The virtual jihad....

The mosque is being replaced by the web as the place for recruitment and subversion.

Salafist ideologues are reinventing Islam, firing the imagination of Internet-savvy Muslim youth from Morocco to Mindanao and from Sweden to Spain. Mohamed Atta trained his 9/11 teams face-to-face. The successor generation now meets in an Open University of Jihad on the worldwide Web.

We can no longer measure success as we did before 9/11. The death of a leader, even of Osama bin Laden, makes no difference at all. Violence is only the tip of a huge, previously uncharted iceberg.

What increasingly looks like a looming disaster in Iraq is already multiplying jihadi cyberwarriors. Britain's homegrown terrorists are organized, trained and controlled directly from Pakistan or via Pakistan networks in the U.K. and the rest of Europe. MI5's Joint Terrorism Analysis Center has concluded the Internet is the key to the intelligence conundrum.

More important than the recipes for homemade bombs -- e.g., hair dye mixed with nail polish remover detonated by the flash mechanism on a throwaway camera -- are the Web sites hosted by university servers, which direct them. MI5 keeps close tabs on 1,000 known extremists, tying up some 6,000 agency personnel. But what about those who conceal their thinking, or confine their traffic to the doctrine of jihad?