Homeland Security Focus Areas

Education and Training

NYTimes.com

June 2, 2008

State Dept. Reinstates Gaza Fulbright Grants

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — The American State Department has reinstated seven Fulbright grants offered to Palestinians in Gaza for advanced study in the United States, reversing a decision to withdraw the scholarships because of Israel’s ban on Palestinians’ leaving Gaza for study abroad.

The American Consulate in Jerusalem sent e-mail messages on Sunday night to all seven telling them it was “working closely” with Israeli officials to secure them exit permits. Maj. Peter Lerner, spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry’s office of civilian affairs, said the Gazans would be granted permits after individual security checks.

On Thursday the seven received e-mail messages saying the grants had been “redirected” because of Israel’s closing of Gaza, an area run by the militant anti-Israel group Hamas. The closing, an effort to punish Hamas for its rocket and mortar barrages of southern Israel, prevents Palestinians from leaving Gaza except for medical emergencies.

But after word of the grant withdrawals got out, senior American and Israeli officials expressed surprise and outrage, saying that training ambitious and talented young people under Fulbright grants was one of the ways to help blunt the appeal of radical forces in Palestinian society.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she was surprised to hear of the withdrawals, adding: “If you cannot engage young people and give complete horizons to their expectations and their dreams, I don’t know that there would be any future for Palestine. We will take a look. I am a huge supporter of Fulbrights.”

Tom Casey, a spokesman for the State Department, said because the seven Gazans had already been thoroughly evaluated for one of the most prestigious foreign educational programs run by the United States, “It ought to be falling off a log for them to be able to do this.”

On Wednesday, the education committee of Israel’s Parliament held a hearing on student movement out of Gaza, with many members saying they were horrified by the policy barring students from leaving. They asked the Defense Ministry to reconsider the policy and report back in two weeks.

Abdulrahman Abdullah, one of the Fulbright recipients in Gaza, said that when the consulate’s e-mail message arrived he had been in the middle of corresponding with Fulbright winners around the world who were mounting a campaign in support of the Gazans.

“Suddenly I got this e-mail, and then I told them I had succeeded in this long battle,” he said. Mr. Abdullah, 30, had been trying to get a grant for five years and plans to pursue an M.B.A. at one of several American universities.

Like the others who got the good news on Sunday, however, he said he could not be truly happy until the other 600 or so Gazans with grants to study abroad also got out.

Major Lerner said that the policy toward study abroad for Gazans was under review and could change, but that the case of the seven Fulbright scholars was accelerated. He cited their tight timetable, but it seems likely that the political pressure played a role.

Sari Bashi, who runs an Israeli organization called Gisha, which focuses on the free movement of Palestinians, said that while the group welcomed the decision to let out the seven Fulbright winners, “Gisha calls on Israel to allow all Palestinian students accepted to universities abroad to exercise their right to leave Gaza and access education, in order to obtain the tools they need to build a better future in the region.”

On Monday, Israel’s Supreme Court will hear petitions brought by Gisha on behalf of two students seeking exit permits for study programs in Germany and Britain. Since January, Ms. Bashi said, almost no students have gotten out of Gaza for such study.

Taghreed el-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza.

NYTimes.com

May 4, 2008 

Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Vision of Islam

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

KARACHI, Pakistan — Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.

He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.

“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”

But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.

Mr. Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.

Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get.

At present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free but require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their children to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid organizations, offer free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some have radical agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is rejecting public schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and choosing from a new array of private schools.

The Turkish schools, which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan since the first one opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on their own. But they offer an alternative approach that could help reduce the influence of Islamic extremists.

They prescribe a strong Western curriculum, with courses, taught in English, from math and science to English literature and Shakespeare. They do not teach religion beyond the one class in Islamic studies that is required by the state. Unlike British-style private schools, however, they encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set examples in lifestyle and prayer.

“Whatever the West has of science, let our kids have it,” said Erkam Aytav, a Turk who works in the new schools. “But let our kids have their religion as well.”

