A few months ago, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, World Bank President James Wolfensohn offered the theory that poverty was the root cause of global terrorism.

“In rich countries, (a) growing numbers of people are beginning to understand that poverty anywhere is poverty everywhere,” Wolfensohn said last March at a conference on financing for development in Montery, California. “Imaginary walls will not protect us.”

Economists like Wolfensohn are now reconsidering this theory.

Recent studies by two of the world’s most respected economic think-tanks have determined that poverty has no bearing on terrorism in the Middle East and South Asia. In fact, these economists believe political repression — not poor economic conditions — most significantly contributes to terror.

The authors of the studies say countries like Pakistan and Egypt have become breeding grounds for terrorism because economic progress is being held back by political repression, provoking an extremist reaction among the educated elites in those nations.

One study, produced for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research by economists Alan Kreuger and Jitka Maleckova, finds that most terrorists are relatively well off and educated, and are reacting to political conditions such as corruption that they abhor within their societies.

“Instead of viewing terrorism as a direct response to low market opportunities or ignorance, we suggest it is more accurately viewed as a response to political conditions and long-standing feelings of indignity and frustration,” say the NBER economists.

“More educated people from privileged backgrounds are more likely to participate in politics,” say Kreuger and Maleckova, adding that terrorist organizations prefer to use highly educated individuals as operatives to carry out acts of international terrorism.

The NBER study relies heavily on experience with the Hezbollah groups in Lebanon, as well as with the Israeli Jewish underground, which conducted numerous violent attacks against Palestinians in the 1970s and 1980s.

A second study by the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Institute goes even further. Institute analysts Jennifer Bremer and John D. Kasarda say terrorists are more likely to surface and thrive in Third World countries where the political regime is corrupt, repressive and holding back economic progress.

The Kenan economists, writing in the Milken Institute Review, say several key US allies in its “war on terrorism” are in actuality the prime breeding grounds for terrorism because of their backward political states. As examples, the economists cite Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Kenya.

Iraq, they say, is a prime example of a Middle Eastern state where economic progress stalled after the nation started to develop industrially because the powerful authoritarian government there colluded to keep wealth in the hands of a small elite.

According to Bremer and Kasarda, the stalled economic development in many of these countries is just as threatening to world peace and stability as that which led to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

“The origins of this new terror have been dangerously misread. Neither Afghan poverty nor Islam is the problem,” say the Kenan Institute economists. “Afghanistan’s weak state and rugged terrain simply make it the perfect cave of convenience for a movement whose origins lie in the stalled transitions of Egypt and Pakistan.

“As in the previous century,” they add, “bomb-throwing anarchists are led by charismatic, educated men drawn from largely middle and upper-class backgrounds.”

While the United States has made fitful starts at prodding its Middle Eastern allies to adopt the principles of democracy and political freedom that eventually would defuse the extremists in their midst, it so far is relying primarily on military action to try to rid the world of terrorism. The authors say this approach will fail.

“The next stage of this battle cannot be won in Afghanistan, but must focus on the much greater dangers posed by the educated, unemployed young men in the coffee shops of Cairo, Karachi and Jakarta.”

The economists believe another strategy that would help defuse terrorism would be to assist countries in the region that are further along in their quest for democracy and prosperity, so they can be examples to the countries that lag behind.

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Arab News Features 27 November 2002