ISLAMABAD -- The U.N. secretary general's special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, could not have chosen a more precise way to underline Afghanistan's predicament. During his latest trip to the central Asian country, he favored spending more on reconstruction and development work to rebuild a badly broken infrastructure rather than on the U.S. military campaign.
"If we spent a little bit more on helping the people of Afghanistan, we would probably do much better in preventing Afghanistan from becoming a breeding ground for terrorism," he said, emphasizing what should otherwise be conventional wisdom.
Brahimi's message, coming ahead of the first anniversary of last year's terrorist attacks in the United States, could not have been more aptly timed. Just as trading guns for bread and butter remains the route to sanity, so does the logic that the root cause of terrorism can only be tackled by attacking a host of social and economic problems that aggravate poverty and have ultimately contributed to the staggering rise in militancy.