That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in Quetta, a frontier town near the Afghan border, took his son out of an elite military school, because it was too authoritarian and did not sufficiently encourage Islam, and put him in the Turkish school, called PakTurk.

“Private schools can’t make our sons good Muslims,” Mr. Niazi said, sitting on the floor in a Quetta house. “Religious schools can’t give them modern education. PakTurk does both.”

The model is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. A preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69, comes from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of Islam. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting in trouble with secular Turkish officials.

Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr. Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”

The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s. Islamic thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the faith they were trying to defend. In the 1950s, while Arab Islamic intellectuals like Sayyid Qutub were firmly rejecting the West, Turkish ones like Said Nursi were seeking ways to coexist with it.

In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with radicalism — the American reporter Daniel Pearl was killed here, and the famed Binori madrasa here is said to have sheltered Osama bin Laden — the two approaches compete daily.

The Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr. Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost as soon as he began. The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle America.

“They asked me several times, ‘Are they Muslim? Do they pray? Are they drinking at night?’ ” said Ali Showkat, a vice principal of the school, who is Pakistani.

Goats nap by piles of rubbish near the school’s entrance, and Mr. Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.” When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic.

“I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ ” Mr. Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The two men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there was no difference between a tie and glasses.

“Behind their words there was no Hadith,” he said, referring to a set of Islamic texts, “only misunderstanding.”

That misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the poorest parts of Quetta. Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam from a religious family, lives in a neighborhood without electricity or running water. Two brothers from his tribe were killed on a suicide mission, leaving their mother a beggar and angering Mr. Bari, who says a Muslim’s first duty is to his mother and his family.

“Our nation has no patience,” said Mr. Bari, who raised his seven younger siblings, after his father died suddenly a dozen years ago. He decided that one of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in the Turkish school.

The Turks put the focus on academics, which pleased Mr. Bari, who said his dream was for Saadudeen, his brother, to lift the family out of poverty and expand its horizons beyond religion. Mr. Bari’s title, hafiz, means he has memorized the entire Koran, though he has no formal education. Two other brothers have earned the same distinction. Their father was an imam.

His is a lonely mission in a neighborhood where nearly all the residents are illiterate and most disapprove of his choices, Mr. Bari said. He is constantly on guard against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for flying kites with the wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the teenager is supervised around the clock in a dormitory.

“They are totally against extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They are true Muslims. They will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll deal with people with justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”

Illiteracy is one of the roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said Matiullah Aail, a religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina University in Saudi Arabia.

In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated province, the literacy rate is less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a government official in the Pasheen district. He estimated that about half of the district’s children attended madrasas.

Mr. Aail said: “Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But when it comes to mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications. They don’t have knowledge, but they are influential.”

That leads to a skewed interpretation of Islam, even by those schooled in it, according to Mr. Gulen and his followers.

“They’ve memorized the entire holy book, but they don’t understand its meaning,” said Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.

Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education.”

In an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their fundamental interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes.”

Moderate as that sounds, some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to advance his own political agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen “sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God,” and described Mr. Gulen’s followers as “Muslim Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run the country.

Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker assessment.

“The purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim world.”

But while radical Islamists seek to re-establish a seventh-century Islamic caliphate, without nations or borders, and more moderate Islamists, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, use secular democracy to achieve the goal of an Islamic state, Mr. Gulen is a nationalist who says he wants no more than a secular democracy where citizens are free to worship, a claim secular Turks find highly suspect.

Still, his schools are richly supported by Turkish businessmen. M. Ihsan Kalkavan, a shipping magnate who has built hotels in Nigeria, helped finance Gulen schools there, which he said had attracted the children of the Nigerian elite.

“When we take our education experiment to other countries, we introduce ourselves. We say, ‘See, we’re not terrorists.’ When people get to know us, things change,” Mr. Kalkavan said in his office in Istanbul.

He estimated the number of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey at three million to five million. The network itself does not provide estimates, and Mr. Gulen declined to be interviewed.

