The American embassy in Beirut introduced me to four of the 2012 Lebanese scholarship students—they attend either the Lebanese American University or Haigazian University, both of which offer modern U.S.-style bachelor’s degrees. As I noted in my column, Israa Yassin, an eighteen-year-old from the village of Qab Elias who was studying computer science, told me: “This whole program is helping to make the youth capable of transforming this country into what it should be and can be. We are good, and we have the capabilities and we can do a lot, but we don’t get the chance. My brother just finished high school, and he could not afford [university]. His future is really stopped. The U.S. is giving us a chance to make a difference … We will not be underestimated anymore. It is really sad when you see a whole generation in Lebanese villages—hundreds of guys doing nothing—no work, not going to college.” Wissal Chaaban, eighteen, from Tripoli, who also was attending the Lebanese American University and studying marketing, told me that the program is in America’s interest because it sends young people to colleges that “encourage openness, to accept the other, no matter how different, even if he was from another religion.”
A few days after talking to these students, I went to Amman, Jordan, where I interviewed some public school teachers at Jordan’s Queen Rania Teacher Academy, which was working with a team from Columbia University to upgrade teaching skills. I talked to them about the contrast between the $13.5 million in U.S. scholarships and the $1.3 billion in military aid, and Jumana Jabr, an English teacher in an Amman public school, summed it up better than I ever could: One is “for making people,” she said, “and the other is for killing people.” If America wants to spend money on training soldiers, she added, well, “teachers are also soldiers, so why don’t you spend the money training us? We’re the ones training the soldiers you’re spending the $1.3 billion on.”
In June 2014, I was invited to give the commencement address at the American University of Iraq, in Sulaimaniya, Kurdistan. As I wrote in my column at the time, I am a sucker for commencements, but this one filled me with many different emotions. For starters, the scene was stunning in the highlands of Kurdistan. As Dina Dara—the student speaker and valedictorian of the 2014 graduating class—took the stage, the sun was just setting, turning Azmar Mountain in the background into a reddish-brown curtain. The class was about 70 percent Kurds, with the rest coming from every corner, religion, and tribe of Iraq. Parents bursting with pride, cell phone cameras in one hand and bouquets in the other, had driven up from Basra and Baghdad dressed in their finest to see their kids get their American-style college degrees. Three Kurdish TV stations carried the ceremony live.
“It has been quite a journey,” Dara, who had been accepted to graduate school at Tufts, told her classmates. (Since the university opened, in 2007, all the valedictorians had been Iraqi women.) “We went through a whole different experience living in the dorms. This evening … we are armed with two things: first, the highly valued American education that makes us as competent and qualified as the rest of the students in the world. And, second, the empowerment of a liberal arts education.” “[As we] exercise critical thinking techniques that have been the core of our education here, and as we try to move beyond the traditional conventions, beyond what others suggest, we may struggle. But isn’t this how nations are built?”
Karwan Gaznay, twenty-four, a Kurd, told me he grew up reading books about Saddam: “Now we have this American education. I did not know who Thomas Jefferson was. I did not know who James Madison was. So when the government is doing something wrong, now we can say: ‘This is wrong. I have been educated.’ … I ran for student president, and Arab guys voted for me. We are living as a family in the university. I am not pessimistic about Iraq. We can work together if we want to.”
The best long-term investment the American government could make to help stabilize the World of Disorder and widen the islands of decency there would be to help fund and strengthen schools and universities throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America that promote American-style liberal arts and technical education. Unfortunately, there are so many huge defense industry lobbies that promote funding the tools for killing people and so few advocates for funding the schools for building people. That has to change. Education alone is not a cure-all, but drones alone are a cure-nothing. Islands of decency can spread. Drones are one and done.
It Takes a Chicken
Even as we amplify educational opportunities, we also have to amplify the opportunities for the poorest of the poor, particularly in Africa, to remain in their home villages on their land. If it wants to stop the spread of disorder, the developed world needs to do this at a scale we have never attempted before. Two of the smartest people I know on this subject are Bill Gates and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification’s Monique Barbut. It is worth listening to what they both have to say—and what they have to say is basically the same thing: you have to stabilize the basic foundations of life in disordered societies, particularly Africa. That can mean starting with something as simple as a chicken coop.
Gates put it to me this way: “For good stuff to happen, it requires a lot of things to go well—you need many pieces to get stability right.” None of it is going to happen overnight, but we need to work with the forces of order that do still exist in the World of Disorder to start building a different trajectory, beginning with all the basics: basic education, basic infrastructure—roads, ports, electricity, telecom, mobile banking—basic agriculture, and basic governance. The goal, said Gates, is to get these frail states to a level of stability where enough women and girls are getting educated and empowered for population growth to stabilize, where farmers can feed their families, and where you “start to get a reverse brain drain” as young people feel that they have a chance to connect to and contribute and benefit from today’s global flows by staying at home and not emigrating.
