I think the problem is not going to go away any time soon. It's not going to go away, and it's certainly spreading in the Middle East. We've heard some news over the past weeks or so that Libya is now being affected by certain terrorist organizations setting up shop in that country. Whether or not that is true, I have no idea. I'm not privy to that classified information.
I think there are some points to be learned from addressing terrorist organizations. One of them, obviously, is the need for a comprehensive approach. We can't just think of development policy addressing this issue and not think about foreign affairs and other branches of government, because obviously it's a whole-of-government problem, so it's a whole-of-government approach that needs to be taken.
One of the things I've been looking at is that civil society certainly plays a role. Civil society on the ground plays a role. Again, we have to be very careful that we don't replicate the problem that we created in Afghanistan, whereby we create a rentier state that is dependent on the foreign aid that is coming from outside. We need to think of local civil society taking charge of that because, in and of itself, that will increase aspects of legitimacy. It will provide public goods for the citizens.
Second, I know this is a very contentious issue, but we need to think about it, and certainly there is evidence out there that certain types of NGOs—I'm not generalizing that all NGOs do that or are experiencing that—have collaborated with certain types of terrorist organizations. There's evidence out there. If you read the report of the Financial Action Task Force, which came out I think a year or two years ago, you see that it clearly identifies those organizations and provides about 40 or so recommendations for what to do about them.
There are also numerous researchers who have tried to understand the poverty-terrorism nexus. In other words, does an increased level of poverty actually lead to larger occurrences of terrorism? The answer is that there clearly is no link between those. In other words, just because your country is poorer, it does not automatically mean that you experience more incidents of terrorism, and the reverse is true as well. Quite to the contrary, actually, some researchers have found that countries with higher national incomes actually experience higher amounts of terrorist incidents.
What we do see, however, when it comes to fragile states, is the correspondence between the state's fragility and the state's experience in situations of national emergency. Think about earthquakes and natural disasters and those types of things. There seems to be a strong indication that terrorist organizations have exploited these situations, these experiences, to gain momentum and to gain ground in those countries.
There's also evidence that FDI—foreign direct investment—and trade have no direct effect on the reduction of terrorism. That's contrary to what some people believe, but that seems to be where academic research is going in terms of the findings.