The schools, which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote interfaith understanding. Mr. Gulen met the previous pope, as well as Jewish and Orthodox Christian leaders, and teachers in the schools say they stress multiculturalism and universal values.

“We are all humans,” said Mr. Kacmaz, the principal. “In Islam, every human being is very important.”

Pakistani society is changing fast, and more Pakistanis are realizing the importance of education, in part because they have more to lose, parents said. Abrar Awan, whose son is attending the Turkish school in Quetta, said he had grown tired of the attitude of the Islamic political parties he belonged to as a student. Now a government employee with a steady job, he sees real life as more complicated than black-and-white ideology.

“America or the West was always behind every fault, every problem,” he said, at a gathering of fathers in April. “Now, in my practical life, I know the faults are within us.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Karachi and Quetta in Pakistan and from Istanbul.

NYTimes.com

March 2, 2008 

U.S. Plan Widens Role in Training Pakistani Forces

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The United States military is developing a plan to send about 100 American trainers to work with a Pakistani paramilitary force that is the vanguard in the fight against Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Pakistan’s restive tribal areas, American military officials said.

Pakistan has ruled out allowing American combat troops to fight Qaeda and Taliban militants in the tribal areas. But Pakistani leaders have privately indicated that they would welcome additional American trainers to help teach new skills to Pakistani soldiers whose army was tailored not for counterinsurgency but to fight a conventional land war against India.

Even though the training program would unfold over several months, it is being disclosed at a time of heightened operations in the unruly tribal areas along the Afghan border. At least eight people suspected of being Islamic militants were killed Thursday in a triple missile attack on a house used for training in the tribal areas.

For several years, small teams of American Special Operations forces have trained their Pakistani counterparts in counterinsurgency tactics. But the 40-page classified plan now under review at the United States Central Command to help train the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force of about 85,000 members recruited from ethnic groups on the border, would significantly increase the size and scope of the American training role in the country.

United States trainers initially would be restricted to training compounds, but with Pakistani consent could eventually accompany Pakistani troops on missions “to the point of contact” with militants, as American trainers now do with Iraqi troops in Iraq, a senior American military official said. Britain is also considering a similar training mission in Pakistan, officials said. A spokesman at the British Embassy here declined to comment.

“The U.S. is bringing in a small number of trainers to assist Pakistan in their efforts to improve training of the Frontier Corps,” Elizabeth O. Colton, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Islamabad, said in an e-mail message. “The U.S. trainers will be primarily focused on assisting the Pakistan cadre who will do the actual training of the Frontier Corps troops.”

Ms. Colton declined to specify how many American trainers would participate or where their bases would be. But Defense Department officials said that the number of American trainers could grow to about 100. Along with intensified missile strikes in Pakistan against suspected militants, the increased training program is another sign of the Bush administration’s growing concern and frustration with Pakistan’s failure to do more about Al Qaeda’s movements in the tribal areas.

The proposed expanded training program is modest compared with the training efforts under way in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is said to offer scant likelihood of blossoming into a much larger American combat presence. American officials are also acutely aware of Pakistani sensitivities to any United States military presence in the country, even trainers, and spoke largely on the basis of anonymity because of the diplomatic concerns and because the plan had not been formally approved.

Until now, American officials have worked closely with President Pervez Musharraf on counterterrorism policies, including training programs. The landslide victory by Pakistan’s opposition parties in last month’s parliamentary elections adds a degree of complication and confusion to any long-term military planning of this sort because it is unclear to what extent new leaders, like Asif Ali Zardari, the head of the victorious Pakistan Peoples Party and the widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, will embrace those policies.

American officials are also taking a number of other steps to help increase Pakistan’s long-term ability to battle a newly resurgent Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in the tribal areas.

At the request of Pakistan’s new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Central Command two weeks ago sent a four-member intelligence team, led by a lieutenant colonel, to work closely with Pakistani intelligence officers in Islamabad. The Americans are helping with techniques on sharing satellite imagery and addressing Pakistani requests to buy equipment used to intercept the militants’ communications, a senior American officer said.

