WASHINGTON: While today’s greatest democracy, the US - along with its loose coalition of allies - routed the Taliban from Afghanistan extraordinarily quickly, the US has not won the war on terrorism. US focus now should be on what it can do to avoid lapsing into victors’ follies. And that means combating the forces of poverty and hopelessness on which international terrorism feeds, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. There could be three strategies - providing basic health care, supporting family planning and addressing such widespread environmental problems as deforestation - that, even in crude economic terms, would cost the US far less than another Sept 11.

There is a simple logic to this line of thinking, based on a sweeping change in the way the world has worked over the last half century. In the past, the US has often portrayed foreign aid in the grand tradition of noblesse oblige - as noble help to others. And while that is still true, foreign aid more than ever represents self-interested help.

The first area in which a modest amount of US money can produce a big payoff is in public health. High infant mortality and short adult lifespans resulting from preventable diseases such as malaria, AIDS, cholera and parasitic infections are a major cause of poverty - and paralyze whole economies in multiple ways.

Compared with the US’s economic losses from Sept 11 (about $100 billion in domestic losses and a further $1 billion per month to wage war in Afghanistan), it would be cheap for it to fund clean water supplies (decreasing the transmission of water-borne diseases); to provide medicines for treatable diseases; to fund more grants for US biomedical research into vaccines for tropical diseases such as malaria and cholera; and to stimulate vaccine and drug development in pharmaceutical companies by guaranteeing to buy effective medicines.

A second area of big payoff for small investment is in family planning. The world population explosion is paradoxically steepest in the poorest countries, which already have more people than the country’s resources can support. This is a disaster in the short term, as noted above, because it removes mothers from the workforce and increases the ratio of non-working children to working adults. It also spells disaster in the long run, because more people competing for a fixed or shrinking resource pie is a recipe for civil war, as has already happened in Rwanda and Burundi, Africa’s most densely populated nations.

The third area to target for foreign aid involves worldwide environmental problems, including biodiversity losses, climate change, deforestation, depleted energy sources, overfishing, pollution, salinization, soil erosion and limited fresh water supplies. To take just one example, deforestation reduces soil fertility and water quality, causes erosion and deprives local people of free timber and other forest products. While these environmental issues are pressing even in the United States, their consequences are more immediately threatening in other countries with more fragile environments.

All three of these areas illustrate a general theme: the need for the US government to pursue long-term crisis-prevention policies, instead of simply responding as crises arise. Unfortunately, such an approach is not considered urgent. Today, and every previous day for years, 100 more acres are being overgrazed in Afghanistan, 100 more acres are deforested in Nepal, and 100 more people are contracting AIDS or malaria in Zimbabwe. These are the slow processes that eventually explode into crises.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.