THE NATURE OF THE BUSH REGIME IS INCOMPANTIBLE WITH ISLAM-- AND WITH EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD THAT VARIES FROM ITS OWN NARROW WORLD VIEW

You may know Akbar Ahmed as a frequent guest of CNN's (or from an Oprah, NPR, or Nightline appearance). He was once Pakistan's ambassador to the U.K. and is now chairman of Islamic studies at American University in DC and the author of many books, most recently, Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization. He is definately one of academia's leading authorities on contemporary Islam, has advised Bush on the subject and is a fellow at the Brookings Institution. This morning he has an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Bush Still Doesn't Get It. He gives Bush the benefit of the doubt, at least as far as intentions, but poses the question, "What went wrong?"

The problem is that Bush has relied on ill-informed advisers and out-of-touch experts. By substituting their false expertise for his own sensible intuitions, he has failed to understand the Muslim world-- which means he has failed to understand the arena in which the first post-9/11 presidency will be judged. Instead of seriously explaining Muslim societies that are profoundly split in complex ways, Bush's aides have offered a fatally flawed stereotype of Islam as monolithic and violent.

Ambassador Ahmed need look no further than the writing of fanatics like former CIA analyst Michael Scheur if he'd like to put Bush's thoughts into some kind of apocalyptic context. Scheur's book, Imperial Hubris pretty much paints Bush to be an incompetent pansy and a complete national security failure. Sounds about right, correct? Well... he's coming at it from a different perspective:

Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills-- all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. Land mines, moreover, will be massively reintroduced to seal borders and mountain passes too long, high or numerous to close with U.S. soldiers. As noted, such actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations and refugee flows.

According to Dr. Ahmed Muslim fundamentalists, or as he terms them "the literalists," are now the rising force inside Muslim society.

This group also arose in the 19th century, but it draws its ethos, attitudes and rhetoric from one central perception: that Islam is under attack. It sees Western ideas such as liberalism, women's rights and democracy as threats, not opportunities. In response to the incursions into the Muslim world of the great Western empires, this group sought to draw firm boundaries around Islam and prevent it from being infected by alien influences. The literalist worldview has inspired a range of Muslim activists, from the Taliban to mainstream political parties such as South Asia's Jamaat-i-Islami, which participate in elections while producing influential tracts on Islam. While this entire school's theology is profoundly traditional, only a tiny minority of the group advocates terrorism. The vast majority of Muslim literalists simply want to live according to what they see as the best traditions of their faith.

But you're more likely to see media images of bearded young men wearing skullcaps and yelling "God is great" and "Death to the Great Satan" than you are to see scholars at work. The angry activists are now on the ascendancy, according to our study. The reasons for their rise are complex: the incompetence and corruption of modernist Muslim leaders from Egypt to Pakistan to Southeast Asia; the widening gap between a crooked elite and the rest of the population; the absence of decent schools, economic opportunities and social welfare programs; and the failure of modernist leaders to douse burning regional conflicts such as Chechnya, Kashmir and Palestine.

The U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan poured gallons of fuel on a worldwide fire. Bush's wars gave the literalists support for their claim that Islam is under siege; the crude Muslim-bashing of some of Bush's supporters helps the literalists argue that Islam is also being attacked by the Western media, which many Muslims believe represents the thinking of the West's citizenry.

Dr. Ahmed's studies show an odd disconnect between how Muslims see America and how Americans see the Muslim world. Muslims are very aware of  "the cloddish Republican talking points branding Muslims as 'Islamofascists'" and they feel threatened.

Remember Jerry Falwell's post-9/11 abuse of the prophet, in which the late televangelist dismissed as a "terrorist" the man whom Muslims named as their foremost role model in our questionnaires? Such slurs helped boost Pakistani religious parties in the 2002 elections in Northwest Frontier Province, where the clerics had never before won more than a few seats. Overnight, the Taliban found a friendly base.

Americans who think that all Muslims hate the United States may be surprised to hear that many Muslims believe they have it precisely backward. Our questionnaires showed that Muslims worldwide viewed Islamophobia in the West as the No. 1 threat they faced. Many Muslims told us that the Western media depict them as terrorists or likens them to Nazis.

Here he will find agreement with Scheur-- that bin-Laden's success in winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim masses, and here he has succeeded where Bush has failed so dismally-- has to do with Muslims feeling under seige and in need of fighting a defensive jihad against the "rapacious" Crusaders. And, like Scheur, he blames hubris and, like him, suggests dealing with the Muslim literalists seriously and on a basis derived from reality.