The United States is also helping to establish border coordination centers in Afghanistan just across the Pakistan border, where Afghan, Pakistani and American officials can share intelligence about Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups in and around the tribal areas.

The Pentagon has spent about $25 million so far to equip the Frontier Corps with new body armor, vehicles, radios and surveillance equipment, and plans to spend $75 million more in the next year. Over all, a senior Bush administration official said, the United States could spend more than $400 million in the next several years to enhance the Frontier Corps, including building a training base near Peshawar.

The training proposal now under review at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., which oversees military operations in the Middle East and much of South Asia, is subject to the approval of the commander, Adm. William J. Fallon, and top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Admiral Fallon said in an interview at his headquarters last week that additional trainers would be part of “a comprehensive approach” to address Pakistan’s security needs. “They want to do as much of this as they can themselves,” Admiral Fallon said.

Pakistani officials said they were aware of the Pentagon’s general offer for more trainers, but were not familiar with the details of the Central Command plan.

That document, titled “Plan for Training the Frontier Corps,” envisions a combination of Special Forces and regular Army troops working with the Frontier Corps in basic marksmanship, infantry skills and counterinsurgency techniques, Defense Department officials said.

Until recently, the Frontier Corps had not received American military financing because the corps technically falls under the Pakistani Interior Ministry, a nonmilitary agency that the Pentagon ordinarily does not deal with. But American and Pakistani officials say the Frontier Corps is drawn from Pashtun tribesmen, who know the language and culture of the tribal areas, and in the long term is the most suitable force to combat an insurgency there.

American and Pakistani officials acknowledge that it will take several years to build the Frontier Corps into an effective counterinsurgency. American officials say they have seen some Frontier Corps members wearing sandals on patrol and wielding barely functional Kalashnikov rifles with little ammunition.

The need for the training is evident. In January, hundreds of Islamic militants attacked a paramilitary fort in the restive South Waziristan tribal region in northwest Pakistan, killing 22 soldiers and taking several others hostage. A Pentagon official said the fort was overrun in part because the commander had failed to range his artillery properly before the attack.

“Pakistani military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas have had limited effect on Al Qaeda,” Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. “Pakistan recognizes the threat and realizes the need to develop more effective counterinsurgency and counterterrorism capabilities to complement their conventional forces.”

Robert L. Grenier, a former director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, told a panel of the Council on Foreign Relations last week that any high-profile American military presence in the tribal areas or the neighboring North-West Frontier Province would be “the kiss of death.”

But Pakistan, he said, would welcome small numbers of trainers who kept a low profile, and were not involved in combat operations. “To an increasing degree as they see that it doesn’t cause the sky to fall, they will be willing to accept low-level support from the Americans, particularly in the form of training,” said Mr. Grenier, a former C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad.

Mr. Grenier added that the role American trainers played would rest largely with General Kayani, the new army chief. “He’s a very conservative, very cautious fellow,” Mr. Grenier said. “He will want to make his own decisions as to what is sustainable and what is not in the way of U.S. support.”

The Washington Times

Article published Feb 28, 2008

Spy search to spotlight on diversity

February 28, 2008

By Sara Carter - The best spies were once well-heeled students recruited from the East Coast's Ivy League universities.

That thinking has changed.

The intelligence community's need for prospects fluent in languages ranging from Arabic to Chinese, and with varying skin colors and religious backgrounds, has forced it to expand its pool of schools.

"There are gold nuggets out there who we overlooked, and we don't want to do that anymore," said Lenora Peters Gant, who is leading an effort by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to broaden the search for intelligence professionals.

To do so, ODNI, which oversees the United States' 16 intelligence agencies, is pumping money into 10 universities that offer national security degrees through its fledgling Centers of Academic Excellence (CAE) grant program.

