When Americans see televised images of bone-thin children with distended bellies, their humanitarian instincts take over. They don't typically look at UNICEF footage and perceive a threat that could destroy our way of life. Yet global poverty is not solely a humanitarian concern. In real ways, over the long term, it can threaten U.S. national security. Poverty erodes weak states' capacity to prevent the spread of disease and protect the world's forests and watersheds--some of the global threats Maurice Greenberg noted in the Winter 2005 issue. It also creates conditions conducive to transnational criminal enterprises and terrorist activity, not only by making desperate individuals potentially more susceptible to recruitment, but also, and more significantly, by undermining the state's ability to prevent and counter those violent threats. Poverty can also give rise to the tensions that erupt in civil conflict, which further taxes the state and allows transnational predators greater freedom of action.

Americans can no longer realistically hope that we can erect the proverbial glass dome over our homeland and live safely isolated from the killers--natural or man-made--that plague other parts of the world. Al-Qaeda established training camps in conflict-ridden Sudan and Afghanistan, purchased diamonds from Sierra Leone and Liberia, and now targets American soldiers in Iraq. The potential toll of a global bird-flu pandemic is particularly alarming. A mutated virus causing human-to-human contagion could kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans.

Today, more than half the world's population lives on less than $2 per day, and almost 1.1 billion people live in extreme poverty, defined as less than $1 per day. The costs of global poverty are multiple. Poverty prevents poor countries from devoting sufficient resources to detect and contain deadly disease. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), low- and middle-income countries suffer 90 percent of the world's disease burden but account for only 11 percent of its health care spending. Poverty also dramatically increases the risk of civil conflict. A recent study by the UK's Department for International Development showed that a country at $250 GDP per capita has on average a 15 percent risk of internal conflict over five years, while a country at $5,000 per capita has a risk of less than 1 percent. War zones provide ideal operational environs for international outlaws.

If in the old days the consequences of extreme poverty could conveniently be confined to the far corners of the planet, this is no longer the case. The end of U.S.-Soviet competition, the civil and regional conflicts that ensued, and the rapid pace of globalization have brought to the fore a new generation of dangers. These are the complex nexus of transnational security threats: infectious disease, environmental degradation, international crime and drug syndicates, proliferation of small arms and weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. Often these threats emerge from impoverished, relatively remote regions of the world. They thrive especially in conflict or lawless zones, in countries where corruption is endemic, and in poor, weak states with limited control over their territory or resources. The map of vulnerable zones is global--including parts of the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, the Caucasus, and Central, South and East Asia. Fifty-three countries have an average per capita GDP of less than $2 per day. Each is a potential weak spot in a world in which effective action by states everywhere is necessary to reduce and combat transnational threats.

Poverty, Crime and Terrorism

Low-income states are often weak states that lack effective control over substantial portions of their territory and resources. Ill-equipped and poorly trained immigration and customs officials, as well as under-resourced police, military, judiciary and financial systems, create vacuums into which transnational predators can easily move. Conflict, difficult terrain and corruption render weak states even more vulnerable. Terrorist groups have raised funds through tactical alliances with transnational criminal syndicates, smugglers and pirates operating in lawless zones from the Somali coast and Central Asia to the tri-border region of South America. Not surprisingly, the human pawns--narcotics couriers, sex slaves and petty thieves--drawn into global criminal enterprises frequently come from the ranks of the unemployed or desperately poor. Transnational crime syndicates reap billions each year from illicit trafficking in drugs, hazardous waste, humans, endangered species and weapons--all of which reach American shores.

State weakness, exacerbated by poverty, also contributes indirectly but significantly to transnational anti-U.S. terrorism perpetrated by substate actors such as Al-Qaeda. Still, there is a robust debate over whether poverty causes individuals to become terrorists. Some analysts argue, as Daniel Pipes did in these pages, that the 9/11 hijackers were predominantly middle-class, educated Saudis, so poverty cannot bear any meaningful relationship to terrorism. Others reason that the poorest are struggling merely to survive and have no capacity to plan and execute terrorist acts.

