How not to combat terrorism

Terrorism is driven by poverty and deprivation in the Third World, right? Surely, a great way to combat it is to give development aid, and make the lives of the poor, downtrodden masses better... or maybe not. ITFD students Cristina Yoong, Rachel Lund, Joonas Uotinen, and Sonja Settele look at the issue in their policy topics presentation. They offer some powerful arguments that question how much, in particular, the US should invest in the largely lawless FATA region in Northwestern Pakistan. They show that most leading terrorists come from more educated, well-off households, and that a proclivity towards terrorism is not significantly correlated across countries with poverty. Even the most optimistic studies suggest that aid would have to be in the hundreds of billions to reduce the recruitment of low-level terrorists by a significant number. Equally importantly, they show that much of the aid actually helps the Taliban directly, through protection money and the like. Their presentation is here:
Terrorism and Aid