"This was one way to tap women, first- and second-generation foreign students and other minorities," said Ms. Gant, CAE director. She added that the previous focus on predominantly white universities was a limiting relic of the community's pre-September 11, Cold War mind-set.

Mark Clark, director of the National Security Studies program at California State University in San Bernardino, says finding students with the aptitude to work in the intelligence community "might lead to the unsuspecting kid next door."

"With this funding, we are able to send our students to study foreign language abroad," said Mr. Clark, who speaks Russian fluently. "Many American students have never traveled outside the U.S. The assistance opens up the world to them."

Based on ODNI criteria, students in Mr. Clark's program can study counterterrorism, homeland security, counterintelligence and risk analysis, as well as other skills.

The idea that the agencies are solely looking for covert operatives is "a myth," said Ms. Gant, emphasizing graduates can become State Department analysts, Capitol Hill aides or civilian Pentagon employees.

The intelligence community is looking for people with the ability to bring a different perspective to the war on terror.

"Many of these students come from a diverse background, are less well-heeled, rough around the edges," said an intelligence official who participated in Mr. Clark's program.

Mr. Clark's program "was very Soviet centric" and now, "post 9/11, with non-state actors of terrorism" it has shifted, the intelligence official said.

"Back then the threat was known and quantifiable," said the intelligence professional, whose focus now is in terrorism. "In many ways, that has all changed."

Ms. Gant established the CAE in 2005, with Trinity University in Washington, D.C., being the first to test it and receive a grant. Since then, it has awarded approximately $5 million in grant money to 10 universities selected by a panel of specialists from intelligence agencies, including the CIA and FBI.

In the 2006-07 academic year, more than 30 universities across the nation applied for the grant and only six were selected. By 2015, the ODNI is expected to add 10 universities.

The universities participating in the program are both "majority and minority schools," but with "sizable minority enrollments," said Ms. Gant, who was first approached for the project in 2004 by CIA Director George Tenet.

Some of the other participating schools are Clark Atlanta University, Florida International University and the University of Washington.

Mr. Clark, who started his school's program in 1989, said military personnel from Southern California's surrounding bases comprised the majority of his students initially; however, a growth of interest in intelligence work surged after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Now, Mr. Clark heads the Cal State Universities Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (CSU-ACE), a consortium of seven colleges — heralding it as "the gem of the West."

The consortium, the only multicampus partner of ODNI's CAE, has been awarded roughly $4 million in grant money over five years to assist with campus resources and aid students with foreign language and travel studies abroad.

The Cal State consortium is comprised of Bakersfield, Dominguez Hills, Fullerton, Long Beach, Northridge, Cal Poly Pomona and San Bernardino.

General Calls Training Critical in IED Fight
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14, 2008 – Technology is critical to countering roadside and car bombs and to attacking terrorist networks that emplace them, but a big part of the solution boils down to good old-fashioned training, the new director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization said.

Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz has built a 36-year career training soldiers, most recently as deputy commander and chief of staff for the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, at Fort Monroe, Va. Since taking the reins of the joint organization tasked with tackling the IED threat, Metz has focused heavily on the training element he said brings together the other aspects of the counter-IED equation.

“The strength of my background is training soldiers, and I think we can make great headway here,” Metz told Pentagon reporters during a roundtable interview yesterday.

Metz pointed to the proposed $591.3 million budget for fiscal 2009 dedicated to training the force for the IED fight. This funding, split between JIEDDO’s base budget and supplemental funding, will go toward enhancing counter-IED training and building on initiatives already under way.

That training is critical at all levels -- from junior-grade troops who learn how to identify and thwart IEDs during their operations to their leaders who piece together intelligence to identify the terror networks that fund, build and emplace them, Metz said.

“It’s one thing to train individual soldiers to use a device, and we are certainly getting about doing that, but it is the collective training of the leader pulling together so that the total is greater than the sum of the parts,” he said. “And that’s what the enhancing the collective training does.”

