Milken Institute Review 2Q10 Page 84

The Milken Institute Review

fighters' outside options by sending them to
inferior schools? It wasn't the Taliban, though
it benefited, since most fighters were already
well through madrassa when the Taliban got
organized in 1994. It may have been the JUI,
which organized traditional Deobandi
schools in the refugee camps. But even if
there had been secular schooling options for

Afghan children in Pakistan, their parents

may still have chosen to send them to madras-
sas if that was the cost of admission to the JUI
mutual aid network in the refugee camps.

Thus, no one necessarily forced future Tal-

iban fighters to receive an inferior education
that limited their outside options. It could
have been a wise choice, made with the un-
derstanding that even if religious education
would not open the door to a good job, it
would open doors to membership in a ser-

vice-providing club.

Consider, too, the complementary logic of

sacrifice. By limiting outside options one in-
curs a cost, which signals to a community
that you can be trusted. That signal, in turn,
makes you an attractive member of some sort
of collective production cooperative. Usually
that cooperative production activity is be-
nign: mutual aid. But if a need or opportunity
arises, religious radicals sometimes press the
advantage that their loyal networks provide
to be effective at coordinated violence.

terrorist clubs

A similar argument invoking loyalty can ex-

plain the effectiveness of radical religious
groups at terrorism. Operative 1 of Hamas
needs a few more compatriots to carry out an

attack. He considers recruiting operative 2,
carefully thinking over operative 2's level of
commitment. What about operative 2's out-
side options? How does he know that opera-
tive 2, once recruited to the plot, will not call
the Israeli Security Agency [Shin Bet]? The Is-
raelis can afford to pay much more for infor-
mation than Hamas can pay their operatives.

Operative 1 thinks through how much the

Israelis will pay for the information that
would save this particular target the value of
the target to the victim. Then he considers

operative 2's defection constraint, taking into
account the services Hamas provides to oper-
ative 2's family and factoring in the outside
options operative 2 might have in an Israeli
witness protection program.

Operative 1 probably knows operative 2

fairly well. They might have attended the
same madrassa and probably spent time to-
gether in some kind of social service opera-
tion. In the case of Hamas, they could well
have bonded in prison, after being arrested
for some type of rebellious offense such as
throwing stones at an Israeli patrol. Those
stones didn't shorten the occupation or even
hurt the Israeli soldiers. However, they did
take months and often years away from study-
ing, gaining work experience or raising a fam-
ily an expensive sacrifice by any account.

The social service provision network is

therefore important to loyalty for a number of
reasons. First, demonstrations of commit-
ment to a mutual aid club, or some other form
of collective activity show that an individual
cares less about the material gains that would
come from defecting and more about loyalty

t is service provision rather than theology that

confers destructive organizational capacity.