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
http://www.hoover.org/publications/p...w/article/7371This 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.hks.harvard.edu/fs/aabadie/povterr.pdfThe 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
The Harvard study
http://www.nber.org/digest/may05/w10859.html
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.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.
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.
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