Metz said he’s committed to improving the way troops train to fight IEDS, from developing more realistic training environments for troops preparing to deploy to enhancing in-theater training. “A very real training environment is key,” he said.

He praised the counter-IED training troops receive at the Udairi Range in Kuwait before moving north into Iraq and said JIEDDO is funding similar training efforts being established in Afghanistan. But Metz said he wants to boost pre-deployment training, too, so troops arrive in theater with the best counter-IED training possible already under their belts.

Toward that end, JIEDDO invested about $150 million last year in the Joint Center of Excellence, with headquarters at the National Training Center, at Fort Irwin, Calif., to support counter-IED training. The center operates through service-specific training centers at Fort Irwin; Twentynine Palms, Calif.; Indian Head, Md.; and Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, to train servicemembers in counter-IED tactics and equipment currently found in the combat theaters and in conditions mirroring those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To help bring realism to that training, Metz said, JIEDDO is turning to the amusement and gaming industry to come up with ways to replicate an IED attack. It helped fund the installation of a cellular phone system at the National Training Center so troops there could train against an “enemy” using cell phones to launch IED attacks.

JIEDDO also built a replica of an Iraqi home at the NTC, where troops can fine-tune their search techniques so they’re better able to identify IED makers and factories during patrols.

“We want to train soldiers in search techniques -- not just walk in and look, (but in) the high-level search techniques that a very skilled investigator would do if they walked into an apartment in Pentagon City,” he said. “So we go through the academic and thinking part of that instruction, and then we have the practical environment for them to train in those skills to search.”

Metz said he wants to ensure troops know exactly what to look for during patrols. “If someone has been making a homemade explosive, they have been working with acid, and most likely their hands are going to be stained. And nitric acid comes in black two-liter bottles,” he said. “So if you’re searching, and you find the owner of the home has got stained hands and in the backyard garbage can are black bottles of nitric acid, you probably have a bomb-maker.”

JIEDDO wants to extend more training, not just to troops who run patrols and traverse roadways, but also to their battalion- and brigade-level commanders focused on identifying and taking down IED networks, Metz said.

“At the staff level, it goes back to this understanding (and) using the tools and capturing the data that help you put together that network and understand the parts and know when to attack,” he said.

He noted that although the rules of engagement authorize troops to attack when they find someone planting an IED, they may in some cases choose to alert other friendly forces to the threat, then wait and watch. By following the person who emplaced the bomb with persistent reconnaissance and surveillance, troops might be able to put together more pieces of the network.

Other key JIEDDO training initiatives include:

-- Electronic warfare training to prepare deploying forces for electromagnetic spectrum operations in the theater;

-- A senior mentor program that provides retired, senior general officers to mentor trainers and units in counter-IED operations before deployment;

-- Enhanced home-station training support, including more force-on-force collective training at combat training centers and service centers of excellence;

-- Tactical training support, offered through a joint expeditionary team that advises and mentors units from platoon to division level on aspects of the counter-IED fight;

-- International and interagency engagement, including efforts to promote sharing and interoperability among coalition partners in Iraq and Afghanistan; and

-- Coalition and partner training, with 18 nations receiving IED defeat training in Europe and in combat theaters before serving in U.S.-led coalitions.

Metz said these training initiatives will go a long way toward strengthening the fight against IEDs. “Training will make a huge difference,” he said.

The Washington Times

Article published Nov 6, 2007

Reforms fail at many madrassas

November 6, 2007

By Willis Witter - First of two parts

LAHORE, Pakistan — The suicide attacks and battles between army and Islamist forces cited by President Pervez Musharraf in his weekend declaration of emergency rule seem a world away from the quiet life in the Islamic seminaries of Lahore.

Known as madrassas, the privately funded schools double as orphanages and free boarding schools for families too poor to feed their children, but they also have a darker side.

They teach a Taliban-style doctrine and graduate tens of thousands of young adults each year, some of whom are eagerly recruited by insurgents for military training as guerrillas and even future suicide missions, say Pakistani lawmakers, academics and analysts.

