Speech of J. Brian Atwood Foreign Assistance: The Fourth Dimension in the War Against Terrorism
October 22,2001

I thank Jessica Stern for inviting me here today.  Jessica has contributed greatly to our understanding of the terrorist threat through her research and her writing.  If timing is everything in life - - and in academia - - Jessica’s course and her research could not have been better timed.  I am not sure whether the cut off date for this course was before or after September 11, but those who signed up before that date should be given extra points for prescience.

The world has certainly changed.  Earlier this year I was giving speeches with titles like “While America Slept.”  I, and others, were railing against unilateralism and cheering on the pragmatists in the Bush Administration.  On September 12, there were no more unilateralists, only coalition builders.  Pragmatism has won the day.  The Administration deserves good marks for its handling of this crisis.

But, as the President has said, this engagement will be a long one.  We are up against a tough and unscrupulous enemy and we will need to adjust as we go along.  I am going to suggest today a few weapons that should be added to the arsenal.

A few weeks ago, in a moment of weakness, I agreed to appear on “The O’Reilly Factor”, a nationally syndicated FOX network program.  The young producer who called me had heard that I had been expressing some ideas for a broader strategy for the war against terrorism.  Yes, I said, I took the President seriously when he said we needed a multi-dimensional approach and I explained how I would use foreign aid in the mix.

Some of you may have seen Bill O’Reilly’s show.  He tries very hard to demonstrate that he has overcome his Harvard education!  He introduced me that night not as a person with some ideas for a better strategy, but rather as someone who wanted to “understand” the terrorists.  As if I wanted to put them on a couch!  He then proceeded to assert that foreign aid had never worked and that there were no countries in the Middle East where our assistance could help.  I began to understand better why the press people at AID kept me away from such programs.

In any case, this is a much better forum in which to explain my views.  You may disagree in the end, but you won’t interrupt me as much as Mr. O’Reilly!

Let me start with a few caveats and definitions.

First, I have no objection to the use of the word “war” to describe the battle we are in.  The President and others have used the word effectively to describe the gravity of our situation, to unify the nation and to create international support for the cause.

Having said that, I also hope that our people are sophisticated enough to understand the differences here.  This is not a war between nations.  Even the Taliban do not qualify as a government.  More importantly, there will be no final victory in this war.  We will not be signing any peace treaties with the terrorists.

A victory in this war will not mean a total defeat of the enemy.  We cannot eliminate the evil thoughts or intentions of every terrorist.  What we can do is to marginalize them to the point of irrelevance. 

There are some analogous situations in countries that have redressed similar threats.  Italy relegated the Red Guard to irrelevance and they pushed the Mafia from the big screen on to HBO.  Peru did the same to the Shining Path.  The Basque of group, ETA, occasionally wreaks havoc in Spain, but they do not disrupt political life or commerce.  Even the IRA are being marginalized as terrorists in Northern Ireland as more moderate members believe they can achieve their goals by political means.

The point is that much can be done to narrow the impact of terrorism.  Much can be done to deny them a constituency, to reduce their audience of sympathizers.  Much can be done to limit their influence, but even a powerful and united government such as ours will not completely rid the world of these angry, often pathological, people.  To believe that we can do so, would be akin to believing that we could somehow rid the world of all sin.

Terrorists who want to hijack an entire religion now confront us.  Despite Mr. O’Reilly’s taunting, yes, it is important to ‘understand’ this enemy, to understand their motives and their method of operation.  In this case, both we and all good people of the Islamic faith have an interest in separating them from mainstream Islam.

The first part of this task is to attack the leadership of the movement, to remove the head or heads of the serpent and to disrupt the functioning of the network.  That is happening now.  The introduction of ground forces in Afghanistan gives me confidence that we will achieve this objective.

We also should acknowledge that the military phase of this operation is mobilizing anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world.  Perhaps not as much as Bin Laden expected, but it is a worry.  It is important to get this particular military phase over with quickly, preferably before Ramadan begins on November 17.

The Administration has done a good job of deflecting the charge that we are at war with Islam, despite some noticeable weaknesses in our government’s information dissemination capacity in the Middle East.  We have a wonderful capacity to broadcast to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, but very little to counter the radical voices of the Middle East.

If I have a worry I would express it this way:  September 11 changed the world as we know it, but serious change in the way our government is organized and funded to deal with it has been relegated to one innovation - - a Homeland Security Office in the White House.  As necessary as is better coordination to protect our homeland, this only improves our defense.  If we are to make terrorism irrelevant, we have to get on the offense, and not just with military power.

