ASHINGTON

Afghanistan is no longer a terrorist factory sending thousands of killers into the world," President Bush announced on Tuesday, as he stood in the White House Rose Garden next to his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai. And, true, Afghanistan has been a success story, at least compared with Iraq. Still, the offensive against militants who fled into northwestern Pakistan continues, and Osama bin Laden remains on the lam. Achieving lasting peace and democracy in this trouble spot will take more than Special Operations troops — we must gain a far better understanding of the militants and their motivations.

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A good place to start is a hand-scrawled inscription I saw on a crumbling wall in a border town in northern Pakistan that read, "Jihad of the sword, like prayer, is a religious obligation." Most Westerners probably assume that this is an ancient dictum — and I bet the man who wrote it did, too. But the fact is, the slogan was conjured up no more than 25 years ago.

Here's the point: contrary to popular theories, the fight against militant religious groups in South Asia is not a clash of age-old civilizations or a conflict between traditionalism and modernism. Rather, it is a more recent story of political ineptitude and corruption, and of a postcolonial class struggle between the disenfranchised poor and these countries' elites.

The story begins early in the 19th century, in the religious schools called madrasas. For centuries under India's Muslim rulers, madrasas were centers of learning, open to all classes, concerned with teaching law, the sciences and administrative subjects. As British rule grew stronger, however, a system of colonial education was established for wealthier, urban children. Its purpose, as Lord Macaulay put it in 1835, was to create "a class of persons Indian in blood and color but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect."

The madrasas were sidelined and many leading scholars, or ulema, were persecuted. In Delhi, madrasas were razed. It was left to the urban and rural poor, neglected by the colonial schools, to support the increasingly decrepit madrasas. The curriculum shrunk, and by the mid-20th century most taught only the rote learning of scripture and a dogmatic version of Islam.

During this period of degeneration, several schools of thought aimed at educational revival emerged, the largest being the Deobandi school, in 1867, and the Barelvi school later that century. Over time, these apolitical movements not only established madrasas but became de facto representatives of self-declared religious groups. Various factions — representing Sunnis, Shiites and radical Wahhabists — began to enter politics. Still, there was no real concept of a "religious" political party.

Throughout the 20th century, the leaders of these groups desperately tried to enter the political mainstream by jumping onto any ideological bandwagon, but none ever secured more than a handful of National Assembly seats. When India was partitioned in 1947, the major Deobandi party in Pakistan, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, began to call for "Islamization" (a mysterious term no one quite knew how to define at the time).

The party initially demanded new laws — based on false scriptural readings — covering superfluous issues like women's dress, and bans on interest and popular entertainment. In the 1950's, its catch phrase was "Islamic Constitutionalism"; by the 1960's, it was "Islamic Democracy"; and in the early 1970's "Islamic Socialism." By the end of that decade, it was back to "Islamic Democracy." In any case, no slogan translated into a mass following. The leadership engaged in occasional diatribes against rivals religious sects or alcohol, but foreign politics and militancy barely entered the ideological equation.

So where did the "Islamic" political parties and their militants emerge from?

The turning point was the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The West and its allies decided the best resistance to Moscow would come through presenting the war as a religious struggle. While Pakistani religious leaders had little political power, they did have considerable influence over the madrasas in Pakistan's northwestern frontier region and in Afghanistan. Even the most benign found this to be an opportunity to finally win recognition (and a fortune), and they set up their own militant subsidiaries. Madrasas were converted overnight into training grounds for mujahedeen. In exchange for political power and global recognition, these impoverished students readily became cannon fodder in Afghanistan.

Of course, the eventual Soviet withdrawal meant an end to all that Western attention and money. The mujahedeen needed a new cause. International events — including the Persian Gulf war and the Palestinian intifada — provided one: hatred of America. An ethnic Pashtun militia, which metamorphosed into the Taliban, provided a rallying point for the unemployed mujahedeen. The rest is history.

Today, Western politicians, academics and intelligence experts continue to search through the annals of history to determine the sources of this jihadist mindset. But the truth is, it is just another ideology adopted by so-called religious parties in the former British Empire for short-term political gains, and fueled by the frustrations of a disaffected lower class.