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Hours after the bloated body of LTTE leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran was found in Sri Lanka, the news reports began flooding in: one of the world’s most infamous terrorist organizations had been defeated, but its sympathizers remained defiant. Across the Sri Lankan diaspora, Tamil expatriates have vowed to keep the liberation movement alive. The Tiger network – including radicalized Tamils in places like Britain and Canada – is reported to be intact and intent on a resurgence. Analysts have warned that the Sri Lankan military might have won a decisive battle against the LTTE, but that, in the long run, the war is not over.

Indeed, recent events in Sri Lanka offer an important lesson to Pakistan as the army takes on the Taliban across the Frontier province. Military action may curtail militancy, but it cannot eliminate a militant ideology. Once the army has crushed militant strongholds, the government must step in with a plan for winning back the proverbial hearts and minds of young men across the tribal and northern areas. This latter stage will be much harder than it sounds.

Since September 2001, many governments have grappled with the question of how to rehabilitate a radicalized militant. The answers, however, are not forthcoming.

Last week, The New York Times reported that an unreleased Pentagon report concludes that 74 of the 534 prisoners released from Guantánamo Bay are currently engaged in some form of terrorism or militancy. That makes of a recidivism rate of almost 14 percent. While some of the former detainees are accused of associating with terrorists or attending militant training camps, others – such as Al Qaeda leader Said Ali al-Shihri and Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Abdullah Zakir – are known to have rejoined the fight.

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon report has raised many questions about whether it is wise for the Obama administration to consider closing Guantánamo when its inmates continue to pose a threat to the United States. But it has also sparked debate about how best to engage with radicalized militants in order to change mindsets and reduce the rate of recidivism among those who are captured, tried, imprisoned and then released.

From Saudi Arabia to Singapore, rehabilitation camps continue to be the most popular solution. Such camps are based on the premise that no one is born a terrorist and can thus be rehabilitated through exposure to competing ideologies. That said, those in charge of reeducating extremists are careful to distinguish between low-level militant foot soldiers or sympathizers and hard-core terrorist leaders who have little to gain from engaging with government authorities.

Jihadi rehab camps tend to be populated by men who have been arrested for conducting terrorist activities or promoting an extremist ideology. In some cases, Guantánamo Bay detainees who have been returned to their home countries are checked into rehab camps before being allowed to reintegrate with society. Rehab programmes are currently functional in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Singapore, Yemen, Algeria, Malaysia and Indonesia, with varying degrees of success.

The Care Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has been offering the most comprehensive jihadi rehab programme since 2004. The centre is managed by a subcommittee of over 100 clerics, another subcommittee including psychological counselors and social scientists, and a security subcommittee, which decides whether militants are prepared to be released back into society.

Militants who are sent into the rehab programme receive spiritual counseling aimed at correcting “misguided” beliefs. They are also required to attend a six-week course that tackles issues such as jihad, relations with non-Muslims, and the validity of fatwas. Rehab candidates sit for examinations that test their newfound knowledge and receive financial assistance in the form of monthly stipends. Incentives are provided so that former extremists are motivated to look for jobs or further their education so that they do not feel the need to fall back in with their old terrorist networks. According to Saudi officials the recidivism rate is less than five percent.

Many rehabilitation programmes work because they focus on creating a sizeable community of religious-minded former militants. Rehabilitated militants tend to return to their old areas and social networks and often encounter extremists who they have previously trained or worked with. Armed with new interpretations of Islam, they can then push back against the radical ideologies propagated by Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In some cases, rehab camps encourage families to bring in their young men who have been recruited by terrorist organizations. This tactic both takes the fight against militant ideologies into wider social networks and shares the task of monitoring rehabilitated extremists with the community as a whole. As such, rehab camps have, to a significant extent, helped reduce militancy – in the sense of both ideology and action – in socities.

Sadly, Pakistan is not well suited to benefiting from jihadi rehab camps. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the camps have met with success because the state dictates a uniform, institutionalized version of Islam and can thus muster up 100 clerics who agree on which interpretation of the religious should be evoked to counter extremist views. On the other hand, in Singapore, the small size of the Muslim population – 15 percent of the city state’s 4.2 million residents – makes it easy to monitor the progress of those who pass out of the programme.

Since Pakistan – both as a state and a populous – lacks consensus on which interpretation of Islam should be championed to counter militant ideologies (or, for that matter, what counts as militant ideology in the first place), jihadi rehab camps could not be established here. After all, extremist rhetoric has found sympathizers within the army, intelligence agencies, and right-wing media outlets. Who then is to say which version of Islam can be presented to militants during rehabilitation to help them abdicate corrupt understandings of the faith? Can we risk replacing the war against terror with a war of competing extremist ideologies?

The fact is, the best long-term antidote to militant ideology is social uplift. But since our government is currently in no position to deliver on important counts such as job creation, health care, secular schooling, and security, Pakistan is at risk of remaining a petri dish in which militancy thrives. If rehabilitation is not the answer to curtailing the spread of extremist ideologies, we should be focusing our immediate attentions on finding out what is.