WASHINGTON: The first US sorties over Afghanistan may drop bread, not bombs, for reasons that officials in President George W. Bush’s administration said are both moral and strategic: A vital component of the war on terrorism is a fight against poverty. In their search to explain the horrors of Sept 11, many politicians, academics and aid workers point to a web of cause and effect that includes poverty, conflict and the emergence of the kind of political and religious radicalism that fosters terrorism.

The thinking goes that an environment devastated by poverty, conflict and the absence of civil society could give rise to extreme and dangerous ideologies, be it the Maoism of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge or the brand of Islam practised by the Taliban. The idea of global inequality breeding global chaos was central to Robert Kaplan’s dark 21st-century vision in “The Coming Anarchy”. “The concrete reality of the phenomenon is undeniable,” he wrote last year. “For every $65 earned in rich countries, $1 is earned in poor ones, and the gap is widening.”

In Pakistan, which spends much of its budget on its military but lacks universal schooling, madrassahs, often fill the gap in rural areas, where they may offer poor students free food, housing and clothing as well as education.

In many cases, writes Jessica Stern of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, they also instil in them the radical brand of Islam that interprets the term “jihad” as a guerrilla war against non-believers. The hotbed of that gave birth not only to the Taliban, or ”students” who swept through Afghanistan, but also unleashed an army of holy warriors on the Balkans, the Mideast, Central Asia and, probably, to New York and Washington.

The Bush administration, in an about version to “nation-building”, is now flirting with the idea of helping the Afghan people lead more stable and dignified lives by toppling the Taliban and replacing it with a more moderate regime.

This week, the World Bank predicted that the economic downturn after the terrorist attacks will kill up to 40,000 children in the developing world and plunge 10 million people into abject poverty, defined as scratching out a living on $1 or less a day. To avert more suffering, the bank urged rich countries to work towards halving poverty by 2015 - by opening their markets to the developing world and boosting foreign aid, from an average of 0.2 per cent of government spending to 0.7 per cent.—dpa