Many of these analysts bemoan the government's failure to implement the sweeping reforms of the madrassa system announced by Gen. Musharraf five years ago.

Just a tiny fraction of the madrassas — estimated by some to number nearly 30,000 — have complied with rules requiring registration with the government, an accounting of private donations and an expanded syllabus that adds traditional subjects such as math and science to core religious classes.

The Jamia Naeemia madrassa in Lahore, which was visited by The Washington Times last month when the prospect of emergency rule seemed out of the question, stands out as an exception.

"There are two kinds of madrassas, those who changed their courses after September 11, and those who did not," said Sarfraz Naeemi, the school"s headmaster.

"There"s no jihad, there"s no terrorism here," Mr. Naeemi said of the school for 1,350 boys, a white-columned three-story complex that surrounds an open courtyard of smooth paved stone.

Unlike seven years ago, its graduates earn accredited bachelor"s and master"s degrees in Arabic and Islamic studies, in contrast to many madrassas where students become well-grounded in anti-Western Taliban theology but are unable to read or write.

But even if the students at Jamia Naeemia are well-educated, one can question whether they are any less militant, anti-Western or anti-American in their outlook.

Musharraf's guidelines

Lahore, a cosmopolitan city of nearly 8 million people, teems with Western icons such as McDonald"s and Citibank. It has yet to be bloodied in the wave of suicide and terrorist attacks that followed a July raid by police commandos on a radical girls" madrassa attached to Islamabad"s Red Mosque.

Those attacks have killed an estimated 400 people; another 400 are said to have died in army battles with insurgents in Pakistan"s mountainous northwest.

Still, one can find all types of madrassas here.

Of schools that refuse to register and follow government guidelines, Mr. Naeemi said, "They were preaching jihad before September 11, and they are still preaching jihad."

Those guidelines were announced by Gen. Musharraf in a Jan. 12, 2002, speech in which he proclaimed a new "jihad against backwardness and illiteracy" — an effort that drew much praise in Pakistan and the West.

His plan required all madrassas to stop accepting money from non-Pakistani sources such as wealthy Saudis who adhere to a militant form of Islam that helped inspire and fund the Taliban in past years. It also included a requirement to add four core subjects: math, science, Pakistan studies and English.

"The children in these madrassas need to be brought into the mainstream of life," Gen. Musharraf said a month later at the White House, with President Bush at his side calling the reforms "visionary."

It was a logical step, considering that the entire Taliban leadership had been educated in Pakistani madrassas and they were largely ignorant of anything beyond the draconian Islamist doctrine that they imposed on Afghanistan.

This same doctrine provided the rationale for Afghanistan"s receiving Osama bin Laden as an honored guest and attempting to shelter the terrorist leader after the September 11 attacks.

Gen. Musharraf again pledged a crackdown on madrassas after the July 2005 suicide attacks in London"s transit system, in which 52 persons and four bombers died. One of the four bombers, a 22-year-old Briton of Pakistani descent, had studied religion at a madrassa in Pakistan.

Gen. Musharraf subsequently said he had expelled more than 1,000 foreign students and promised to refocus on the reforms that he had announced more than three years earlier.

The modern world

A steel gate and high wall separates Jamia Naeemia from the din of Lahore"s exhaust-choked streets. It boasts a library that would rival in size that in many American high schools. One difference is that the books are on glass-covered shelves, offering protection in a dusty part of the world.

A computer lab funded by the Lahore Lions Club and a local charity affiliated with the school contains dozens of desktop computers with familiar names such as Compaq and Philips.

Mr. Naeemi, whose gray beard and dark-rimmed glasses do little to mask a biting contempt for both Muslim terrorists and U.S. policy toward the Islamic world, is satisfied that his students have many options when graduating.

The bachelor"s degree awarded after eight years of study beyond what would be considered middle school in the United States gives graduates the option of becoming preachers or schoolteachers.

