All right, enough with the recap. What exactly is Abizaid's new approach to fighting jihadi terrorism? If you noticed the title, then you're probably already ahead of me: having read the WSJ article (that's what this post is about, in case the exciting intro drove it from your minds!) Assuming they accurately described his strategy... then I think what he has done is reinvent the British Empire -- updated to 2006 and Americanized. We circle around, we circle around...

In the fall of 2002, the U.S. military set up a task force here on the Horn of Africa to kill any al Qaeda fighters seeking refuge in the region. The base was crawling with elite special-operations teams, and an unmanned Predator plane armed with Hellfire missiles sat ready on the runway.

Today, the base houses 1,800 troops whose mission is to build health clinics, wells and schools in areas where Islamic extremists are active. The idea is to ease some of the suffering that leaves the locals susceptible to the radicals' message, thus bolstering local governments, which will run the new facilities and get credit for the improvements.

I know this won't sit well with a lot of you. Too many of us -- yeah, I admit a tendency in this direction -- look at the paragraph above and think, "holy moley, it's midnight basketball for terrorists!"

Be prepared for a shock: "midnight basketball" actually works.

Hard-nosed criminologists -- the same ones who agree with John R. Lott that widespread gun ownership and concealed-carry permits reduce crime -- also agree on this one. A huge percentage of gang violence (not all, of course) is spur of the moment... high-energy teens and twenties, possibly on an amphetamine-like drug such as meth or crack, but maybe just cranked up by their own raging hormones, enter a store. They start horsing around, jostling each other. Then it gets a little more serious -- and suddenly, Stone Cold pulls a gun, shoves it in the proprietor's face, and says "gimmie everything you got, mofo!"

Often, they never intended a robbery when they entered. That's why they had no plan, made no attempt not to be seen on the security camera, and had no escape route planned out. Maybe they panic and shoot everyone; or maybe they just like killing people. But they never planned anything -- because planning involves time-binding... and these morons live in a universe that's thirty minutes wide: anything more than fifteen minutes in the future or longer than fifteen minutes ago... doesn't exist.

Sure, some gang crime is well planned; so is some terrorism (a tiny percentage). Mostly banging is just the natural result of kids with no moral compass whatsoever colliding with a universe where violence is easier than work.

And most terrorism is what Daniel Pipes calls "sudden jihad syndrome," though I think he far underestimates how common it is.

Moslems who feel alienated, drifting through life, cut off from the rest of humanity -- whether in the land of the infidels or an Islamic country -- suddenly pick up a weapon and launch an attack against... someone. Doesn't matter who: for a few brief moments, they feel part of something bigger than themselves (like the gang kids in the liquor store).

Then they start suffering the consequences of their "decision," which was never reasoned through in the first place. But it's too late: they've become hunted men, and they have nowhere else to go but straight to the only group of people who will embrace them, the jihadists.

Midnight basketball works to quell (not end) gang violence because it gives them something transcendent (sports), something to burn that excess energy, something to do with their friends -- at their favorite time of night -- that doesn't involve killing and being killed. It fills the same need that banging fills. And for a similar reason, John Abizaid's strategy may well work to quell (not end) terrorism: because it makes the societies in which potential jihadis live more functional.

Building things gives them work to do that tires them out physically and fills the need nearly all humans have to be part of something communal. And while they're doing that, they're not out shooting anyone.

It also gives them a stake in their own society: every time they pass the well or the school, they can think, "I helped build that." Few people enjoy seeing something they built destroyed; so perhaps they'll even argue some more disaffected friend out of blowing it up next week.

It shocks us how quick some Moslems are to kill their neighbors and blow up buildings in their own cities. The reason is clear: they don't feel like those are their neighbors, and it's certainly not their city. They're aliens in their own lands, as in others:

Abizaid, more than anyone here, understands that often, you just have to kill the son of a bachelor and worry about what caused his madness later. But later must come eventually, unless we want to play an endless videogame where an infinite number of jihadis pop up and shoot at us forever. So he tries to ground them in their own countries:

But his view of the region is increasingly shaped by the inability of all that firepower to prevail against a violent strain of Islam seeking to expand its foothold. "The best way to contain al Qaeda is to increase the capacity of the regional powers to deal with it themselves," he says....

