Pressure grows on US to aid 'weak' states to curb terrorism

After the controversy over President Bush labeling three nations an "axis of evil," some experts are urging the US to turn its focus to a larger and perhaps just as worrisome club of "weak" states as a way to curb global terrorism.

Moreover, this group - including security experts and congressional leaders - believes the way to address the threats is through the "soft power" of development assistance, something that has not had the same attention as military might.

What is needed, they say, is an overhaul of US aid and development programs to raise the profile of these countries and to make clear their role in battling terrorism. Such a move could prove a boon to the Bush administration by highlighting a shift from confrontation to diplomacy - a post-Iraq penchant observers say was already on display at last week's G-8 summit.

The challenge of global development was recently addressed by a bipartisan Commission on Weak States and US National Security. It concluded that a reorganization is needed to give the US an effective tool for addressing a growing 21st-century threat. It recommended that one cabinet-level agency be created out of the many development programs currently spread out over a dozen departments.

"9/11 showed us how weak and failed states are the threat that puts our security most at risk, and creating Homeland Security and talking about a major intelligence reorganization are a direct response to that," says Stuart Eizenstat, cochair of the commission. Rethinking strategies for aid "is the third leg of that stool."

Looking at the challenge a little differently, cochair John Edward Porter, a former GOP congressman from Illinois, says: "We have zeroed in on the need to find and destroy terrorists, and we have worked to provide better protection for the American people at home. But we haven't really looked at the third track - how we reach out to even our potential enemies and engage with states that are losing ground in ways that can stop them from becoming a threat to our security."

Acting earlier is the kind of "preventive work that could put off the military action, the huge expenses that entails, and loss of American life," says Mr. Porter.

Creation of a superagency for foreign aid, long dismissed by critics as a type of international welfare, would no doubt be as contested as the Homeland Security reorganization. But even some experts focused more on military matters say the time for heightened attention to weak states has come. "Over the last half-century we have set up 120 new states, and not all of them are working," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.com. "There are large patches of this planet that don't have real states. We lack a systematic way to deal with this, and, as 9/11 showed us, we fail to take up the problem before it gets worse at our own risk."

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