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August/September 2004
Vol. X, No. 3
Foreign Assistance and the Fight Against Terror
USAID administrator and former Institute fellow Andrew Natsios outlined a new vision for foreign assistance.
In a speech cosponsored by the Institute in late April, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Andrew Natsios outlined a new vision for the agency—one rooted in President Bush's declaration that fighting terrorism is the country's number one foreign policy objective. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, brought the most fundamental changes to U.S. security policy since the Cold War, said Natsios, and heightened USAID's importance as an instrument in the War on Terror.
Andrew Natsios |
Institute president Richard Solomon introduced Natsios, observing that the administrator was a former senior fellow at the Institute in 1998–99. During his tenure at the Institute, Natsios wrote a book on the famine in North Korea during the mid-1990s, which Solomon called "a compelling account of a state sacrificing at least 20 percent of its population." Now, said Solomon, the United States is seized with the challenge of stabilizing societies—such as Afghanistan and Iraq—torn apart by decades of mismanagement, dictatorship, and warfare. How well USAID responds to these challenges will help determine the security landscape of the future.
Natsios began his speech by underlining one of the central points in President Bush's National Security Strategy of the United States, presented to Congress in 2002, which outlines the security strategy of the administration in the wake of 9/11. Its preamble notes that, "Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank." The recognition that weak and failed states—which can both harbor terrorist networks and create a breeding ground for new terrorists—pose a greater danger to the United States than militarily powerful states has significantly raised USAID's profile as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, and has led to a near doubling of the agency's budget since the Bush administration came to office.
To confront the challenges of this new era, Natsios called for the "most thoroughgoing reassessment of the country's development mission since the Second World War." The resulting white paper—still a work in progress at the time—identifies five central objectives in U.S. foreign assistance:
- Promoting transformational development.
- Strengthening fragile states.
- Providing humanitarian relief.
- Supporting U.S. geostrategic interests.
- Mitigating global and transnational ills.
Natsios acknowledged that none of these objectives directly addresses terrorism, but he insisted that all five were interwoven into the War on Terror. "It is no accident that al Qaeda based its operations successively in three weak or failed states—Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan," he said. Furthermore, he argued, the job of diminishing the underlying conditions that give rise to terrorism—one of President Bush's main foreign policy objectives—falls squarely under USAID's mandate. Natsios identified four conditions in particular that can breed terrorism: isolation, the absence of economic opportunity, weak or corrupt institutions, and the absence of transparency. All four are being addressed by USAID projects.
In Afghanistan, for example, the United States is refurbishing the airport it built in the early 1960s and the hospital it built in 1973. It is also rebuilding a dam from that era in order to double the production of electricity and provide irrigation water for thousands of farmers. Most notably, the United States has recently completed a major highway system that knits together vast areas of the country. It has also developed an innovative radio station, Radio Kabul, that provides programming aimed at changing the worldview of the younger generation.
Elsewhere in the world, USAID is generating quick employment for jobless young men, a group particularly susceptible to the terrorists' message. It is developing innovative solutions to the problems of corruption and mismanagement that plague many Third World countries. It is developing educational programs to compete with the madrassas—fundamentalist Muslim schools that promote an anti-Western agenda.
James Dobbins, a security expert with the RAND Corporation and a veteran diplomat, responded to Natsios. He focused his remarks on Iraq, noting that it was unfortunate that the Department of Defense had been given primary responsibility for rebuilding that country. "I am afraid that we are doing what we know best how to do, rather than what most needs to be done," he said. Beyond the issue of security, which remains the most compelling need in Iraq, the most pressing issues relate to governance and macroeconomic stability. Yet the Defense Department, Dobbins asserted, was focusing primarily on rebuilding the nation's infrastructure. Another respondent, Dan Serwer, Peace and Stability Operations director at the Institute, praised Natsios for moving the agency in the right direction, but noted that USAID's budget had not caught up to the agency's new agenda. He urged the agency to devote more resources to the "soft side" of development—such as programs in democracy building, conflict management, and the rule of law.
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