We have heard a great deal about the failure of our intelligence community and its future needs.  How much of this $32 billion budget is being used effectively to counter terrorism?  Should we shore up our human intelligence capacity?

These are legitimate questions on which I have opinions, but I will show restraint today.  That is not the debate in which I want to engage beyond suggesting that we can improve our human intelligence dramatically without reengaging the world’s thieves and murderers.

Secretary Rumsfeld wants a lighter, faster military to respond to terrorist threats and other non-traditional insurgencies and threats.  This should be encouraged too.  I certainly hope our Afghan operations will be critically analyzed and used as a basis for improvement.  It is almost certain that we will soon hear a request for an increase in defense spending from its current $328 billion.  I have an opinion here too, but that is not the debate I want to open today.

The point is these two issues - - intelligence and military - - have dominated the public dialogue in the aftermath of September 11.  Yet, this long, so-called war to make terrorism irrelevant must be fought with other means as well.  We will not be successful, if we cannot use the opening created by September 11 to mobilize American resources for aggressive and highly creative diplomacy and for targeted development assistance to attack the alienation that poverty produces and terrorists exploit.  The entire budget for diplomacy, foreign aid and support for the UN and World Bank systems is about $19 billion.  That is grossly inadequate.

If you accept that poverty is a potential ally of terrorism, the statistics suggest that our war will be an ever-expanding one.  Of the world’s 6 billion people, 2 billion live below the poverty line, 1.3 billion of these in extreme poverty.  Another 2 billion are just over the poverty line and a recent World Bank report estimates that the current global recession will send millions more under that line.

One billion of these people are jobless teenagers.  Many live in the squalid slums of sprawling cities.  If the urbanization trends continue, there will be 27 cities in the developing world that are bigger than New York within the next decade.

That decade will also bring us close to another billion people.  Most of these will be born poor in the developing world.  The terrorists do not need to recruit many of these people to keep the war going.

We all know the effects of poverty: terrible diseases that take millions of lives, mostly children, environmental disasters, food shortages and, most damaging of all, the loss of hope.  Alienation and anger are right on the surface and the terrorists and demagogues know how to exploit it.

How will the new global citizens view the United States?  Will we be seen as we wish to be: as a nation that stands for freedom and democracy, a nation that offers a helping hand?  Or, will we be seen as an isolated society, living in fear behind the barriers of our new security measures, closed to the hopes and dreams of those who wish to share our good fortune, a nation consuming most of the world’s food and energy while others starve?  If we are in fact seen that way, the terrorists will be on the ascendancy - - at a minimum, they will remain a very relevant force to contend with.

We are just beginning to hear some voices arguing for a renewed effort to attack poverty.  The logic is unassailable if one spends any time at all observing the way terrorists networks operate.  The poor are their potential soldiers, the martyrs who believe that life after death will be far better than what they endure now.

The Al Qaeda message is opportunistic; it varies to appeal to current popular opinion in the Islamic world, but there is one recurrent theme.  The United States is the land of godless consumerism, modernism and personal aggrandizement.  To borrow from Tom Friedman, America is the ‘Lexus’ that is spreading its free market, anti-religious (read anti-Islamic) philosophy far and wide; we are the ultimate threat to the ‘Olive Tree’,  the traditions which have preserved the spirit of Islam even in the worst of economic times.

As inaccurate as it is, the message has a powerful appeal.  We should do everything in our power to explain that ours is a nation founded to protect the right of people to practice their religion freely.  We  should recognize and point to the 7 million Muslims who are proud to be Americans.  We should remind people that the last two military encounters the United States participated in were on the side of Muslim communities in Bosnia and Kosovo.

We should do these things, but we will not win hearts and minds with a propaganda war alone.  The United States and its friends must also engage people on the ground, forming partnerships across borders and cultures and religions to deliver development assistance that dramatically improves the everyday lives of people.

Last week in the New York Times, my friend Hernando de Soto said “To divert the poor from the siren call of terrorists, America and its allies must appeal to their entrepreneurial interests.  It is not enough to appeal to the stomachs of the poor.  One must appeal to their aspirations.”

Tom Friedman called for a tripling of foreign assistance.  Anthony Lewis, also calling for more aid, said that “Desperate populations are beating at our doors and are menacing our ease of life.  We have to care.”

All over Europe, conservatives are joining liberals in an appeal to broaden the fight against terrorism by increasing aid to the developing world.  Yet, in the United States, the new consensus for engagement has failed thus far to embrace the need to fight poverty - - the need to drive a wedge between the terrorists and the poor.  It is heartening to hear these opinions expressed in the pages of the New York Times, or the Boston Globe, or the Washington Post, but thus far our political leaders have been silent.

