- It was last fall when I first became aware that the coalition
governing Iraq had failed to pay any attention to one of the world's most
dangerous threats.
-
- According to a small story in the back pages of the Financial
Times of London, the U.S. military and its contractors, in their efforts
to rebuild the country's infrastructure, had hired tens of thousands of
workers from Bangladesh and India. Baghdad Airport had become a vast staging
ground for eager new employees from the Indian subcontinent.
-
- In itself, there's nothing wrong with this: Throughout
the Middle East, the tough jobs tend to be done by people from poorer places
farther east, and heaven knows that Bangladeshis need the work.
-
- The problem wasn't the workers, but the thousands of
young Iraqi men lined up outside the airport in search of any kind of occupation,
no matter how nominal or paltry, to fill their time and make them part
of their country's reconstruction. They were rudely and foolishly turned
away.
-
- "We don't want to overlook Iraqis, but we want to
protect ourselves," explained Colonel Damon Walsh, head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority's procurement office. "From a force-protection
standpoint, Iraqis are more vulnerable to a bad-guy influence."
-
- This shortsighted decision, I suspect, lies at the heart
of much of the "bad-guy influence" we are witnessing in Iraq
today. In the immediate interest of avoiding sabotage, Col. Walsh and his
colleagues managed to inflame the world's most dangerous constituency:
Men in their late teens and 20s with nothing else to do.
-
- Almost all the violence and crime in the world is committed
by people, mostly male, aged 15 to 29 years. You can draw a pretty accurate
map of the world's trouble spots by plotting the places where there are
large concentrations of young people and insufficient economic resources
to give them something to do with themselves.
-
- Places where half or more of the population is aged 15
to 29 ó known to demographers as an "extreme youth bulge"
ó include Afghanistan, Iran, the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon,
Syria, most of sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. (In Canada, on the low end
of the scale, people of this age make up less than a quarter of the population.)
-
- "The evidence that a large proportion of young people
is associated with the outbreak of political violence and warfare is among
the best documented in the literature on population and conflict,"
the organization Population Action International writes in a new and fascinating
study, titled "The Security Demographic: Population and Civil Conflict
After the Cold War."
-
- Among countries that are at war, according to detailed
studies by Christian Mesquida and Neil Weiner at Toronto's York University,
the ones with high youth populations experience the most severe violence.
-
- Iraq is in trouble here. As of last year, according to
the United Nations, 47.5 per cent of its 26 million people were aged 15
to 29. Many of them have nothing to occupy themselves: A lot of the country's
industry is still on hold, there's hardly any farmland, there is no longer
a monolithic army-state to provide dole and order, and the economy has
yet to return to its former prosperous levels. An occupying force could
either help them out of this bind, or be blamed as the cause of it.
-
- Guess which happened? Last fall, the young men who had
been standing outside Baghdad Airport, many of them soldiers who were further
disgruntled by the lack of compensation or policing work, rioted at Coalition
Provisional Authority offices across Iraq over their lack of inclusion.
Marines fired shots into the crowd in Baghdad. If these young men didn't
actually join the insurgency that has exploded in recent weeks, they certainly
have little reason not to cheer it on.
-
- People with experience in nation-building know that a
crucial priority is to keep young men from becoming disenfranchised. This
week, The New York Times Magazine noted that Major-General William Nash
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who helped to oversee the restoration
of Bosnia's democracy, had initially stuck to the conventional tasks of
policing borders, confiscating weapons and keeping ethnic factions separate.
Then, James Traub wrote, "he realized that his real problem was idle
young local men. So Nash put them to work building things."
-
- It worked. The employment of local young men, lest they
become part of an anti-transition rebellion, has become one of the keystones
of post-conflict recovery, at least in NATO and UN circles. It is not a
cure-all, but it does prevent one of the most common forms of violent trouble.
But it was very explicitly not done in Iraq. In fact, when military contractors
tried to set up a program last year to find jobs for Iraq's 400,000 unemployed
ex-soldiers, almost all of them 15 to 29, they were ordered to stop. All
succeeding plans have been cancelled. The guerrilla resistance has become
a make-work program unto itself.
-
- Behind this immediate crisis, of course, lies a larger
problem: Why does Iraq have such a huge proportion of people in their teens
and 20s? Because its families continue to have, on average, 4.8 children
each, far above the population-maintaining rate of two. A generation ago,
this sort of unsustainable fertility could be seen in almost every nation
in the world's southern two-thirds. Today, thanks to birth control and
the introduction of women to education and work, it is very rare outside
the African continent (Afghanistan and Pakistan are among the few remaining
holdouts).
-
- This helps to explain why the world is a less violent
place than it was a generation ago. It also points to a long-term solution
for places such as Iraq: Make sure women have full access to education,
and put birth control at the centre of medical services. Around the world,
the United States has a good record of supporting the former, and a terrible
record of obstructing the latter. After turning Iraq's reserve army of
idle men into a genuine army of angry rebels, this would be a good moment
to avoid making a second, more lasting demographic mistake.
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