With a college degree, they are also welcome in the Pakistani army. The computer lab provides a gateway for those who choose to pursue careers in information technology and related fields. Graduates also have the option of earning a master"s degree after two more years of study.

But being a highly educated Muslim theologian does not necessarily lead to a pro-Western outlook, nor does it appear to make much of a dent in the widespread belief — espoused by the Taliban and al Qaeda — that Islam is under attack by the United States.

Mr. Naeemi"s sarcasm is unmistakable when the subject of Osama bin Laden comes up.

"When the war was against Russia, Osama was a U.S. ally, and now he is a terrorist," he said. "The U.S. will use people and then throw them away like toilet paper."

He doesn"t harbor much sympathy for bin Laden, either.

"If one said there are two evils in the world, one would be [President] Bush and the other Osama. They should go out into the Indian Ocean together, have their fight and kill each other."

A murky world

No one seems to know how many madrassas operate in Pakistan. Estimates range from about 12,000 to close to 30,000. Estimates are just as varied for the size of the student population, ranging from 600,000 to nearly 2 million.

Religious Affairs Minister Ejaz ul-Haq, whose agency oversees madrassa reform, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Of two main types of madrassas, Deobandi and Ahle Sunnat, Mr. Naeemi"s school belongs to the latter. In addition to his duties at Jamia Naeemia, he also leads a loose coalition of more than 10,000 madrassas in an organization called Tanzeem-ul-Madaris Ahle Sunnat, whose members find it easier to operate within government guidelines than the rival Deobandi schools do.

Madrassas are funded entirely by private donors, ranging from wealthy Saudis to poor Pakistanis who chip in pennies to accommodate the zakat — an Islamic tradition requiring Muslims to give 2.5 percent of their wealth to charity.

Room and board is free. Discipline is strict, with students required to say five daily prayers beginning before dawn and ending after sunset — perhaps two hours each day kneeling and bowing toward Mecca.

There is no contact with women, 600 of whom attend a separate female madrassa associated with Jamia Naeemia.

Last month, the school was largely empty as most students had gone home to their families during the holy month of Ramadan, leaving the library and computer lab empty.

The few students remaining had no families to visit, highlighting another role for madrassas. They serve as orphanages that if closed down would leave thousands of children homeless.

Still, Gen. Musharraf"s critics fault his government for failing to implement his education reforms. They say few madrassas have complied fully with the 2002 law, leaving many as de facto prep schools for future terrorists.

Moreover, the president is criticized for failing to build a public-school system that would provide alternatives to madrassas and help raise the nation's abysmally low literacy rate, thought by some to be as low as 30 percent.

The United Nations estimates that fewer than half the children of elementary-school age attend school and, of those who do, half will drop out before completing their primary education.

Back burner issue

Among the harshest critics of the madrassas is opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, who often accuses the Islamic seminaries of "brainwashing our children" and of producing "mindless robots" of intolerance.

Given the recent turmoil in Pakistan, including a suicide attack on Mrs. Bhutto"s motorcade last month that killed at least 140 supporters, madrassas and the broader goal of education reform are likely to remain on the back burner.

When Gen. Musharraf appeared on state-run television Saturday night to explain his emergency declaration, madrassas were not mentioned once.

In a report issued more than a month before the latest outbreak of violence in July, the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, said the madrassa-reform effort was in "shambles."

"Plans are announced with much fanfare and then abandoned," the report said. "In any case, the introduction of secular courses would only be of slight value unless there were also deep changes in the religious curriculum to end the promotion of violent sectarianism and jihad."

At the Jamia Naeemia madrassa, Muhammad Allahyar, 22, expects to complete his bachelor"s degree sometime next year. He said that he once dreamed of studying in the West, but that his ambitions have changed and now he wants to remain in the Islamic world.

"I want to serve my religion. I want to preach Islam. By the grace of God, it will happen over time," he said.

When an American visitor posed a question about bin Laden, he felt compelled to defend the terrorist mastermind.

"Osama is a Muslim, and whatever he is doing is in the interest of Islam."

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