The title of Ken Ballen's recently released book, Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals, is misleading. I put off buying it for some time because of the title, which implied it would provide a sympathetic view of terrorism and constitute yet another rant against "failed" U.S. counterterrorism policies since 9/11.

However, I have always been impressed with the nonprofit organization run by Ken Ballen, Terror Free Tomorrow, and its solid polling work in Pakistan and other Muslim-majority countries. This compelled me to take a closer look at the book, which I ended up reading on a flight to South Asia last fall.

Terrorists in Love is more than a captivating read. It provides fresh insight into how al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies have manipulated young Muslim men into following a hateful and destructive ideology that kills countless innocents -- mostly other Muslims. We have heard a great deal about al-Qaeda's recruitment and training process from U.S. experts, but Ballen describes the terrorism phenomenon in the jihadists' own words, bringing deeper understanding to the issue.

Through interviews and extensive research, Ballen profiles six jihadists, some of whom eventually renounced al-Qaeda. It is the stories of those who become disillusioned with al-Qaeda and its aimless violence that are the most interesting and that need to be publicized more widely. Indeed, exposing first-hand personal accounts of the contradictions and corruption within the terrorist movement likely will hasten its demise -- a process already underway thanks to the elimination of Osama bin Laden and an aggressive drone-missile campaign in Pakistan's tribal border areas.

Ballen acknowledges in his introduction that there are many different paths to becoming a jihadist and that the individual stories in the book should not be viewed as representative of all radical Islamists. The first chapter is a telling eyewitness account of al-Qaeda deceiving a young man into taking his own life and others. Ahmad al-Shayea is a Saudi who at the age of 19 goes to Iraq to fight Americans, after seeing photos of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It is a story of disillusionment -- one that many other Muslim men would surely have expressed, had they lived to tell about it.

Ahmad al-Shayea is tricked by two Iraqi fighters into driving a truck loaded with explosives, from which the two Iraqis suddenly jump, just before the bombs go off. Ahmad miraculously survives the explosion, and the rest of the chapter recounts his recuperation at an American hospital in Iraq.

After the ordeal, Ahmad retains his steadfast belief in Islam, but he has awoken to the al-Qaeda lie. He proclaims his desire to go on television to tell other young Saudis that "Al-Qaeda was not for Islam; it was not for humanity." And that, "I am a living example of al-Qaeda's hellfire...I want them to see how al-Qaeda tricked me into killing innocent people."

Terrorists in Love pulls no punches in its depiction of the close relationship of the Pakistan military with jihadist terrorism. In one chapter, Malik -- an Afghan refugee who grows up in Pakistan, joins the Taliban, and has personal encounters with Mullah Omar -- becomes disillusioned with the Afghan Taliban when he discovers its reliance on Pakistan's intelligence agency (run by the Army) for training, weapons and funding. Malik feels ashamed that his organization must rely on an army that also receives support from the Americans. However, instead of abandoning jihad, Malik joins the Pakistani Taliban to attack what he views as the double-dealing Pakistani military.

In the fifth chapter, we become acquainted with a Pakistani jihadist whose father is a colonel in the Pakistan Army. The colonel is disdainful toward Islamist extremists and works for the Strategic Plans Division, which controls Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. His responsibilities include keeping Pakistan's nuclear assets out of the hands of extremists, like his own son. The irony of this complex father-son relationship story brings home the reality of the dangers in Pakistan, where the institution in charge of protecting the country's nuclear weapons also arms and trains the Afghan Taliban.

Ballen concludes from his research and interviews that Muslim communities themselves must develop ways to counter extremism, while also acknowledging that the U.S. cannot afford to be complacent against extremists dedicated to killing Americans. His overall recommendation for the U.S. to simply lead by example is unrealistic, however, especially in light of the democratic revolutions sweeping the Middle East, where U.S. silence could contribute to more bloodshed. America should not retreat from actively promoting democratic ideals in the Middle East, as Ballen suggests, particularly since the principles of liberal democratic governance are a powerful antidote to Islamist extremists' message of intolerance, hatred, and repression.

Ballen's work is well worth a read by anyone seeking to understand more fully the complex and multiple factors that drive terrorism. The reader will have to judge whether Ballen was brave or merely naïve in agreeing to meet with extremists at hotels in Islamabad. But the conversations he recorded from those probably ill-advised meetings are eye-opening, and should help U.S. policymakers develop more finely-tuned messages and policies to fight the ideological battle laid bare in Terrorists in Love.

Lisa Curtis is a Senior Research Fellow on South Asia at the Heritage Foundation. 

