way, I think we're seeing extremism from different religions. Unfortunately, when you have nothing to lose, there is no problem becoming an extremist. When you have homes and children, and schools, and a certain material well-being that you would like to protect--let's talk about the children in the madrasas. What have they got to lose? Nothing. We have to seek out ways that may have to undermine some of our own well-being in our country if we are seeking that kind of security.

I lived in Morocco for almost 20 years. Morroco is known for its stability but also its material wealth. Threre's a very large middle class there. You don't hear about Morocco in the news.

I would like everyone to read about who our allies are. I ask everyone to think about and read about these men that make up the Northern Alliance. These men are animals. They have massacred, raped, and killed. They have as many boys in their groups as the Taliban has in theirs. We side with one against the other. But we may be breeding new Osama bin Ladens in our own allies today.

Please read about the history of the Northern Alliance.

?: My question is have we addressed historical information about Afghanistan. How can you remedy the situations? What would we do?

Ray Peppers: I don't think it's going to be hard to get rid of the Taliban. They are exceedingly unpopular and not just with the Northern Alliance. What my friend says about the leaders of the Northern Alliance could not be truer. They are terrible people. They might not be as bad as the Taliban, but maybe they are. No sensible country would want to throw another country to the people of the Northern Alliance. I think the Taliban will go, but we must not consider our job finished as we did when the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. We put money and blood into that fight. When it was over, we left Afghanistan to their own devices. It would be an excellent idea to go to the U.N. Security Council even now and ask them to pledge to help put in an interim government with assurances that there will be a permanence chosen if not by one man, one vote, than some other quasi-democratic process--a government that would somehow represent all of the tribes, all of the complexions, all of the religious strains of Afghanistan and would ensure that neighbors like Iran, Pakistan, and the central Asian republics keep their hands off.