From Dhaka, With Hope

CHESTERTOWN, Md. — This sleepy town on Maryland's Eastern Shore is deeply rooted in the 18th century. Crab fishermen still ply the waters of the Chester River, and painstakingly restored homes bear witness to its history as a remote outpost of the British Empire long before it joined the upstart United States. Yet Chestertown has improbably become the laboratory for a bold new experiment in the war on terrorism.

Against this colonial backdrop, 21 young Muslim student leaders from South Asia, chosen from among hundreds of applicants, spent their first summer in the United States. Like their American counterparts, they went to cookouts, baseball games and Fourth of July parades. Unlike most Americans, they hotly debated the fine points of the U.S. Constitution, explored the rising importance of Islam in America and stayed up late at night seeking solutions to the Kashmir conflict.

Six months ago, the State Department asked me to organize the first American Studies Institute -- an experimental summer school on American values for students from the Muslim world. The brainchild of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the program is a visionary idea on several levels. By reaching out to foreign college students -- which the department's educational programs have not done for nearly half a century -- the program offers an alternative to the madrasas that have been training young Muslims in the fanatical extremes of anti-Americanism. By asking American colleges to run the programs, the federal government entrusts the teaching to independent scholars, avoids the taint of propaganda and widens public participation in our foreign policy.

In the 1990s, the U.S. committed a serious error when we eliminated many of the overseas cultural programs that had been in place since the Cold War. American educational centers and libraries were closed down in places like Pakistan, where they had never been more desperately needed, and under pressure from then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the U.S. Information Agency was folded into the State Department and effectively eliminated. Is there any wonder that foreigners have trouble understanding us?

But now, called to attention by the events of 9/11, the U.S. government is groggily waking up to the need to explain itself better to an uncomprehending, often resentful world. Just as we did in the late 1930s, when the State Department created a cultural division to counteract the rise of fascism, and again in the 1950s, when the Cold War led to some of our best efforts to wage cultural diplomacy, we are discovering new incentives to explain the ideas that animate us.