Afghan women have long fought for a say in their country's future, but that fight has grown more urgent in the run-up to the Bonn Conference, a gathering charged with laying out a plan for Afghanistan for 2014 and beyond.

So far, women's battle to win a substantive role at Bonn - and any other peace talks that may come to the capital - has gained little traction either at home or abroad.  And in the US, those backing women say they face an uphill fight convincing the Obama Administration to speak out more about the need for women's participation.

Afghan women leaders have issued press releases and formal position papers in the run-up to December's meeting demanding that civil society makes up 30 percent of Afghanistan's delegation to the Bonn Conference, with women accounting for half of that group.  

The Afghan government has not yet announced its official delegation, but so far one man and one woman from civil society have been invited to Bonn, with the woman getting three minutes to address the plenary.  Of the sixteen women attending a separate civil society forum, only one will have access to the official conference, according to the Institute for Inclusive Security, which recently brought Afghan women leaders to Washington to press their case on the Hill and with the Obama Administration.

"We would like to have strong participation in these processes, we would like to know what is being discussed, what is put on the table," says Orzala Ashraf, a peace activist and founder of an Afghan NGO for women and children. "We would like to ensure that these bargaining chips (in any peace process) are not women's rights or our achievements of the past ten years."

With the U.S. and its NATO allies focused on extricating themselves from Afghanistan, the task of laying out the path ahead has assumed extreme urgency for Afghans. "It is of high importance for women's groups and civil society to make sure their voices are included in any road map," says Ashraf, "in any direction that Afghanistan is going to take." 

But whether those voices will be heard remains an open question.

As Human Rights Watch noted, "The Afghan government and its international backers say that women's rights are one of their ‘red lines' as they plan for the withdrawal of international forces. If this is the case, why are Afghan women struggling to get a seat at the table in Bonn?"

Those in Washington attribute part of the reason to a White House inner circle that sees the role of women as far removed from the issue of Afghan security.  As the Washington Post famously noted earlier this year, women are seen as "pet rocks in our rucksack" that are "taking us down."

"These guys don't get it," said a senior administration official who has argued that women's participation is crucial for Afghanistan's stability, as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell did in 2002. "Ten years on we still have to make the case that women are additive."

As I've written in these pages, it is far from the situation of a decade ago when leaders across Washington fanned out before the cameras to speak about the importance of supporting Afghan women. After five years of Taliban rule, in which women were denied the rights to work and education and to leave their homes, the international community offered its arrival in 2001 as a new start.  

Secretary of State Clinton helped women leaders win a speaking role at last year's Kabul Conference and has promised women that "we will not abandon you," but with her departure imminent and 2014 looming, talk of a Taliban return is surging.

Fears of what the Taliban's ascendance would mean for women have only grown stronger with news of the stoning death of a woman and her daughter in Ghazni Province.  Assassinations of leading human rights supporters and police officials and attacks on girls schools have skyrocketed in recent years - even as talk of a peace deal with the Taliban has come to be viewed in NATO capitals as the best option for ending the war.

Some American advocates for women say any talk of Taliban negotiations is misplaced, especially given the recent assassination of former President and head of the High Peace Council, Burhanuddin Rabbani.

"We don't think anybody should be negotiating with the Taliban," says Esther Hyneman of Women for Afghan Women, which runs family centers and safe homes for abused women across Afghanistan.  "If the Taliban wanted a role in the government, why don't they run for parliament in a democratic election? They don't want a role in the Afghan government -- they want the Afghan government."

Women's group leaders say that just like in the 1990s, when they lobbied to stop the Clinton Administration from recognizing the Taliban government, they will not stand by quietly while women half a world away are denied their constitutionally guaranteed rights to work and education. They note that Afghan women are making progress for themselves, pointing to the rising number of girls attending school, as well as female midwives, police officers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, civil society activists, parliamentarians and educators as evidence.

"We will keep the pressure on and support women in any way we can," says Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which helped to lead the fight against Washington's recognition of the Taliban in 1996.  "There is now a huge network of non-profit organizations within Afghanistan and we are talking to them and they are taking the lead.  What we can do is continue to put pressure on the U.S. government not to agree to anything that omits half the population."

Yet some wonder just how committed the White House is to supporting women's participation in their country. The President has not spoken often about Afghanistan - and far less about the country's women.

"Perhaps the tremendous unpopularity of the war puts [President Obama] in an awkward position," says activist Mavis Leno, wife of talk show host Jay Leno and one of the women who put the issue on America's map -- and in PEOPLE Magazine in 1998 -- after the Taliban came to power in 1996. "I don't think he is doing as much as he could."

