Counter-terrorism is a strange business, particularly for the military-minded. Policymakers and defense specialists who came of age in a Cold War environment are used to thinking of a professional enemy who takes calculated risks for a specific payoff -- a balance of power.

Of course, this far into the "War on Terror," everyone knows that the classic model does not apply to the motivations behind terrorism or the tactics it employs. The military has sought out and digested new frameworks; there is much talk of "hearts and minds." High-level military and policy decision-makers even talk of staunching the desperation that can give rise to terrorist sympathies (witness AFRICOM). But it still seems a stretch to believe that new generations of terrorists may be more bored, slighted and uninspired than anything else. These simply cannot be good enough reasons to turn to terrorism, can they? Or, as a staffer to Vice President Cheney commented in Newsweek during a briefing by an anthropologist who studies the children who keep Al Qaeda and its spinoffs going, "Don't these young people realize that the decisions they make are their responsibility, and that if they choose violence against us, we're going to bomb them?"

On Tuesday Newsweek profiled Scott Atran, the anthropologist in question, because he thinks so differently about what drives these young people and how to communicate effectively with them. Atran was dumbfounded by the staffer's question. "Bomb them?" he responded. "In Madrid? In London?"

When Atran looks at the forces driving terrorism, he does not, first and foremost, see religious zealotry, desperate poverty or a calculated desire to change policy (though those factors are present). He sees a desire to be cool.

Atran studies young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005 and hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006.

[He] has looked at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them. And he's reached an unconventional but, to me, convincing conclusion: what has inspired the "new wave" terrorists since 2001 is not so much the Qur'an as what Atran calls "jihadi cool." If you can discredit these kids' idols (most notably Osama bin Laden), give them new ones and reframe the way their families and friends see the United States and its allies, then you've got a good shot at killing the fad for terror and stopping the jihad altogether...

So when Atran went back to Washington [after the aforementioned trip to the vice president's office] to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January this year, he went armed--with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing cooked up by the Bush administration's warmongers and spinmeisters comes close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a commercial action adventure series called "The 99."

Yep, he showed them comics with Muslim superheroes. There's nothing magical about the idea. What makes the comics different is that they are crafted to bring out the best, not from the outside but within the Muslim narrative; they do not read like a marketing piece.

Mainstream comics in the West have drawn heavily on Judeo-Christian narratives and iconography, he says. Why not create a cast of characters whose powers echo Muslim history and traditions? And because his company, Teshkeel, is the distributor of Marvel and DC comics in the Middle East, Al-Mutawa knows just where to find top writers, pencilers and inkers to make his new publications as polished as any on the market.

The core conceit of the series is that when the Mongols sacked the great city of Baghdad in A.D. 1258, their main target was its magnificent library. They "planned not only to conquer the greatest empire the world had ever known, but to eradicate its hope--its potential--thereby destroying its future," the narrator tells us in boldface block letters. "That would require more than sword and club, sinew and blood. That would require destroying the empire's true base of power ... that would require destroying its knowledge."

This is not, I imagine, the sort of challenge young Muslims often receive: knowledge, rather than violence, as the source of pride, of cool. From this place, we can start a conversation where none was possible before.