Saturday, October 11, 2014

The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism

By Hernando de Soto

As the U.S. moves into a new theater of the war on terror, it will miss its best chance to beat back Islamic State and other radical groups in the Middle East if it doesn’t deploy a crucial but little-used weapon: an aggressive agenda for economic empowerment. Right now, all we hear about are airstrikes and military maneuvers—which is to be expected when facing down thugs bent on mayhem and destruction.

But if the goal is not only to degrade what President Barack Obama rightly calls Islamic State’s “network of death” but to make it impossible for radical leaders to recruit terrorists in the first place, the West must learn a simple lesson: Economic hope is the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.

I know something about this. A generation ago, much of Latin America was in turmoil. By 1990, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization called Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, had seized control of most of my home country, Peru, where I served as the president’s principal adviser. Fashionable opinion held that the people rebelling were the impoverished or underemployed wage slaves of Latin America, that capitalism couldn’t work outside the West and that Latin cultures didn’t really understand market economics.

The conventional wisdom proved to be wrong, however. Reforms in Peru gave indigenous entrepreneurs and farmers control over their assets and a new, more accessible legal framework in which to run businesses, make contracts and borrow—spurring an unprecedented rise in living standards.

Between 1980 and 1993, Peru won the only victory against a terrorist movement since the fall of communism without the intervention of foreign troops or significant outside financial support for its military. Over the next two decades, Peru’s gross national product per capita grew twice as fast as the average in the rest of Latin America, with its middle class growing four times faster.

Today we hear the same economic and cultural pessimism about the Arab world that we did about Peru in the 1980s. But we know better. Just as Shining Path was beaten in Peru, so can terrorists be defeated by reforms that create an unstoppable constituency for rising living standards in the Middle East and North Africa.

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

  1. FASCISTS DON’T LIKE TRUTH: Harvey Organ’s Gold and Silver Blog Has Been ‘Deleted by Court Order’

    News of the termination of Harvey Organ’s Gold and Silver Report blog comes to us today via SGT reader denaliguide, who writes: “Seems to me to be a threat to all bloggers and ‘Net users. A clear explanation of this might allay some of my concerns, otherwise, its like a “black bag operation”. It just ain’t right!”

    A link to a post from Harvey left on a Google forum reads: I am harvey organ of www.harveyorgan.blogspot.com and my entire blogspite disappeared. I need help.

    http://sgtreport.com/2014/10/fascists-dont-like-truth-harvey-organs-gold-and-silver-blog-has-been-deleted-by-court-order/

    ReplyDelete