ABSTRACT
A prominent and unusually discerning Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid, just visited Washington. Ahmed Rashid calls the spread of the movement “Talibanization,” because of the way in which the radical fundamentalist Taliban movement, which runs Afghanistan like the most retrogressive of medieval states, supports the training of Islamic terrorists far beyond its borders. The US government is obsessed with one Saudi-Afghan terrorist leader, Osama bin Laden, but, since it abandoned its Afghan “freedom fighters” once the Soviets left, it has little grasped the larger picture. “A new Great Game is being played in the region,” Rashid says, referring to the nineteenth-century fight over Central Asia by the English, the Germans and the Russians. Ahmed Rashid, for instance, talks about how the Afghan Islamic extremists came directly out of the “madrassah” schools. Originally formed as a response to the war, these cloistered Islamic schools sprung up all over Afghanistan and then Pakistan.
