How to contain radical Islam

The best global strategy for the US may be the one that won the Cold War

By Commander Philip Kapusta and Captain Donovan Campbell  |  July 27, 2008

A recent piece published by The Boston Globe points out the similarities between the United States’ fight against communism during the Cold War and the current struggle against radical Islam . The article, by Commander Philip Kapusta and Captain Donovan Campbell, is titled “How to Contain Radical Islam: The best global strategy for the US may be the one that won the Cold War”. Kapusta and Campbell base their assessment of the global setbacks currently experienced by the US military in the War on Terror on one underlying problem: the US has yet to formulate a holistic strategy to guide the prosecution of the war. Their new policy, dubbed “neocontainment” focuses on the war of ideas, and further, isolation of the most dangerous ideas from main stream Islam. They propose a strategy based on the Cold War era NSC-68, a National Security Council report which encourages the building of “stable, moderate nations on the periphery of the arc of instability”, as opposed to (arguably) self-defeating military confrontations.

While Kapusta and Campbell emphasize the strategic importance of stabilizing Lebanon and Pakistan, the fundementals of Neocontainment, namely development of economic infrastructure, are exactly what The Neutral Development Project stands for. Sinse we were founded in 2006, we have advocated a policy of providing constructive alternatives to those most at risk of being dragged into harmful political or religious conflict. 

Here is an exerpt from the article:

…The path dictated by NSC-68 was not a straight line to the collapse of the USSR, but the strategy proved remarkably effective. Communism expanded outside of its containment zone in a few instances, but, for the most part, the United States and its allies successfully implemented the indirect approach recommended by NSC-68. When the once mighty Soviet empire imploded in 1991, it was almost precisely as NSC-68 had predicted.

Strikingly, if one replaces “communism” with “Islamic extremism” and “the Kremlin” with “Al-Qaeda,” NSC-68 could have been written in 2002, not 1950. Like communism, Islamic extremism lusts for political power, in this case through the restoration of the caliphate and the imposition of Sharia law on all peoples. Indeed, language from NSC-68 rings eerily true today – it described the Soviets as “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own.” Al Qaeda and its ilk are the latest in a long line of narrow ideologies that claim to provide the only true answer to life’s existential questions. And as with Soviet communism, the idea has a geographic nucleus.

Our task now is to envelop this nucleus with prosperous, stable countries whose inhabitants are free to choose their own beliefs. Working from the outside in, the United States must partner with nations on the periphery to help them build a stronger middle class, enhance their education systems, improve basic health, and lower government corruption. We must help elected and unelected governments to allow greater empowerment of their citizens, whether through a slow march toward representative government or expanded economic opportunity for all classes.

Lebanon in the Middle East and Pakistan in Central Asia are some of the best countries in which to begin and expand this work. In Lebanon’s complex political landscape, Iran and Syria support the Islamist Hezbollah party-cum-militia, while the United States backs the secular Lebanese government. Another Islamist movement, Fatah al Islam, enjoys a nebulous connection to Al Qaeda. We should be using our country’s massive financial resources to allow the Lebanese government to outspend its competitors by a factor of 10, showering much-needed aid on the Lebanese people, and thus de-legitimizing their opponents and debunking their ideology. Instead, the government cannot meet its basic responsibilities, and extremist movements are increasingly seen as the only institutions capable of bettering lives.

In Pakistan, the extremist cancer in the northwestern provinces continues to grow despite $5.5 billion in direct US military aid. Pakistan’s dangerously unstable new civilian government lacks the capability and will to challenge Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the region. Instead of focusing exclusively on military operations along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, America must broaden its scope to encompass other priorities: tension with India over Kashmir and education reform. Only after a comprehensive Indo/Pakistani border settlement will Pakistan shift its military energy from south to north. In the interim, it will placate us with occasional forays into the frontier provinces, but such adventures will never be decisive. We must also help Pakistan provide a counterweight to the hundreds of Wahabi madrassas spreading virulent extremism. As long as these fundamentalist institutions remain the only option for much of the country’s poor, Islamic extremists in the tribal areas will enjoy a virtually inexhaustible manpower pool. In the long run, 5,000 secular teachers for Pakistan’s middle schools will do more for America’s national security than will 50,000 AK-47s for the country’s army.

