Quote Originally Posted by Chowing View Post
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.