In Lebanon, Gen. Abizaid says, he saw firsthand how Hezbollah used guerrilla violence, political activity and social aid to grow over the course of decades. "We Western-educated people tend to view war as first you fight then you talk," he says. "Here you are always talking and fighting." The general's counter strategy -- particularly in the Horn of Africa -- in some ways mimics Hezbollah's hybrid approach to war.

Implementing the "long war strategy," however, has proved fiendishly difficult for troops in the Horn of Africa. The idea is to send small teams into some of the world's most troubled lands to train local forces, gather information and build clinics and schools that extend the local government's influence. The military has long dispatched humanitarian aid, civil affairs teams and military trainers to places like Indonesia, the Philippines and North Africa to provide relief and bolster allies. But the Horn of Africa task force marks the first time that a large military command has been established solely to address the root causes of terrorism in a region.

"This is the most complex thing I have done in my military career," says Rear Adm. Richard Hunt, the commander of the mission.

If this sounds familiar -- exporting modernity -- it's because this is eerily similar to the approach that the British Empire took to pacifying the lands they conquered. They believed in the idea of an "occupation force" that comprised not just soldiers, but civil servants: engineers to build dams and modern buildings, agricultualists to teach modern farming techniques, lawyers to set up Westminster-style legal systems, doctors of modern medicine, and of course teachers to bring "the natives" into the modern world.

These civil servants arrived with every intention of staying for years, decades, maybe even their entire lives. Their children were raised in India, South Africa, the East Indies and thought of those countries as "home;" England was a far-away land that they were forced to visit every once in a while, or even attend school there, so that they wouldn't "go native." (Which of course they did anyway, every chance they got.)

It worked sometimes and failed sometimes; often, it was just a cover for horrific exploitation. But very frequently, even when the Brits were kicked out, the "natives" kept many of the cultural improvements the British had crammed down their throats; India is a good example of this.

Britain wanted an empire, so occupation forces made perfect sense to them. America has never been "imperialist" in that sense, and certainly not in the sense of Spain, France, or Belgium; so the idea of occupation forces is foreign to our thinking. But that is exactly what Gen. Abizaid is trying to inculcate in the American mind: the idea that you cannot rule a country for long; so your best bet is to change the country so that it can rule itself in a way that's conducive to our own cultural standards and national interests.

The Brits did it high-handedly, because they truly believed that Englishmen were genetically superior to all those Hottentots and Fuzzy Wuzzies and Baboos. They believed that natives could never come up to their level, so why bother trying? Just teach them what they need to be good servants, make sure they get it (by force, if necessary)... and then live off the labor of others.

That's not what Abizaid is doing, of course; but it's the same principle at core: he wants to move the "natives" of Moslem lands into twenty-first century modernity, so they'll think just enough like Westerners not to worship death and killing. Then we leave and let them handle their own affairs.

It's not a new idea; but it's a very new and very American riff on an old idea. Everything old is new again.

I have no idea if Gen. Abizaid will succeed; I'm not even sure it's the best strategy. But at least, damn it, he's thinking about a permanent solution, instead of just playing a game of Whack-a-Mole that you can't win, can't draw, and can't even quit.

For some reason, people are allergic to the phrase "root causes." Probably because it's been used so often by lefties as code for "it's all America's fault." But there must be something, somewhere that causes people in one area to be relatively peaceful (such as the United States and Europe), and causes people in another area to be savage, barbaric, violent, unthinking, and filled with a creepy religious fervor that takes the form of wanting to kill anyone who won't convert.

It's not something in the water; and it's not some genetic defect in "Moslems," because Moslems come in all different races. Besides, it's not all Moslems, even in the ummah: look at the lads at Iraq the Model, and most of their readers. They didn't come from another planet; they grew up in Iraq, under Saddam Hussein.

That "something" must be a series of beliefs and attitudes... and beliefs can be changed.

Don't let yourself be driven from possible solutions by liberals who co-opt the language and twist it to use as a weapon against the rest of us. (Take back the lexicon! You have nothing to lose but your clichés.) If we truly could find root causes for some-but-not-all terrorism, we could at least reduce it. Every potential jihadi who opts against it is one fewer person trying to kill us.

So let's all hope that Abizaid is onto something here... and if so, that he is allowed to finish what he started. And of course, let's not stop fighting back whenever we can: the two approaches are not mutually exclusive.