A clear new containment strategy will help us recognize the importance of engaging with such nations at pivotal points before they slide into repressive autocracy (Pakistan in 2001) or all-out chaos (Afghanistan in 1989).

It is popular to blame these failings on the attention and resource deficits created by the Iraq war. But they are just as much the result of the black-and-white mentality that governs our approach to foreign affairs – liberal democracy or nothing. In working with periphery states, we must be willing to accept outcomes that are less than perfect. Indeed, we must be willing to accept ruling regimes that may not like us at all. We are not trying to create mini-Americas scattered across the globe; we are looking to foster stable, free countries whose people will have little interest in the repressive ideology of our enemies.

On occasion, extremist governments hostile to the existence of the United States (Hamas in the Gaza Strip) will enjoy broad popular support, but preemptive wars must become a thing of the past. We cannot say that we value freedom and then seek political change through force when the choice of the people produces regimes not to our liking. However, the military can, and must, be used to target individuals bent on terror aimed at American interests. Furthermore, if a nation enables attacks on our homeland, as Afghanistan did under the Taliban, then we must use all necessary means to defend ourselves. On rare occasions, this will require full-out war and post-invasion reconstruction….

Read the entire article here.

A recent article from ForeignPolicy.com points to the benefits of “smarter farming”, as seen in Uganda in recent years. A symbiotic combination of more farming and a bit of protectionist trade policy has dramactically increased the country’s independence from foreign aid and stimulated the domestic economy. The success of the farming community in Uganda confirms The Neutral Development Project’s position that water and irrigation are among the most critical factors for a developing country struggling to acheive economic growth.

Link to the Article

Playing the Rice Card 

by G. Pascal Zachary

 For years, Western experts promised Africans that free-market ideology would save them from poverty and famine. Now, one African country is showing that sometimes, a little protectionism can work wonders

Farming has suddenly become fashionable again. Once a largely ignored corner of the development business, agriculture is now a hot field among experts more versed in structural adjustments than crop rotations. Record prices for cereal crops such as wheat, corn, and rice have many of them viewing farmers as a key component of economic growth in poor countries and as a supply-side solution to the political instability those high prices have caused everywhere from West Africa to Bangladesh. Researchers should be careful, however, to learn the right lessons from the countries that are already harvesting success.

Consider the case of Uganda. The country’s rice output has risen 2½ times since 2004, according to the Ministry of Trade. Rice production is expected to reach an astonishing 180,000 metric tons this year, up from 135,000 in 2006 and 102,000 in 2005. Consumption of imported rice, meanwhile, fell by half from 2004 to 2005 alone, and by half again from 2005 to 2007.

Uganda’s importers, seeing the shift, have invested in new mills in the country, expanding employment and creating competition for farmer output, thereby improving prices. New mills, meanwhile, lowered the cost of bringing domestic rice to market. While people in developing countries across the globe are clamoring about the sharp rise in food prices, Ugandans are still paying about the same for rice as they always have. And Uganda is poised to start exporting rice within East Africa—and beyond.

The secret of Uganda’s homegrown success? Ignoring decades of bad Western advice.

In the 1990s, African governments sharply reduced or eliminated duties on imported rice, urged on by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and some influential free-market economists. The assumption was that richer countries would reciprocate by curtailing subsidies to their own farmers. That never happened. In response, a few African countries have raised duties on rice, violating a key tenet of neoliberal trade philosophy. Protectionism is supposed to be bad—so bad that international advisors have spent decades convincing African governments to open their markets as wide as possible to imports.

