Al-Qaeda in Africa (merged thread)

[Dayuhan]

The world's poor are a easy target for terrorists to recruit and gain their confidence. The world, not necessarily governments only, must reach out to help, listen to and walk along side the poor or there will be much unrest ahead.

I remember Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly predicting anarchy in West Africa back in 1994...see article http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-anarchy/4670/ What we may be seeing is a second wave of the anarchy with the same, unsolved poverty issues driving it.

Odd how the terrorists who plan and do the damage never seem to be poor.

Poverty is of course a huge problem and a huge issue, but any proposed causative link between poverty and terrorism is strained at best. And while it's easy to point to poverty as a problem, it's a good deal harder to do anything about it. Development aid simply doesn't work. It doesn't win hearts and minds, it doesn't have much impact on poverty, and it certainly doesn't do anything about terrorism. It allows donors to feel good about themselves and say nice things about themselves, and it keeps the aid industry afloat, so you can say it's doing what it's intended to do... but let's not pretend that it's doing anything abut poverty.

There is certainly a good deal of unrest ahead, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. For poverty to be effectively addressed parasitic governments have to be displaced, and that requires unrest: the parasites aren't just going to walk away.

[Bill Moore]

Most terrorists that I have read about were middle or upper middle class and had a college degree. I don't know why this poverty causes terrorism myth refuses to die despite the facts.

I'm all for development and helping the poor, that isn't my point, but rather that we're going to waste a lot of money looking for terrorists in the wrong places. Want to pre-empt the next terrorist, visit a university.

[KingJaja]

Poverty is of course a huge problem and a huge issue, but any proposed causative link between poverty and terrorism is strained at best. And while it's easy to point to poverty as a problem, it's a good deal harder to do anything about it. Development aid simply doesn't work. It doesn't win hearts and minds, it doesn't have much impact on poverty, and it certainly doesn't do anything about terrorism. It allows donors to feel good about themselves and say nice things about themselves, and it keeps the aid industry afloat, so you can say it's doing what it's intended to do... but let's not pretend that it's doing anything abut poverty.

You are wrong. Most terrorists are poor.

To access the Western World you must be both financially stable and educated. So the terrorists that attack the West tend to be middle class. On the other hand, most terrorist activity in the developing World (where the majority of terrorist activity occurs anyway) is carried out by poor people. Nigeria's first suicide bomber was a roadside mechanic and suicide bombers in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan tend to be poor.

Finally, Osama bin Laden's flavour of Islam is not the traditional Islam of the merchant class, it is the Islam of desperate young men from slums. That it was co-opted by the middle class does not change its primary audience.

It all boils down to poverty.

[Bill Moore]

KingJaja,

I believe you have it wrong when you confuse poverty as the cause for terrorism, because if that was true, if we eradicated poverty there would be no terrorism. In Iraq and Afghanistan you are confusing insurgents with terrorists, but hey our forces do that all the time. You make a good point though about local terrorists compared to transnational terrorists, but I still doubt poverty is the cause.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...76100500351318

This research note explores aspects of the demand for terrorism using data from the Pew Research Center. With these data from 7,849 adult respondents persons within 14 Muslim countries, this article explores who supports terrorism. It is shown that females, younger persons, and those who believe Islam is under threat are more likely to support terrorism. Very poor respondents and those who believe that religious leaders should play a larger role in politics are less likely to support terrorism than others. Because these affects vary throughout the countries studies, it is argued that interventions must be highly tailored, using detailed demographic and psychographic data.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/p...w/article/7371

The experts have maintained for a long time that poverty does not cause terrorism and prosperity does not cure it. In the world’s 50 poorest countries there is little or no terrorism. A study by scholars Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova reached the conclusion that the terrorists are not poor people and do not come from poor societies. A Harvard economist has shown that economic growth is closely related to a society’s ability to manage conflicts. More recently, a study of India has demonstrated that terrorism in the subcontinent has occurred in the most prosperous (Punjab) and most egalitarian (Kashmir, with a poverty ratio of 3.5 compared with the national average of 26 percent) regions and that, on the other hand, the poorest regions such as North Bihar have been free of terrorism. In the Arab countries (such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but also in North Africa), the terrorists originated not in the poorest and most neglected districts but hailed from places with concentrations of radical preachers. The backwardness, if any, was intellectual and cultural — not economic and social.

These findings, however, have had little impact on public opinion (or on many politicians), and it is not difficult to see why. There is the general feeling that poverty and backwardness with all their concomitants are bad

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/aabadie/povterr.pdf

The Harvard study

http://www.nber.org/digest/may05/w10859.html

After controlling for the level of political rights, fractionalization, and geography, Abadie concludes that per capita national income is not significantly associated with terrorism. He finds, though, that lower levels of political rights are linked to higher levels of terrorism countries with the highest levels of political rights are also the countries that suffer the lowest levels of terrorism. However, the relationship between the level of political rights and terrorism is not a simple linear one. Countries in an intermediate range of political rights experience a greater risk of terrorism than countries either with a very high degree of political rights or than severely authoritarian countries with very low levels of political rights.

What shocks me is that our COIN doctrine is focused on development instead of the actual factors that drive the conflict. As one academic terrorism expert stated, our development efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in providing more money for the terrorists and insurgents, but did little to alleviate the true causes of the conflict.

Where you may be right, is the secondary effects of poverty, which could be political polarization and greater social tension if a particular group is poor due to discrimination.

[KingJaja]

I believe you have it wrong when you confuse poverty as the cause for terrorism, because if that was true, if we eradicated poverty there would be no terrorism. In Iraq and Afghanistan you are confusing insurgents with terrorists, but hey our forces do that all the time. You make a good point though about local terrorists compared to transnational terrorists, but I still doubt poverty is the cause.

I don't agree with any of these reports.

I live in Nigeria with 75 million Muslims and I can tell you that the Muslim parts of Nigeria where poverty and illiteracy rates are the highest are the most prone to terrorism. That is a fact.

Of course the most vocal exponents of terrorism tend to be from the middle class, because they tend to have the best communication skills. But the soil in which terrorism thrives is poverty and frustration.

Poverty and frustration triggered both terrorism in the Niger Delta and in Nigeria's North East. The Odua People's Congress in the South West has carpenters and motor park touts as its rank and file, but its mouth piece is a medical doctor.

[KingJaja]

Eradicating poverty and emphasising education will not eliminate terrorism, but it will drastically reduce it. The Sahel Region (an area larger in size than the USA) is on track to be a major terrorist breeding ground, if poverty and education are not taken seriously.

The transition from madrassa student / almajiri (student of an itinerant religious scholar) to hired political thug (for less than $10 a day) to suicide bomber can occur (and is occurring) extremely rapidly in Northern Nigeria. On the other hand, the transition from engineering student to suicide bomber takes much longer and is much rarer.

Secondly, there is no clear division between terrorism and insurgencies. It is generally accepted that poverty and frustration drives insurgencies and insurgents use terrorism as a tactic.

[Dayuhan]

Poverty may well be associated with insurgency and the domestic use of terror tactics by insurgents... but that's hardly something that the US or the West need to be concerned with. At the end of the day the solution to insurgency - and thus domestic terrorism - in Nigeria is drastic reforms in the Nigerian government. In the absence of such reform, western attempts to alleviate poverty will only worsen the problem by allowing the government to avoid confronting the need for change.

The US and the west need to worry about terrorism directed at the US and the west, and that doesn't seem reliably connected to poverty. Moot point in any event, as the US and the West can't really do much about poverty in Africa. That's a function of African governance and it needs to be addressed by Africans.