These cell-by-cell outcomes may have much more impact on the overall potency of al Qaeda violence than changes in Middle East education or job creation -- certainly in the near term, and perhaps in the long term as well. Sageman also argues persuasively that just as European socialist parties and democratic communist parties helped to isolate Soviet-backed communists and radical Marxist cells, so should the United States explore how to use peaceful, radical Muslim political movements to cut off jihadists from popular support. Secular Arab governments have used such strategies successfully, as did European colonial administrations in the Middle East before them. Debate about such nuanced political strategies in the United States since Sept. 11 has barely developed; Sageman's contribution is helpful.
As for Iraq, it "is a great opportunity but also a great danger," Sageman concludes. Its success as a democracy may indeed alter Middle Eastern politics for the better, he thinks, but Iraq may also become a new "Peshawar or Khartoum . . . where the excitement for the jihad is renewed." The al Qaeda visible in Sageman's analysis is more movement than organization, an "imagined community," in the phrase of anthropologist Benedict Anderson, increasingly located not in any one geographical place but in the virtual and global space of the World Wide Web -- continually reaffirmed by cliques of angry young Muslim men tapping their keyboards in Internet cafés from Rabat to Riyadh to Jakarta.
Yet if there is any one country that matters most to al Qaeda's future, argue Mariam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy in Islamist Networks, it is Pakistan, where "the fate of the last jihadists" trained and inspired before Sept. 11 "is being played out." The "Pakistanization of al Qaeda," as the authors call it, is rooted in 20 years of collaboration between elements of the Pakistan army and intelligence service and the radical Islamist movements that birthed and nurtured bin Laden's organization. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, contradictions long submerged and unresolved in Pakistan are surfacing as open conflict -- as in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl and the recent assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf.
Zahab, a French specialist on Pakistan, and her colleague Roy, an accomplished scholar on political Islam, argue that in Pakistan -- unlike in other countries where al Qaeda has recruited and thrived -- "the state and the Islamist movements had common interests," namely, political control of Afghanistan and Islamic revolution in Kashmir.
Before Sept. 11, bin Laden targeted the United States while his lesser-known Pakistani allies -- radical groups such as Lashkar-e Jhangvi, Harakat al Mujaheddin al Alami and others -- concentrated on Kashmir. Now these Pakistani groups have more fully fused with al Qaeda under pressure from Musharraf, who in turn is acting under heavy pressure from Washington. The groups are responding by trying to kill Musharraf, sheltering fugitive al Qaeda leaders and organizing regional attacks against Western and Indian targets.
In a richly detailed analysis of the recruitment patterns among the Pakistani groups, Zahab and Roy report that, contrary to popular belief, the great majority of violent Pakistani jihadists have come not from the madrassas but from dysfunctional state schools or private, semi-commercial English-language schools promising a modern education in exchange for religious indoctrination. (In Sageman's more global sample, too, only 17 percent of the terrorists he examined had Islamic religious primary or secondary education; the rest went to secular schools.) For Pakistan's floundering, desperate lower-middle classes, jihad can offer a path to upward social mobility, since "the family of a martyr acquires a privileged position" in local towns and villages, often including financial support. Islamist Networks is a thin work, more a journal article between hard covers than a fully formed book. Still, especially read with Roy's other lectures and published work, it is nourishing.
Iraq is commonly described as a hinge conflict that will decide al Qaeda's future, but Zahab and Roy place more weight on the current peace talks between India and Pakistan, especially the talks about Kashmir's future. Unless those negotiations succeed, Pakistan's army will again "need the jihadis to put pressure on India," they fear, reviving the cycles of violence and state support that strengthened al Qaeda in the past. In the meantime, they argue convincingly, while Iraq's insurgency may be of rising importance, Pakistan "continues to be the central point of mobilisation of the Islamic radicals." •
Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post, is the author of "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001."