One of the leaders of Uganda’s rice revolution is Gilbert Bukenya, the country’s vice president and its leading advocate for the commercialization of agriculture. I first met Bukenya at his home on the shores of Lake Victoria, where he laid out the basic philosophy. “By farming smarter, Ugandans not only can grow more, they can earn more money,” he told me. An advocate of food self-sufficiency, Bukenya wants Ugandans to eat more homegrown rice, boosting local farmers and rice millers while at the same time freeing hard cash for other uses. Bukenya has long promoted a new African rice that grows in “uplands” (as opposed to wetland “paddies”) and requires less water.

Embracing a new variety is only part of the working-smarter formula. Once rice output began to expand, Bukenya and other Ugandan politicians played another card: They stumped for a duty of 75 percent to be imposed on foreign rice. The legislature passed the duty, which stimulated domestic rice production further.

Uganda’s success in expanding its rice production is especially interesting because the people of sub-Saharan Africa spend nearly $2 billion a year on rice grown outside Africa. The amount Africans spend on rice alone equals the national budgets of the governments of Ghana and Senegal combined. With the help of wise policies, African farmers could grow much more rice on their own, maybe even enough to eliminate virtually all imported rice. Eliminating rice imports would benefit Uganda by ensuring a local supply as Asian rice is becoming less available and more expensive.

What Uganda recognized is that the world’s major rice exporters actually practice the opposite of what the World Bank and IMF preach. Much of the rice grown in Pakistan, Vietnam, and especially the United States is stimulated by subsidy payments to farmers. Then the rice is “dumped” into African markets at low prices—sometimes below the cost of production. These producers also maintain stiff duties against imported rice, contradicting free-market ideology but helping protect domestic farmers against global competition. And for good reason: Virtually every successful Asian economy was built on selective trade barriers—and in China and India, the world’s two fastest growing economies, such barriers remain in force. Even South Korea and Japan maintain massive duties on imported rice simply to protect the livelihoods of their own rice farmers. Rice duties are working in Uganda—and also in Nigeria, where rice output is also soaring. In both countries, the value of imported rice is declining and locally produced rice is winning the hearts and minds of ordinary consumers.

Rice is just one example. African governments might wish to repeat Uganda’s success with other crops (which ones depends on specific trade flows and the agricultural strengths of the particular country). But African governments should be encouraged to rely on a mix of economic tools, including farm protectionism, aimed at helping indigenous producers.

Uganda and other African countries need to be careful that protectionism doesn’t become a cover for inefficiency or corruption. And selective protectionism is no panacea for Africa even when such policies effectively aid local producers. But, after decades of hardship, economic self-reliance is a worthy goal for most African countries. Uganda’s rice experiment deserves wider attention, if only because it shows that Africans aren’t passive victims of global economic forces. They are fighting back.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article covering an interview with Bill Gates, whose views reflect those of The Neutral Development Project.

Bill Gates Issues Call
For Kinder Capitalism

Famously Competitive, Billionaire Now Urges Business to Aid the Poor

By ROBERT A. GUTH
January 24, 2008; Page A1

Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But later today, the Microsoft Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism.

In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a “creative capitalism” that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored.

“We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,” Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gates isn’t abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system. But in an interview with the Journal last week at his Microsoft office in Redmond, Wash., Mr. Gates said that he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He said he has seen those failings first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum of Soweto, and discussed them with dozens of experts on disease and poverty. He has voraciously read about those failings in books that propose new approaches to narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

In particular, he said, he’s troubled that advances in technology, health care and education tend to help the rich and bypass the poor. “The rate of improvement for the third that is better off is pretty rapid,” he said. “The part that’s unsatisfactory is for the bottom third — two billion of six billion.”

Three weeks ago, on a flight home from a New Zealand vacation, Mr. Gates took out a yellow pad of paper and listed ideas about why capitalism, while so good for so many, is failing much of the world. He refined those thoughts into the speech he will give today at the annual Davos conference of world leaders in business, politics and nonprofit organizations.

Among the fixes he plans to call for: Companies should create businesses that focus on building products and services for the poor. “Such a system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don’t fully benefit from market forces,” he plans to say.

