Tim Costello is wrong to draw a link between terrorism and poverty and then go on to argue for more taxpayer funds to be spent on foreign aid. He is not alone. The problem is that poverty does not cause terrorism. What's more, Costello even concedes as much when he notes that the terrorists responsible for September "were for the most part children of the Saudi elite" and the terrorists responsible for the recent London bombings were "middle-class Britons".
When asked about the link between poverty and terrorism, Costello's brother, Federal treasurer Peter Costello, was right on the money when he said in a TV interview that "I have heard people say that his [bin-Ladens] terrorism was born out of poverty" but "that's not the case".
The Treasurer's view is backed up by a body of research into the topic. Summarising this research in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review, terrorism expert Walter Laqueur wrote that "it is not too difficult to examine whether there is such a correlation between poverty and terrorism, and all the investigations have shown that this is not the case".
Perhaps the most commonly cited research is that conducted by Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger and Middle Eastern expert Jitka Maleckova of Prague's Charles University. Krueger and Maleckova looked at the backgrounds of terrorists from various parts of the world and compared them to average members of the terrorists' own societies. What they discovered was that the terrorists tended to be more affluent and better educated than the average citizen. In addition, they also found that support for terrorism did not rise as poverty increased. In fact, affluent Palestinians were more likely to support suicide bombings than poor Palestinians.
Krueger and Maleckova have argued that terrorism is more like a "violent form of political engagement" than property crime. According to the researchers, the "more-educated people from privileged backgrounds are more likely to participate in politics, probably in part because political involvement requires some minimum level of interest [and] expertise ... all of which are more likely if people are educated enough and prosperous enough to concern themselves with more than economic subsistence".
There is no direct link between economic disadvantage and international terrorism. In spite of this, the foreign aid industry, which has been behind making this largely misleading connection between the poverty and terrorism and then arguing for higher levels of foreign aid for essentially self-serving reasons, has been successful in getting a number of politicians and the media to march to their inane drumbeat.
It is true that terrorists do thrive in failed states, which no doubt accounts for greater attention being given by Western countries to development issues in recent years. But as in the case of the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, these problems are not solved by simply throwing more money at the problem.
We've been down that path before and it hasn't solved anything. Tackling these problems required a whole-of-government approach rather just giving more foreign aid.
Aside from the fact that poverty does not causes terrorism, its also debatable just how effective foreign aid is at alleviating poverty. Markets, economic freedom, free trade and capitalism are a better solution to poverty than handouts in the form of foreign aid, though curiously you won't hear many in the foreign aid NGO sector talking about this.
Foreign aid not only has a very poor record when it comes to ending poverty, it has actually has made things much worse in many countries; something conveniently ignored during the recent Make History Poverty campaign directed at G8 leaders in Gleneagles.
There are a few limited ways which foreign aid can be used to make Australians safer and more secure. For example, by funding and building up the type of institutions in the developing world that are in the frontline against terrorists. To its credit, the Howard Government has already started doing this in the area which is set out in the policy paper "Counter-Terrorism and Australian Aid".
If the objective of spending taxpayer money is to make Australians safer, then forming another SAS Regiment is a far better use of taxpayer monies than simply throwing more taxpayer money into the abyss that is foreign aid.
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