With growing public and elite consensus that military action alone is unable to stop terrorism, the New America Foundation convened last week in a conference on the economic response to terrorism, reports Paul Wulfsberg from Washington Insufficient education and economic underdevelopment are often blamed for providing what is typically termed a "breeding ground" for extremism. Tackling terrorism by fighting poverty was the subject of a conference entitled "Beyond Bullets: Economic Strategies in the Fight against Terrorism", hosted on 21 September in Washington. Organised by the non-partisan New American Foundation, the conference featured an all-star lineup of experts from the fields of media, academia and politics, with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto acting as the keynote speaker. To counteract the radicalising process of disempowerment and exclusion, Harriet Babbitt, the director of Women Waging Peace, proposed focussing on the question of how to bring political organisations that have used violence at some point, such as Hamas, Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood, "into the system". CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen also took a conciliatory approach, arguing "Islamists are a potential ally" for United States interests in the region. Sherle Schwenninger, founding editor of World Policy Journal, also pinpointed unfulfilled economic expectations as a culprit. "[Educated youth] have a choice between driving a taxi in London and driving a taxi in Cairo, and they perceive neither as suitable to their middle-class aspirations." Explicitly rejecting the World Bank and IMF as ideal guides for developing countries, Schwenninger argued "there is no substitute for huge public works in the Middle East to put people to work." He clarified that jobless youth should be put to work in New Deal-style programmes improving infrastructure rather than creating useless bureaucratic positions. "I know it's out of ideological favour but it makes a lot of sense." One recurring issue at the conference was the dilemma posed by Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest, who asked whether a benign authoritarianism such as that in Singapore was preferable to a democracy unable to provide economic security, such as Columbia. Gvosdev interpreted National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's speech in Cairo last June as a sign that the Bush administration has decided to discard the friendly authoritarian model. De Soto rejected both what he labeled as "electocracies" which had nominal or even competitive elections without having a truly representative government, and authoritarianism, benign or otherwise, pointing out that authoritarianism offers no mechanism for change should it no longer be benign. While more than one speaker chastised the US for its stinginess in providing foreign aid for developing countries, there was general agreement that direct aid does little to actually stimulate sustainable development. "Charity is great, but it's not the battlefront," said de Soto. He went on to expound on his well-known theory stressing the importance of establishing the legal framework conducive to private enterprise, with the full extension of formal property rights as the crucial first step in economic development driven by the indigenous private sector. "Foreign aid is mostly marginal, but what we need is what I call 'imprinting', wherein other countries come to share our political and economic values", said Lael Brainard, vice president and director of the Global Economy and Development Centre at the Brookings Institution. While the conference presented a range of viewpoints and ideas, it never seriously debated its basic assumption -- that economic development can reduce future terrorism. The popular perception that there is some causal link leading from economic deprivation to terrorism has persisted and perhaps even become more widespread since 11 September 2001, but studies have failed to discover a correlation between the two. Only David Hale, chairman of the board of China Online, made even a passing reference to research which has found no causality between personal economic difficulties and the propensity to commit terrorist acts. Studies such as "Education, Poverty, and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?" by Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova have even suggested that terrorists tend to be middle-class and well educated, far from the common perception of a desperately poor individual with nothing to lose. Nonetheless, he went on to claim that "the reality is we have a lot of poverty and a lot of inequality and this provides a breeding ground for terrorism." As the editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris, pointed out, "[terrorists'] grievances are not directly tied to poverty, and it's not just impoverished countries that have terrorist problems." Babbitt endorsed this more subtle understanding, arguing that "not poverty, but political and economic disenfranchisement and disempowerment" are among the root causes of terrorism. De Soto followed the same line, saying that terrorists "pick up their constituency not from the poor but from the excluded". Seymour Hersh, a columnist for The New Yorker, went further as the representative voice of dissent, downplaying economic development as only one of several possible non-military steps to pre-empt terrorism. According to Hersh, the US and its allies cannot avoid "dealing with the bigger issues" such as the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, the failure of Western European societies to integrate Muslim immigrants and US foreign policy in general. Research so far has suggested that the connection between poverty and terrorism is tenuous at best, with no clear causality. Global economic development unquestionably is a goal worthy of dedicated pursuit by countries with the means to help others, one that does not need a "war on terror" for justification. For its part, the "war on terror" could focus on issues more directly tied to terrorism, such as political disempowerment.
