In a major speech last year at Kansas State University, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates addressed the importance of “soft power” in the War on Terror. He could have had an attack like the recent Bombay massacre in mind: He warned that “asymmetric warfare” will be the “mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time,” and argued that “success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior — of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between.”

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After ten heavily armed Pakistani men tore through the center of Bombay, targeting and killing over 160 people and bringing the megalopolis to its knees for half a week, the Bush administration adopted this soft-power approach. When it became clear that the Pakistani Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) was responsible, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen rushed to Islamabad for separate, consecutive meetings to pressure Pakistan to cooperate with India’s investigation.

The U.S. is urging Pakistan to help India investigate and prosecute those behind the attack and move against the outlawed (but still tolerated) LeT. This is a challenge, since some Pakistani factions support LeT, including elements within the very state agencies needed to do the purge.

And as difficult as this it will be for Pakistan’s government, it’s not enough. Pakistan must also either overhaul or shut down those madrassas and educational centers that create a culture of jihad and serve as the prime recruiting grounds for jihadi groups.

Since several Muslim advocacy groups began condemning as “Islamophobic” any recognition of terrorists’ self-declared religious ideologies, the State Department has shied away from acknowledging such obvious connections. But, as Secretary Gates emphasized in subsequent speeches on soft power, long-term success in the conflict against a “malignant form of terrorism inspired by jihadist extremism” will depend less on military engagements and more on the “overall ideological climate within the world of Islam.”

First, Pakistan must close all schools and offices nationwide of LeT’s charity front, Jamaat-ul-Dawa. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed founded LeT in 1990 and changed its name to Jamaat-ul-Dawa (“Society for Preaching”) after the U.S. froze LeT’s assets and called for it to be banned following a 2001 attack on the Indian parliament. At that time Saeed publicly quit the militant wing, but remained head of Jamaat, which functions as LeT’s fundraising, educational, and social-services wing.

Jamaat runs schools and offices in over 60 Pakistani cities, including a 75-acre campus encompassing a university, madrassa, and school in Muridke, near Lahore. This complex and its students, one of whom was among the London Tube bombers, have been implicated in numerous violent attacks. Muridke is Saeed’s main base of operations, and he was reportedly giving public lectures there right up to the day before the Bombay attacks. He is one of 20 Pakistanis whose extradition India now demands.

Since Bombay, Pakistan has raided only one of Jamat’s hundreds of facilities, the Muzaffarabad camp in Pakistani Kashmir where the Bombay jihadis were trained.

Extremist indoctrination was an essential step in LeT’s preparations for the siege. According to press reports, the lone Bombay jihadi arrested, Ajmal Amir Kasab, told police his training began and ended with ideological indoctrination: “At first, it was the recitation of the Koran and lectures about jihad. He was being prepared mentally.” After subsequent military training, Kasab was “briefed” one last time, actually by Saeed himself. According to the Washington Post, Saeed “told them that this was good for the community and the religion, and that they were blessed to be martyrs.” He no doubt drew from one of Jamaat’s publicly distributed instruction manuals, entitled “Why We Are Performing Jihad.”

The brand of Islamist ideology in which Kasab and his Bombay cohorts were indoctrinated is based on Saudi Wahhabism. Pakistan’s current ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, formerly the co-editor of the Hudson Institute journal Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, wrote in 2005 that LeT is Pakistan’s “most significant jihadi group of Wahhabi persuasion” and is “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.” Saeed founded LeT after returning from Saudi Arabia, where he had been immersed in advanced Wahhabi studies and developed contacts with Saudi sheikhs who supported jihad in Afghanistan.