Amid indications of a further deepening of the Middle East imbroglio comes the welcome news that steady moves are afoot by the international community to firmly entrench the development process in Afghanistan in answer to the proliferating cancer of narco-terrorism.

Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli border settlements and towns, could have the unfortunate effect of further trammelling the US-sponsored Middle-East peace effort but the deployment of what may be called the development weapon in Afghanistan, under the aegis of the world community, could make a dent in the compounded crisis Afghanistan has been laboriously shouldering over the decades. The news is that the 24-member Joint Coordinating and Monitoring Board, which was formed to oversee the implementation of the Afghanistan Compact, launched in 2006, has identified a series of development projects as urgently needed by war-torn Afghanistan. Some of these are: community-based development projects, expanded irrigation, increasing use of livestock and the fostering of rural entrepreneurship. Two parties in the Afghan development forum, the World Bank and the Britain-based Department for International Development, had reportedly estimated that the world needs to invest more than US$2 billion in these development projects if the Afghan farmer and sections of the poor are to be weaned away from opium cultivation, which is a booming business in Afghanistan and a number one income earner.

Opium cultivation is also a mainstay of "terror" organisations which siphon the huge income earned from the macabre enterprise for the purchase of arms. Clearly, if the poor could be provided with some alternative income sources they could be distracted from the deadly lure of poppy cultivation and this is the rationale behind the multi pronged development effort for Afghanistan currently contemplated by the world community under the Afghanistan Compact.

In the South and South-West Asian theatre, the terror - hard drugs nexus is a fact of life but it is poverty which strongly sustains it. Finding no viable form of livelihood, the poor of Afghanistan are driven to opium cultivation, inasmuch as the poor in other parts of the region are tempted to try their hands at illegal livelihoods as a means of surviving. Poverty also accounts for the seductive lure militant faiths exercise over the more impressionable and deprived South Asian minds. This could very well be happening in the Pakistan "tribal belt", for instance, and in all other parts of South Asia where religious bigotry holds sway.

Therefore, programmes to defuse "terror" in our part of the world could be fundamentally deficient if this task is narrowly conceived by governments as consisting of only armed action to crush and eliminate terror outfits. There is much more than meets the eye here. Poverty, hunger and deprivation drive people to arms and bring them under the sway of divisive ideologies. Programmes to eliminate economic inequity and all other forms inequality could go a considerable distance in ending violent dissension in Third World polities.

These lessons need to be borne in mind by all those states in our region which are up against a "terror" problem, no less than Afghanistan and the Middle East. For example, Sri Lanka would do well to quickly follow-up the neutralizing of its Eastern Province, militarily, with a multidimensional development programme which would satisfy the needs of all its peoples. It just would not do to only stabilize and entrench state power in the province. Not only must a development process take hold there, a political process must be put in motion too where the truly deprived of the region would be brought into the decision-making process. In the absence of this two dimensional process, violent dissension would erupt once again in the province.

The same considerations apply stringently to Afghanistan. Taliban militancy is currently being held at bay and it is quite some time since a presidential election was held there. But the people are yet to be brought into the decision-making process. Reports indicate that instead of a democratic process being activated, the ruling elite is being allowed to exercise exploitative and parasitic overlordship over the weaker sections of Afghan society. Close kith and kin of the current Afghan President are accused of engaging in the opium trade.

Such socio-political blights in the Afghan polity could set back the hands of time and bring the development process to nought. The Third World could no longer conceive ‘development’ only in terms of the upping of the GNP per capita or as a top-down delivering of goods and services by the all-powerful state. Development in the real sense is the elimination of inequalities of all kinds and the incorporation of the people in the country’s decision-making process.