The Afghan war forged a new generation of Pakistani jihadis – fired-up young fighters, driven by a hardline Islamist ideology and burning with a new sense of purpose. And it left behind a network of radical mosques and madrassas, led by emboldened clerics, where a new generations of jihadis could be shaped. An Ivy League of hard-line institutions sprang up in the big cities. In Karachi, there was Binori Town, memorably described by the French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy as ‘the house of the devil’. Not far from Peshawar stood the Darul Uloom Haqqania, the gigantic seminary run by the ‘Father of
...more