Believe it or not, he argued, a good place to start is with chickens—a solution he demonstrated for me and other interested visitors by erecting a huge model chicken coop on the sixty-eighth floor of 4 World Trade Center. “If you were living on $2 a day, what would you do to improve your life?” Gates asked on his blog. “That’s a real question for the nearly 1 billion people living in extreme poverty today. There’s no single right answer, of course, and poverty looks different in different places. But through my work with the foundation, I’ve met many people in poor countries who raise chickens, and I have learned a lot about the ins and outs of owning these birds … It’s pretty clear to me that just about anyone who’s living in extreme poverty is better off if they have chickens. In fact, if I were in their shoes, that’s what I would do—I would raise chickens.”
Here’s why, he explained:
They are easy and inexpensive to take care of. Many breeds can eat whatever they find on the ground (although it’s better if you can feed them, because they’ll grow faster). Hens need some kind of shelter where they can nest, and as your flock grows, you might want some wood and wire to make a coop. Finally, chickens need a few vaccines. The one that prevents the deadly Newcastle disease costs less than 20 cents.
They’re a good investment. Suppose a new farmer starts with five hens. One of her neighbors owns a rooster to fertilize the hens’ eggs. After three months, she can have a flock of 40 chicks. Eventually, with a sale price of $5 per chicken—which is typical in West Africa—she can earn more than $1,000 a year, versus the extreme-poverty line of about $700 a year.
[Chickens] help keep children healthy [by keeping them fed]. Malnutrition kills more than 3.1 million children a year.
And, maybe most important of all, he added,
They empower women. Because chickens are small and typically stay close to home, many cultures regard them as a woman’s animal, in contrast to larger livestock like goats or cows. Women who sell chickens are likely to reinvest the profits in their families …
Dr. Batamaka Somé, an anthropologist from Burkina Faso who has worked with our fo
undation, has spent much of his career studying the economic impact of raising chickens in his home country [and attests to their value] …
Our foundation is betting on chickens … Our goal: to eventually help 30 percent of the rural families in sub-Saharan Africa raise improved breeds of vaccinated chickens, up from just 5 percent now.
When I was growing up, chickens weren’t something you studied, they were something you made silly jokes about. It has been eye-opening for me to learn what a difference they can make in the fight against poverty. It sounds funny, but I mean it when I say that I am excited about chickens.
Barbut shares Gates’s view that you have to get the basics right that stabilize the bottom of the pyramid so people are not forced to either “flee or fight.”
You have to build solutions “at the source,” Barbut said to me. “You know, we live in a world where we believe that technology is going to bring the solution to everyone, and it’s very difficult to make people say, ‘Please, maybe not all the world is yet ready for that. You need to deal with the small farming agriculture piece first. Today in the world, you have five hundred million farms which are less than three hectares, and those five hundred million farms [are providing] the direct living of 2.5 billion people. It means one-third of the planet lives on those small entities.” If they are wiped out by climate change and desertification, as is starting to happen all over West Africa and the Sahel region now, “you are going to have major crises … Eighty percent of the population of Niger lives off of the land. If you lose your little land, then you have lost everything.”
In the past, she notes, when you had a drought, people would migrate for the season, until the drought went away. Then they came back and tried again. “But what we are seeing—and we think that it is very much linked to the climate change—the droughts are becoming harder and harder,” said Barbut. “Now it’s every three to four years … [So] instead of seasonal migration, you get definitive migration, because people have lost their land … It becomes totally unproductive forever, at least if you don’t do big measures to restore it. And this is a phenomenon that we see increasing very much.” If this trend continues, millions of people in the southern part of Africa and the Horn “are going to lose their means of living. But what does that mean? It means also that those farmers are not going to be able to feed the population they were feeding, and so it’s going to have repercussions on the food prices.” It also means millions of Africans will either flee to southern parts of Africa and destabilize those regions or try to cross the Mediterranean to get into Europe.
Barbut has her own idea for an affordable modern-day Marshall Plan for Africa. “To restore a hectare of degraded land, it costs between one hundred and three hundred dollars,” she said, while a day in the refugee camp for one refugee in Italy costs the host government forty-two dollars. “So, please, we are not talking about a huge amount of money,” she noted. Her proposal: in the thirteen countries from Mali to Djibouti, fund a “Green Corps” of five thousand people—one per village in each country—give them basic training and seedlings for planting trees that can retain water and soil, and pay them each two hundred dollars a month to take care of their plantings. This is an idea that actually originated with African leaders. It’s called “the Great Green Wall”: a ribbon of land restoration projects stretching across the entire southern edge of the Sahara, to hold the desert back—and help anchor people in the communities where they actually want to live. It makes a lot more sense than building expensive leaky walls around Europe that will never hold if millions of Africans have to migrate.