A commonly cited study by Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova in the Journal of Economic Perspectives concludes there is "little direct connection between poverty or education and participation in terrorism." They examine recruits into Palestinian terrorist groups in the Middle East and find they are neither illiterate nor impoverished and that citizens of the world's poorest countries are not more likely to turn to terror. But by their own admission, their analysis is incomplete.

It is also unconvincing in several respects. First, it extrapolates data on Palestinian terrorists and crime rates in several countries to draw conclusions about a very different phenomenon--transnational, anti-U.S. terrorism. Second, other evidence casts doubt on the argument that socio-economic conditions are unrelated to the recruitment of terrorist foot soldiers, if not leaders. For instance, research at the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management shows that countries with low income, productive efficiency and life expectancy, as well as a high male youth bulge, were more likely to experience political violence, including terrorism.

In the Greater Middle East, the emergence of a youth bulge in the 1970s was followed by the rise of political Islam. Many countries in the region suffer from high unemployment rates, an exploding labor force and stagnant real wages. For years, Saudi Arabia, home to several 9/11 hijackers, experienced rapidly declining GDP. The emergence of Algeria's Front Islamique du Salut was also preceded by plummeting GDP growth and high unemployment rates caused by the 1986 collapse in world oil prices. The breakup of the Soviet Union led to dramatic economic decline in Central Asia, as in the Fergana Valley, where the radical Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan took root in the midst of unemployment rates soaring to between 60 percent and 90 percent. Numerous analysts hold that Al-Qaeda has gained adherents and global reach in part by seizing on the hopelessness and despair of aggrieved Muslims in these regions. Poverty, vast income disparities, joblessness and lack of hope may indeed engender sufficient levels of fatalism among some groups (perhaps especially educated but underemployed youth) to render them vulnerable to recruitment by radical groups linked to terrorists.

However, the primary flaw in the conventional argument that poverty is unrelated to terrorism is its failure to capture the range of ways in which poverty can exacerbate the threat of transnational terrorism--not at the individual level but at the state and regional level. Poverty bears indirectly on terrorism by sparking conflict and eroding state capacity, both of which create conditions that can facilitate terrorist activity.

Conflict zones not only cost lives, but they can incubate virtually every type of transnational security threat by creating the optimal anarchic environment for external predators. While low per-capita income increases the likelihood of civil conflict, conflict zones in turn have been exploited by terrorists to lure foot soldiers and train new cadres--as in Bosnia, the Philippines and Central Asia.

In extreme cases, conflict results in state failure, as happened in Somalia and Afghanistan. When states collapse, the climate for predatory transnational actors is improved exponentially. Economic privation is an important indicator of state failure. The CIA's State Failure Task Force found that states in which human suffering is rampant (as measured by high infant mortality) are 2.3 times more likely to fail than others. State failure is also substantially correlated with uneven distribution of income within societies, as well as a lack of openness to trade. While poor economic conditions are not the only major risk factor for state weakness and failure, they are widely understood to be an important contributor, along with partial democratization, corrupt governance, regional instability and ethnic tension.

Even absent conflict, poverty at the country level, particularly in states with significant Muslim populations, may enhance the ability of transnational terrorists to operate. Poor countries with limited institutional capacity to control their territory, borders and coastlines can provide safe havens, training grounds and recruiting fields for terrorist networks. By some estimates, 25 percent of the foreign terrorists recruited by Al-Qaeda to Iraq have come from North and sub-Saharan Africa. To support their activities, networks like Al-Qaeda have exploited the terrain, cash crops, natural resources and financial institutions of low-income states like Mali and Yemen. Militants have taken advantage of lax immigration, security and financial controls to plan, finance and execute operations in Kenya, Tanzania and Indonesia. Al-Qaeda is now believed to have extended its reach to approximately sixty countries worldwide.

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