Does the widespread poverty in Afghanistan fuel the conflict?
If anything, it’s the attempts to develop and modernize that fuel insecurity. I’m not saying we shouldn’t develop and modernize, but we shouldn’t assume that it’s stabilizing. You could argue that in Afghanistan being extremely poor is a stable state, and being developed is a stable state. But the process in between, as new social groups emerge and there are perceived winners and losers in the economic development process, that’s not stable. I’m very curious why there is this very strong perception in counterinsurgency circles that it’s the poor people who are fueling radicalization. If you look at the 1970s in Afghanistan, it was the rapid social change with the emergence of Kabul University that led to the emergence of extreme Islamic groups and the communist parties, which basically fueled a lot of the last three decades of conflict. And that was due to modernization, not poverty. It seems that the U.S. and the international community would like to go in and clean up the Afghan gove
