Posted on 11/19/2006 9:48:00 PM PST by Gengis Khan
In a crisis, a Labour politician's first instinct is to reach for his wallet – or, rather, for your wallet. The struggle against the jihadists has not gone as well as had been hoped.
Something close to a full-scale war rages in Afghanistan against a new Taliban insurgency. In Iraq, coalition troops and their local auxiliaries are virtually confined to base, while warlords fight it out over great tracts of the country. Tony Blair's response? To spend his way out of trouble, lavishing overseas aid on the Islamist heartlands – notably in Pakistan – in the hope that economic growth will distract the tribesmen from their zealotry.
The trouble is, there is absolutely no evidence that foreign aid quells fanaticism. Indeed, there is some evidence of negative correlation. Afghanistan has received more than $8 billion in grants since 2001, while the US alone voted for $18.7 billion for reconstruction in Iraq in 2003; yet the peoples of these lands are more radicalised than ever. The largest recipients per capita of development aid in the world, by a considerable margin, are the Palestinians, who have none the less constructed a society in which paramilitarism and even suicide bombings are regarded as normal, if not meritorious.
It is possible to envisage how overseas aid might achieve its objectives. Tightly focused programmes to, for example, incentivise the substitution of narcotics crops, can succeed. But such schemes are the exception rather than the rule. It is more usual for foreign aid, as in Palestine, to foster corruption, dependency and resentment. An economy in which subventions keep young men idle and just above the poverty line is arguably the perfect terrorist habitat.
It is striking, for example, how many of our own attempted Tube bombers were living on welfare, despising the hand that fed them and despising themselves for feeding from it. Had this option been closed, they might have had to find gainful employment, and so had less time to work themselves into a condition of existential rage.
The idea that political violence is born of poverty and despair derives, ultimately, from Marx. Like many of his ideas, it looks plausible on the page, but turns out not to be true.
Most revolutions happen at times of rising wealth and aspiration.
If Mr Blair thinks that Western aid will win over the Muslim world, he misunderstands human nature. One of the reasons that Iraqis distrust the West is that they had come to associate it, via the UN's oil for food racket, with their own corrupt officials.
The last thing we want is for a similar thing to happen in Pakistan. There are many things Mr Blair could usefully do to help that country, such as encouraging investment and trade and the opening of EU markets to Pakistani exports. Aid, in the final analysis, allows autocratic governments to spend more money without having to ask their peoples: in other words it makes them more irresponsible. This is in no one's interest.
Sounds all too familiar.
Tony Blair, a Third Way proponent, killing 'em with kindness like Clinton..
I am less bothered than I might be (seeing as I am paying for it) as this tends to stabilise Musharraf's position.
Its the biggest misconception that showering money can stabilise the position of an ally.
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