 For the rest of the article, link to The Wall Street Journal.

Establishing this basic economic infrstructure is the first step toward ending the bloodshed in places like the Horn of Africa, and ultimately achieving sustainable peace.

In response to an a January 2008 article by The Economist, “A Very African Coup”, concerning the humanitarian crisis in Kenya, Sir Edward Clay, the British high commissioner to Kenya from 2001 to 2005, warned that the recent election-driven violence was a result of two underlying problems:

“First, there has undoubtedly been a serious breach of Kenya’s electoral law. A result arrived at illegally is itself illegal. Second, the poorest, whether in the slums of Nairobi or in the rural areas, had all too little to lose in the recent violence. Most people living in the slums are inhabitants of shanties erected at the whim of rapacious landlords, who are themselves part of the political class. Some of  these residents have now had their votes stolen as well. Kenya requires a solution that restores social harmony and cohesion. A political understanding between party leaders is necessary, but not sufficient. Without sider social harmony, life for most of Kenya’s people will become even more intolerable. The poorest attack their equally poor neighbours and set fire to the little they have in common not because they hate these targets in themselves but because they see no other adequate way to express their grievances…”

Civil unrest stems from a desperation bred by a lack of basic necessities. Throughout history hungry, unemployed groups who lack the infrastructure necessary for self sustainment have been the most likely to violently rise up against political oppression. The events in Kenya should act as a reminder that the first and most important requisite for social harmony is a fair, healthy economy.

An article published by Scott Johnson of Newsweek International highlights the U.S. Government’s recognition of humanitarian aid as a preventative form of counterterrorism. As for the “Peace Corps with a weapon” concept, The Neutral Development Project makes no comment. Nonetheless, an interesting article:

Taking the war on terror to Africa

The United States is planning a new strategic command to take the global War on Terror to the Horn of Africa

Sept. 17, 2007 issue – America is quietly expanding its fight against terror on the African front. Two years ago the United States set up the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership with nine countries in central and western Africa. There is no permanent presence, but the hope is to generate support and suppress radicalism by both sharing U.S. weapons and tactics with friendly regimes and winning friends through a vast humanitarian program assembled by USAID, including well building and vocational training. In places like Chad, American Special Forces train and arm police or border guards using what it calls a “holistic approach to counterterrorism.” Sgt. Chris Rourke, a U.S. Army reservist in a 12-man American Civil Affairs unit living in Dire Dawa, in eastern Ethiopia, says it comes down to this: “It’s the Peace Corps with a weapon.”

Read on at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20657234/site/newsweek/

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) is a non-state armed group (NSAG) that operates in eastern Ethiopia. Regardless of whether or not their cause is just or constructive, what drives them is clear:

“When I realized that there is no education, no health services, no development, and children don’t go to school, I knew that there were problems.”

Here is a June 2007 New York Times video report on the ONLF by  Jeffrey Gettleman

http://youtube.com/watch?v=B2UsCzim6cc

In late July The Economist published an article entitled “A Computer in Every Pot”, which talks about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, an initiative to provide a low-cost laptop to the poorest children in the most austere locations. The effort has been spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Here is a key exerpt describing the project:

…This week sees the realisation of Mr. Negroponte’s five-year dream. After field testing in Nigeria and Brazil, the OLPC project’s first model, a rugged little green laptop called the XO that can run on batteries, solar power, a miniature windmill or hand- or foot-crank, goes into mass production. Schoolchildren in developing countries will start receiving the remarkable computer from October onwards.

The first batch is being supplied to some 30 of the world’s poorest countries for $176 apiece. As production builds up at Quanta, the huge Taiwanese laptop-maker that is producing the machine for OLPC, Mr Negroponte hopes to drive the unit cost down to $100.

It is no secret that the presence of education in a society is one of the most essential elements necessary for basic economic development. Thanks to the OLPC, “economically deprived children will have the chance to feel the exhilaration of computer-based learning”. To say that we at NDP are impressed would be an understatement.