Another Mentor of Mine

So there are two people who have had a large impact on the development of my international perspective. You have already heard about Thomas Friedman; the other is Nicholas Kristof. In this column ($), he talks about civil conflict and instability as the greatest killer in Africa.

Mr. Collier [author of The Bottom Billion - a book I want to read as soon as the NYPL gets a copy], a former research director of the World Bank, notes that when the G-8 countries talk about helping Africa, they overwhelmingly focus just on foreign aid. Sure, aid has a role to play, but it’s pointless to build clinics when rebel groups are running around burning towns and shooting doctors.

One essential kind of help that the West can provide — but one that is rarely talked about — is Western military assistance in squashing rebellions, genocides and civil wars, or in protecting good governments from insurrections. The average civil war costs $64 billion, yet could often be suppressed in its early stages for very modest sums. The British military intervention in Sierra Leone easily ended a savage war and was enthusiastically welcomed by local people — and, as a financial investment, achieved benefits worth 30 times the cost.

Sometimes I feel like the reason good governance and foreign aid are emphasized is because military intervention is much less popular. So we console ourselves by talking about how much money we send to developing countries. I think promoting good governance ($) is a joke when you are talking about somewhere like Congo (or Iraq) - stability is a definite prerequisite. But that won't happen until this country and its leaders make a serious decision to actually protect all the victims in war torn regions.