Boost US foreign aid, big-time

Mr. Malloch Brown listed four priorities in Afghan rebuilding: security, agriculture, community-based programs, and the return of displaced persons. He said the UN would present a five-year recovery plan to a donors' conference in Tokyo in January - and he noted that the latter years of that program would be the more expensive ones. Development experts warn that the US and other donors must be ready to stay the course in Afghanistan - and that the funds for this must not come out of those already earmarked for Africa.

Can the UN "deliver" on organizing rebuilding programs in failed and failing states? Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has cast doubt on the effectiveness of development aid. I wonder if he's ever been to a country like, say, Mozambique, a very poor country that is still recovering from a long and brutal civil war that ended in 1992. That war killed a million of Mozambique's 16 million people, displaced 5 or 6 million more, and caused massive infrastructure degradation that led to long years of drought and famine.

I was in Mozambique last August. Eight years into a UN-led rebuilding effort, it's still poor. But I saw how much its people have already benefited from programs similar to what Malloch Brown is proposing for Afghanistan. In addition, the UN ran special programs to reclaim roads and arable land from land mines, and to support the demobilization and reintegration into civilian life of former combatants. (Afghanistan could benefit from programs like that, too.)

Is Mozambique a reported haven for global terrorists? No. Do most Mozambicans feel they have a stake, however small, in global stability? Probably so.

I'll admit, there have been failures in UN rebuilding efforts, as well as successes. Turning from war to peace and stability has to be a people's choice. But if we structure the incentives wisely - which we did far too rarely during the "stingy '90s" - most folks around the world will make the right decision. Just as they did in Western Europe, in the late 1940s, when the Marshall Plan invested one-fourth of 1 percent of US GNP, every year for four years, in postwar recovery and reconstruction.

Now we must plan once again to invest seriously in peace.

It's true, our economic prospects look murky. But we're still a rich country. All the world's other rich countries invest a considerably larger portion of their GNP in overseas aid than we do. There are scores of ways our budgeters could find the money to bring our aid figures up - including deferring tax cuts or paring back some of the planned growth in military spending.

If the starving, war-ravaged Afghans can make a U-turn toward peace, can't we Americans support them and the world's other very-low-income folks by making our own U-turn on aid? The time to do that is now.

Helena Cobban is a veteran journalist, and author of five books on international issues.

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