Hyneman goes further:

"I am at my wit's end at the lack of discussion by the media, by our government, by our president on the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan." Of Obama, Hyneman says, "I am appalled that he has not mentioned Afghan women's rights since his speech on withdrawing US troops."

Women's activists say they are watching closely to see exactly what the Afghan government -- with support from the United States -- agrees to in any peace deal.

"I just don't understand why the fate of these women has to be considered as special pleading," Leno says.  "Are we just going to stand back and see this happen again? Women were making it a little way up the hill; can we at least make sure that they don't slide back down again?"

They say they share Americans' desire to end the country's longest war, but that a peace that leaves women out will not last.

"We are in favor of peace, but this is not the road to peace, it is the road to bloodshed and subjugation and civil war, a repeat of the years past," Hyneman says. "Everyone will be sitting in front of their TV sets wringing their hands as we see women brutalized."

Countries that have experienced decades of conflict and political turmoil, and have historically featured persistent executive-judicial disputes tend to have less judicial autonomy. Afghanistan epitomizes this. The country has not only lacked comprehensive, integrated laws for much of its history, but what laws existed were culturally dictated and enforced, and in most cases, still are.

As an Afghan, articles about the emergence of the rule of law in the West make me think about the intersection of culture and law in Afghanistan and its challenges. Even before its formal establishment as a nation, the United States began to create common law by using centuries-old written precedents from Great Britain, and applying American notions of reason and justice. Since there is little written tradition in Afghanistan, it does not have such a heritage, nor common law texts, as a starting point. Its starting point is a religious text, the Quran, written in Arabic, a language understood by only a small number of Afghans, the oral history of past decisions, and "felt necessities of the time," as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. characterized one aspect of the development of the common law in the United States.

The Afghan idea of a justice system is also defined by Pashtunwali, a social code of conduct and way of life that predates the Anglo-Saxon common law.  Pashtunwali defines the fundamentals of the Afghan culture, identity and, above all, personal honor.  What distinguishes the practice of Pashtunwali is its emphasis on using influential local and tribal leaders (Maliks, Khans and mullahs), or respected outsiders chosen arbitrarily by the conflicting parties, to act as fact-finders and decision-makers.  Furthermore, decisions must be seen as arbitrary and impartial, not compelled by any of the players in the conflict. This is one of the key reasons people in rural Afghanistan have historically opted to use customary shuras (councils) and jirgas (assemblies) as the primary decision-making forums in which to resolve their disputes. Over the course of Afghan history, the ideals of Pashtunwali have driven and influenced local decisions and rulings, primarily in rural Afghanistan, though the ethos of the system may be seen in all Pashtuns. The few attempts by the central legal authorities to supplant this indigenous centuries-long system of beliefs have been, and may continue to be, largely unsuccessful.

Laws in the United States made by federal, state and local representatives are designed to supersede and override the common law, while in the absence of a statute (or the Constitution), the common law prevails. Although broad policy objectives are not well mapped by use of the common law, it is a filler of necessity and provides an indispensable resource for judicial decisions in the absence of legislative guidance. By contrast, Afghans are usually handed oral, extemporized rulings influenced heavily by village elders, local and tribal leaders, Khans and mullahs, through the long-practiced shura and jirga system. Shuras and jirgas are said to be more efficient, accessible, cost-effective, less corrupt and more trusted by the Afghans than the formal state justice institutions. But these rulings often occur without reference to - mostly because of a lack of knowledge of, indifference to or defiance of - the Afghan Constitution, statutory laws or any other written records. Instead, these leaders rely on their understanding of the Quran, oral histories of past decisions known to them and to their people, Pashtunwali, and their "felt necessity."  

Thus, there is no cohesive thread connecting these oral decisions across villages and tribes to any common national public policy objectives. Afghans who have experienced both the formal and non-formal justice systems find the latter more in line and in compliance with local norms, customs and traditions, including the promotion and encouragement of consensus and avoiding a culture of impunity. Ignorance of and disregard for the country's written law , as well as prevalent corruption, mean that people have little confidence in the laws and low expectations of justice brought through the formal court system.  A report released last year by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) notes that in 2009 alone, Afghans paid an estimated $2.5 billion in bribes, equivalent to 23 percent of Afghanistan's GDP, and that judicial officials topped the list of those who received the bribes. By contrast, judges in the United States use a more consistent process and look to the written precedents in common and statutory law, as well as publications of scholars and retired judges when they do not have written precedents in their own jurisdiction to guide them.  This reduces the incidence of corruption, since wide departures from these precedents would bring critical attention to anomalous decisions.

