All eyes are focused on what the governments in Pakistan and Afghanistan are doing to combat terrorism. Some attention, however, should be paid to Saudi Arabia and what it could do to douse the theological firestorms it helped unleash in the region. This Western ally has the material and intellectual resources to make a difference now, just as it did in the war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Because Islam's holiest shrines are located in Mecca and Medina, and because of its immense material wealth, Saudi Arabia enjoys enormous goodwill and affection in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It therefore has the power to soften the extremist Taliban's theological zeal. It can achieve this result by organizing public symposiums in Kabul, Peshawar, and Karachi that denounce extremism as antithetical to the tenets of Islam.
The Taliban, in both its Afghan and Pakistani variants, are driven by a particular construction of Islam. They can't likely be induced to reconcile with other Muslims without addressing the great theological issues that divide them. Saudi and Egyptian ulema, scholars trained in Islamic law, would be better qualified to address these issues than their Afghan or Pakistani counterparts, who would be viewed as local partisans.
Saudi efforts to arrange power-sharing deals among Afghanistan's warring factions last September haven't produced any results, nor did the Saudi king's interfaith seminar at the United Nations in November. The king has allowed foreign intellectuals to express critical opinions in Riyadh — but only behind closed doors in seminars held under U.S. pressure, with nothing reported in Saudi media.
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