“Today people are putting walls all over the place,” said Barbut, “and me also, I dream of a wall—a wall that we have called ‘the Great Green Wall.’ We have to stop the deserts coming down [from the Sahara]. We are going to need to replant enough vegetation so that we stop the desert advancing and we restore the fertility of our land and the storage of our water. It will bring hundreds of millions back to work. It will feed the people, and you could store up … CO2 emissions. So it will help on the climate change.”
In addition to these no-tech solutions for amplifying decency and capacity, there’s one high-tech concept worth investing in: nothing would help create more local economic growth than bringing high-speed wireless broadband connectivity to every village in Africa. Every study on this subject indicates that connecting the poor to the world of flows—of education, commerce, information, and good governance—drives economic growth and enables people to generate income while staying in their homes.
Chicken coops, gardens, and Webs—it’s either some combination of those or: Would the last one out please turn off the lights …
Deter and Degrade
Though the Cold War has long since ended, deterrence remains a crucial tool in a world in which superpower rivalry has not gone away. Russia still really would like to break up the NATO alliance—just as NATO still really does see the most important part of its mission today as containing any possible Russian aggression. China really would like to see the United States retreat from the South China Sea and shrink its power profile in Asia generally; the United States really does believe that its role in maintaining the openness of global sea lanes requires making certain that China doesn’t alone write the rules of the road for the South China Sea, let alone the Pacific. And both Russia and China still have nuclear weapons targeting America—and the rogue state of North Korea clearly aspires to have the same. The power of all of them has to be balanced by a strong American nuclear deterrent. Without that, every country on the border of Russia and China would seek nuclear weapons to protect itself.
But that’s not all. Deterring today’s Russia, in particular, is a complex challenge that requires more than building missiles. On July 28, 2016, the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, an expert on Eastern Europe, noted that President Vladimir Putin has evolved a “hybrid foreign policy, a strategy that mixes normal diplomacy, military force, economic corruption and a high-tech information war.” Indeed, on any given day, the United States has found itself dealing with everything from cyberattacks by Russian intelligence hackers on the computer systems of the U.S. Democratic Party, to disinformation about what Russian troops, dressed in civilian clothes, are doing in Eastern Ukraine, to Russian attempts to take down the Facebook pages of widows of its soldiers killed in Ukraine when they mourn their husbands’ deaths, to hot money flows into Western politics or media from Russian oligarchs connected to the Kremlin. In short, Russia is taking full advantage of the age of accelerating flows to confront the United States along a much wider attack surface. While it lives in the World of Order, the Russian government under Putin doesn’t mind fomenting a little disorder—indeed, when you are a petro-state, a little disorder is welcome because it keeps the world on edge and therefore oil prices high.
China is a much more status quo power. It needs a healthy U.S. economy to trade with and a stable global environment to export into. That is why the Chinese are more focused on simply dominating their immediate neighborhood.
But while America has to deter these two other superpowers with one hand, it also needs to enlist their support with the other hand to help contain both the spreading World of Disorder and the super-empowered breakers. This is where things start to get tricky: on any given day Russia is a direct adversary in one part of the world, a partner in another, and a mischief-maker in another.
In Syria, the Obama administration has constantly wrestled with a fiendishly difficult question: Should America and its allies work to take out the murderous Syrian president Bashar al-Assad first—in which case they would lose the support of Iran and Russia and likely introduce even more near-term disorder into Syria? Or should it take out ISIS first—with the tacit support of Iran and Russia—and allow Assad to stay in power, containing total disorder but also crushing the more secular, democratic Syrian opposition? As of the writing of this book, America has not resolved that dilemma.
In other parts of the w
orld, the United States needs China’s help—for instance, to contain North Korea’s nuclear missile program and prevent it from proliferating nuclear materials in the World of Disorder. One could imagine China agreeing to help—but only if the United States cuts Beijing more slack in the South China Sea.
As for the breakers, be they individuals or groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, they cannot be deterred. They can, though, be contained and degraded in their various theaters of operation, by using air power, special forces, drones, and local forces. In the end, however, they can only be sustainably destroyed by their host communities’ delegitimizing their narrative and ultimately killing or jailing their leaders. Outsiders can help degrade them, but ultimately only the village can destroy them.
Yes, it makes for a rather messy strategic environment. Which only reinforces why, as Waylon Jennings might have put it in song, “Momma, don’t let your daughters grow up to be secretaries of state.” You need to juggle drones and walls where you must; invest in chickens, gardens, and schools where you can; amplify islands of decency wherever you find them; deter competing superpowers—whenever you’re not also enlisting their help; learn to live with the fact that a foreign policy of amplify, deter, and degrade will more often than not require us to side with the least bad over the worst; and finally, appreciate that widening decency is the necessary precursor to electoral democracy—and in many places is more important.
Captain Phillips
Thank You for Being Late Page 34