So what happens in Afghanistan? The disparate sense of "felt necessity," guided by various interpretations of a religious text many cannot read and many misunderstand - together with flawed oral histories of past judgments - drive local decisions, creating a confusing and conflicting hodgepodge of rulings devoid of broad public policy considerations. A key point to note here is that a lack of nationally accepted laws permits subversive elements such as the Taliban and leaders who may be unaware of the formal justice system or distrust government institutions, to intuit and then adopt the most draconian of these incongruent decisions. These actors then form "public policy" based on their interpretations, and enforce it in the areas that they control with attribution to the Quran and use of brutal penalties for non-compliance. 

The solution, it seems, would be for Afghan scholars and those with legal education and background in Afghanistan to go to village and tribal leaders across the country and record the background and results of recent their rulings and judgments. These scholars could then tease out common public policy threads from dispute resolutions that were build on factors ranging from the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad to local conditions and "felt necessities." Having distilled the core essence of such decisions, a "Restatement of the Law of Afghanistan" could be written, similar to the one that exists in the United States, which would set out the main principles of a developing Afghan common law.  It would have no legal power, but it would provide a starting point of the type the founding fathers of the United States received from Great Britain.  Through this mechanism, the future decisions of village and tribal leaders in Afghanistan would be guided but not bound by the past. They would at last be put into writing, further developing coherent and better reasoned guides for Afghanistan's judicial system and a foundation against which ill-conceived and corrupt decisions can be measured and criticized.

It would be these written decisions of village and tribal leaders that would begin the long process of codifying the actual common law of Afghanistan, providing a place to look back for precedent and forward for the common threads of a rule of law.

There are no effective alternative power centers in Afghanistan that could create incentives for the people to take their disputes and disagreements to courts. Indeed, there are only a few courts now in existence and most are distrusted and discredited. However, codifying the actual common law of Afghanistan and applying it in the formal court system could create an incentive for the Afghan people to more formally and habitually refer their disputes and problems to the justice system.

Javid Ahmad, a native of Kabul, is Program Coordinator with the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington DC.

Last year, Qasim, a construction worker from eastern Afghanistan, was detained in a joint US-Afghan raid on his home in Kabul. He eventually ended up in the hands of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan intelligence agency. For over a week, Qasim was hung by his arms, taken down only to go the bathroom and pray. Several times a night he was beaten with pipes and electrical cables, his head bashed into walls, and threatened with much worse. After a week and a half, he could no longer walk, not even to bring himself to the bathroom. My organization, Open Society Foundations, and its Afghan partners have interviewed many other Afghans who, like Qasim, have suffered acts of torture at the hands of the NDS, ranging from beatings, and burns, to electric shock, and sexual abuse.

In a ground-breaking report released yesterday by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the true scope and severity of such abuse is made clear. The UN found evidence of torture and mistreatment in 16 Afghan detention facilities, including electric shocks, hanging detainees from ceilings, beatings, and threat of sexual assault. As a result of the report, the Afghan government dismissed several NDS officials implicated in the report, though it unclear whether there will be any criminal prosecutions.  The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has temporarily halted the transfer of ISAF detainees to the 16 facilities.

ISAF's halting of transfers to facilities identified in the UN report is an important first step. The Afghan government's initial response was certainly less positive, but will hopefully improve following now that the report has been publicly released. Looking forward, however, there is real concern that the ISAF and Afghan government responses will prove rather superficial, and ultimately fail to fully grapple with the depths of the problem.

One area that the Afghan government and ISAF should prioritize is accountability. Though perhaps politically difficult, accountability for abuses is key, and must be pursued vigorously and publicly. The UN report is an opportunity for the right signals to be sent, both within the Afghan justice system as well as to the Afghan public.

Without sustained efforts on this front, it's likely that even if those Afghan officials who are responsible for abuse are removed, they will only re-emerge elsewhere in the justice system or government. Shuffling the problem around only sows the seeds for future abuse, and reinforces perceptions of impunity that are at the heart of the Afghan government's struggle for legitimacy.

An independent, external body should be empowered to monitor facilities, receive complaints, and investigate allegations of abuse, with findings and remedial actions made public. Full, unfettered access should also be granted to outside monitors, including Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, ICRC, and UNAMA. Those responsible for abuse should not only be removed from their positions, but also subject to criminal prosecution and civil liability.

The international community can play an important role in ensuring those responsible are truly held to account. Governments should not only apply conventional diplomatic pressure, but should think creatively and ambitiously about how to strengthen accountability. Funding, training, as well as military and intelligence relationships with the Afghan government and security forces should all be utilized to ensure those responsible for abuse are held accountable. The US is prohibited by the Leahy Law from supporting foreign security forces which engage in gross violations of human rights. 