An aid program to counter terrorism should be nuanced and carefully targeted. There is no need to challenge the olive trees of Islamic countries if we are responding to the felt needs of the people of these countries.

These are the initial components I would package together in a Bush Administration request for an emergency foreign aid supplemental:

1.      A large increase in humanitarian and food aid for the starving people of Afghanistan and the Afghan refugees in Pakistan.  This would include adequate funds to help UNHCR repatriate the refugees as soon as the hostilities cease in Afghanistan, after a UN peacekeeping team is deployed.

2.      Adequate funds to demonstrate global leadership in raising the resources needed to rebuild Afghanistan under a coalition government during a UN-managed transition.  The first installment of the reconstruction package should be at least $1 billion with the US contributing one-third.

3.      Immediate funding to at least double the current USAID programs in Jordan, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Indonesia, and new funds to start up a program in Pakistan.  Funding for the programs in Egypt and the West Bank-Gaza is already adequate in my opinion.

4.      We should request a major increase in funding for African states that have significant Muslim populations, particularly in West and East Africa.  More Muslims live on the African continent than in the Middle East.

5.      If our current efforts to gain the cooperation of states that have been harboring terrorists succeed, we should consider opening aid missions there as well .  If Syria, for example, is open to engaging in the peace process with Israel and agrees to take steps to curb terrorism, this would be a good place to start.  A contingency fund based on the need for a presidential certification should be requested.

The programs funded in this special fund to combat terrorism should emphasize education programs: vocational training, primary education, literacy and numeracy and Internet, distance-learning.  I would like to see a real effort made to link American schools with counterparts in the Islamic world.  Both sides would benefit from kids talking to kids, telling each other what their worlds are like.

Our education programs should have a strong civics component.  As we have learned in Egypt, there are limits to what can be accomplished through development if we cannot operate in a freer, more democratic environment.  My friend, Rob Malley, who worked on the Middle East at the NSC, was recently quoted in the Globe as saying “…the absence of democracy has caused a vacuum that Islamic militants alone were able to fill.  While governments silenced all dissident political speech, Islam enjoyed the use of inviolable space - - the mosque…”

I have seen this happen in Egypt where the combination of authoritarian control and a lack of investment in education, particularly in Upper Egypt, has given the militants the space to operate and to proseltyze.

All of the other strategic goals of a development program -- health, environment, agriculture, clean water, family planning -- should be a part of the dialogue as well.  New innovations such as those discussed by Hernando de Soto in his book Mystery of Capitalism can also play a role.

It is vitally important, however, that the programs be bought into by the local population.  We must assure that they cannot be described as part of a U.S. "modernization" plan.  We can avoid that if we are careful to identify ourselves with the grassroots and not Western-educated elites who often seem too eager to bring their societies kicking and screaming into the 21st century.  This is a program that should emphasize participation.  Only by listening to the poor can we know that we are meeting their real aspirations.

This form of engagement will inform us as well.  It will give us an improved perspective for future decisions and it will limit the ability of terrorists to paint us as the devil incarnate.  In terms of knowledge and understanding, these programs deliver more than does the intelligence community.

We will not achieve a balanced relationship with Islamic countries over night but we can create some good will in the short term and can begin to lay a foundation for development results in the longer term.

It may even be necessary to waste some money to test the waters in several countries.  We did that in spades during the Cold War, but we have learned a great deal about participatory development and development cooperation since then and, with the right partners, we can run a cost-effective program.

We won the East - West struggle because we matched power with intelligent engagement.  We promoted our democratic values and proved over time that market economics, with all it inefficiencies and inequities, was more capable of producing wealth and more consistent with the laws of human nature than the alternative.  We brought about a new international consensus and swept aside the old ideological debate.

Today, our adversaries offer no opposing ideology.  They operate in the realm of the mystical and the only promise they hold out is for a better life after death.  They are exploiting the alienation of the poor.  To counter this appeal, we must undertake and offensive to show the poor that there is hope.

To make terrorism irrelevant, we will need all the dimensions of power and influence that won the Cold War.  We will need the military dimension when we can find the terrorist's hiding places.  We will need the intelligence dimension to find our adversaries and to defend against their tactics.  We will need the diplomatic dimension to encourage cooperation and the smooth functioning of international institutions.  And we will need foreign assistance as the primary means of engaging the poor directly in an effort to help themselves while helping us to keep them from the appeal of the terrorists.  This is the all-important fourth dimension.