The terrorist attacks may have claimed another casualty: the structuring of foreign aid.
European diplomats are sifting through the wreckage of Western policy toward the former Soviet Union, wondering what role, if any, the massive aid programs of the past decade might have played in creating a world order even more threatening than the one that came before.
Their tentative conclusions: The policies put in place 10 years ago to help former Soviet countries were misguided at best, and downright unhelpful at worst. In their place, some diplomats say, Europe needs a new policy based on alleviating poverty and raising educational standards rather than attempting to prop up democratic institutions and jump-start free markets in places where these institutions are scarcely understood.
At the forefront of this reassessment is Javier Solana, the European Union's top diplomat. In a confidential four-page memorandum he prepared recently for European governments, the EU's high representative for foreign policy takes a diplomatic swipe at the mess 10 years of market-driven aid programs have created in an endemically poor part of the world.
"Until now, we have treated the countries in the region as transitional economies, and tailored our (aid) instruments accordingly," Solana writes. "It is now clear that their needs go much deeper."
What's more, Solana has some suggestions about how the West could structure its aid programs more effectively. "With poverty growing in Central Asia and health care and education levels declining, we should ask ourselves whether our efforts need also to be directed to these areas," he says. "Terrorists find most fertile ground amongst the poor and the dispossessed."

The reassessment comes partly because the events of Sept. 11 are forcing Western leaders to view the world in a different light. Gone is the rosy-eyed sense that countries will naturally drift toward capitalism and free markets, with just a little prodding. In its place is a growing recognition that poverty and political oppression can lead to catastrophic consequences, if allowed to fester.

Diplomats like Solana now look at the world with Afghanistan at the center of their attention, and what they see is deeply disturbing - an entire region where the educational system has largely collapsed; where young people are taught to hate other faiths in religious schools; and where life has grown so twisted and weird that a career inside the al Qaeda organization can seem like a noble calling.
Now diplomats are asking: Isn't there more we can do with the 9.3 billion euros of aid that Europeans give each year to attack problems like these head on? Bureau Report