The pervasive lack of due process also leaves detainees vulnerable to abuse. Detainees and defense lawyers we have interviewed consistently decry Afghan authorities' denial of legal counsel, in addition to preventing family notification or contact. In some cases we documented, defense lawyers have themselves been arrested or harassed simply for contacting their clients. The Afghan Government should implement measures to ensure detainees' access to legal counsel, and adopt strict rules regarding family notification (just as the Afghan government advocates for in ISAF detentions), while international donors should provide funding to Afghan legal aid organizations to represent conflict-related detainees. Ensuring detainees have their most basic due process rights respected while in detention provides an additional, necessary check on Afghan authorities' power and strengthens transparency and accountability.

For their part, international forces must acknowledge that there are no quick fixes for detainee abuse in Afghanistan. Detainee monitoring, for example, is too often posited as the solution to abuse, although it only focuses on detainees transferred by international forces, not the wider prison population. While monitoring is a potentially important part of protecting detainee rights, international forces must be honest about its practical limitations, and confront the fact that, in the current context, monitoring alone cannot satisfy their legal obligations to prevent torture.

Indeed, the fact that the UN has documented abuses despite the existence of various ISAF countries' monitoring mechanisms and oversight by organizations like the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) speaks to the insufficiency of such measures. Given the sheer number of facilities and detainees, logistical and security challenges, and detainees' fears of reprisals for disclosing abuse, even the most well-designed monitoring mechanisms may in practice be incapable of ensuring detainees are free from torture.

International forces must also grapple with the problem of torture beyond the narrow issue of transfers, not least because they have been working so closely with the Afghan intelligence authorities, including using intelligence that may very well have been extracted through the use of torture. Appropriate assessment of the risk of torture will also always have to take into account treatment of all detainees at a particular Afghan facility-not just those transferred from international custody. Conceiving of the problem as one of detainee transfer also biases policy solutions towards bureaucratic box checking in order to resume detainee transfers-not actually halting abuse.

To be sure, there are real dilemmas and constraints facing the Afghan government and ISAF. There is a lack of professional capacity at every level of the Afghan justice system, from guards to judges to prosecutors. The sheer number of persons detained in connection with the conflict means the system is under severe strain, burdened further by the military as opposed to law enforcement nature of operations. But the Afghan government and all ISAF nations have strict legal obligations to refrain from and prevent torture, and as the UN report lays bare, they have fallen well short.

The looming troop drawdown and transition only give greater urgency to this issue. With more and more responsibility for security being shifted to Afghans, the strategic risk and political liability posed by abusive detention practices will only grow. Right now the US and other ISAF nations have the most leverage to shape the Afghan justice system and leave behind institutions, laws, and mechanisms that uphold the rule of law and protect Afghans from torture. As the war in Afghanistan marks its tenth anniversary, time is not on the side of either ISAF or the Afghan government. The UN report marks a perhaps singular opportunity to marshal momentum behind detention reforms that will be long-lasting and effective at protecting the most basic of human rights.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, everyone's favorite punching bag in Afghanistan, has decided provincial reconstruction teams -- PRTs -- are, in fact, bad for his country. "The Afghans want to have a government of their own. The Afghans don't want a government from abroad," Karzai told reporters in Kabul. "The transition means giving the whole thing to Afghan ownership and leadership. Naturally then the PRTs will have no place."

This didn't used to be controversial. When the first PRT was created in early 2003, it was actually called a provincial transition team because the idea was to transition control of an area from U.S. to Afghan control as capacity was built. Of course, that first PRT, in Gardez, Paktia, only had one civilian on it who was supposed to monitor all the reconstruction and governance activity in three provinces. Soon, the PRT program got a new name -- reconstruction this time, not transition -- and by 2007 there were 25 PRTs across the country.

Evaluations of PRT performance have been mixed at best. One researcher at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies found in 2008 that PRTs "lead to counter-productive results such as the strengthening of local Power Brokers and the weakening of the government in Kabul." This is because coalition forces "again and again form an alliance with local militias and supply them with weapons and money."

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The assassination of Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Pakistan's Punjab province on January 4, may have shocked many, but calls for his death had been coming for the past few months -- and went unchecked.

If responsibility has to be laid at anyone's door, it is at that of religious parties -- who campaigned vociferously against Taseer for his support of a woman convicted and sentenced to death under Pakistan's blasphemy law -- and of the ruling PPP-led government for not putting those inciting to murder him behind bars.

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