Dr. Ahmed, of course, doesn't advocate the rivers of blood and razing of infrastructure that Scheur predicts. He says "we need to marginalize the violent fringe and build deeper ties with mainstream literalists who are suspicious of the West but shun violence."

Take U.S. aid to Pakistan, which has added up to about $10 billon since 9/11. Much of this goes toward buying gunships and tanks, which ordinary Pakistanis say are used against them. In other words, U.S. aid is being used in ways that boost anti-Americanism-- hardly a smart policy. Instead, the United States should stipulate that half of its aid go to building up Pakistan's tattered educational structures, with a special focus on madrassas that eschew violence. Overnight, hearts and minds would begin to change; Muslims hold education especially dear, and if governments won't provide it, parents will be tempted to go to whomever will.

He urges Bush to pursue dialogue if he wants to avert disaster. I'm less certain than Dr. Ahmed is that Bush does want to avert disaster. After all, it would prove, at least to his cronies, that he was right all along.


UPDATE: DO THEY HATE US?

I graduated from college in 1969. I didn't bother to go to my graduation ceremony-- or my last couple of months of classes; I just headed for Europe. And after a nice summer driving around Spain, France, Germany, Portugal, England, Morocco, I was off-- for two years-- for a drive through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. I was literally broke-- penniless-- but I never lacked for food or a place to stay. The hospitality, particularly in Muslim communities, was unstinting and effusive. I was made to feel like I was doing them a favor by eating their food, sharing their homes, smoking their hashish.

When I got to Lahore Mohsin Hamid hadn't been born yet. Today the Pakistani novelist (and summa cum laude graduate of Princeton), who lives in London, is also featured in the Post examining the animosity between Muslims and Americans in an essay Why Do They Hate Us? He recently found himself the recipient of the same kind of hospitality in Dallas that I found in the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Like Ambassador Ahmed and Michael Scheur, Mohsin Hamid comes to the conclusion that much of the problem between Muslims and Americans is based on nothing more mysterious than American policies towards them-- "the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans. They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences."

When he was 9, Hamid's family moved from the U.S. back to Lahore in Pakistan, not far from the Afghan border/war. "The U.S. government, concerned about Afghanistan's proximity to the oil-rich Persian Gulf and eager to avenge the humiliating debacle of the Vietnam War, decided to respond" to the invasion of that country by the Soviet Union.

Building on President Jimmy Carter's tough line, President Ronald Reagan offered billions of dollars in economic aid and sophisticated weapons to Pakistan's dictator, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. In exchange, Zia supported the mujaheddin, the Afghan guerrillas waging a modern-day holy war against the Soviet occupation. With the help of the CIA, jihadist training camps sprung up in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Soon Kalashnikov assault rifles from those camps began to flood the streets of Lahore, setting in motion a crime wave that put an end to my days of pedaling unsupervised through the streets.

Meanwhile, Zia began an ongoing attempt to Islamize Pakistan and thus make it a more fertile breeding ground for the anti-Soviet jihad. Public female dance performances were banned, female newscasters were told to cover their heads and laws undermining women's rights were passed. Secular politicians, academics and journalists were intimidated, imprisoned and worse.

One part of this was particularly unpleasant for those of us entering our teens: the angry groups of bearded men who began enforcing their own morality codes. They made going on dates risky, even in a fun-loving city such as Lahore. Meanwhile, a surge of cheap heroin-- the currency often used to buy the allegiance of Afghan warlords-- meant that Pakistan went from having virtually no addicts when I was 9 to having more than a million by the time I completed high school, according to a lecture that a U.S. drug-enforcement official gave at my school.

...Eighteen years later, most people I meet in the United States are astounded to learn that the period ever occurred. But in Pakistan, it is vividly seared into the national memory. Indeed, it has torn the very fabric of what, when I was born, was a relatively liberal country with nightclubs, casinos and legal alcohol.

The residue of U.S. foreign policy coats much of the world. It is the other part of the answer to the question, "Why do they hate us?" Simply because America has-- often for what seemed good reasons at the time-- intervened to shape the destinies of other countries and then, as a nation, walked away.

Hamid's solution? "Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values... The challenge that the United States faces today boils down to a choice. It can insist on its primacy as a superpower, or it can accept the universality of its values. If it chooses the former, it will heighten the resentment of foreigners and increase the likelihood of visiting disaster upon distant populations-- and vice versa. If it chooses the latter, it will discover something it appears to have forgotten: that the world is full of potential allies."