Africa’s World War

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: June 14, 2007

THE RWANDA-BURUNDI BORDER

Speciose Kabagwira lost another baby last week. It was the end of her 12th pregnancy, and the infant was stillborn on delivery.

It was her fifth stillbirth or miscarriage. And of her seven children born alive, four have died.

At one level, what killed her children and cost her those pregnancies was a combination of poverty and pathetic health care. But hovering in the background is another of Africa’s great killers: civil conflict and instability.

Earlier this year, I held a “win-a-trip contest” to choose a student and a teacher to take with me on a reporting trip to Africa. Now I’m taking the winners to the Great Lakes region here in Central Africa partly because it underscores the vast human cost when we in the West allow conflicts to fester in forgotten parts of the world.

On our two-week trip, the winners — Leana Wen, a medical student from Washington University, and Will Okun, a high school teacher in Chicago — will travel with me through Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Will and Leana are blogging and video blogging at www.nytimes.com/twofortheroad.)

Since the Rwandan genocide began in 1994, at least five million people have died in the Great Lakes region in what is sometimes called Africa’s first world war. In the Congo, those deaths are still piling up.

Leana, Will and I visited the Catholic church yesterday in Nyamata, in Southern Rwanda, where hundreds and hundreds of terrified Tutsis were butchered in 1994 after they took shelter there.

Most numbing are the bloodstains on one section in the back of the church. That is where the attackers gathered babies and bashed them against the wall. Below the church is a crypt with endless rows of skulls and other bones of the victims — a monument to the shameful refusal of Western powers to get involved in African genocides.

The Rwandan bloodbath was over quickly, and Rwanda is now peaceful and booming, but the turmoil is still enveloping families like Ms. Kabagwira’s. We found her in an encampment of 2,000 Rwandans, all of whom who had fled tribal violence to Tanzania — but who were driven back last year by rampaging Tanzanians.

Now Ms. Kabagwira is living in a makeshift hut, in an area where water is inadequate, soil is poor and the nearest hospital is a one-hour bus ride away. She says she might have been able to save her baby last week if she had gone to the hospital earlier, but she couldn’t pay the $1.20 bus fare.

So how do we help people like Ms. Kabagwira? Some excellent answers are found in the best book on international affairs so far this year: Paul Collier’s “The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.”

Mr. Collier, a former research director of the World Bank, notes that when the G-8 countries talk about helping Africa, they overwhelmingly focus just on foreign aid. Sure, aid has a role to play, but it’s pointless to build clinics when rebel groups are running around burning towns and shooting doctors.

One essential kind of help that the West can provide — but one that is rarely talked about — is Western military assistance in squashing rebellions, genocides and civil wars, or in protecting good governments from insurrections. The average civil war costs $64 billion, yet could often be suppressed in its early stages for very modest sums. The British military intervention in Sierra Leone easily ended a savage war and was enthusiastically welcomed by local people — and, as a financial investment, achieved benefits worth 30 times the cost.

Josh Ruxin, a Columbia University public health expert living in Rwanda, notes that a modest Western force could have stopped the genocide in 1994 — or, afterward, rooted out Hutu extremists who fled to Congo and dragged that country into a civil war that has cost millions of lives.

“Had an international force come in and rounded them up, that would have been the biggest life-saving measure in modern history,” he said.

So it’s time for the G-8 countries to conceive of foreign aid more broadly — not just to build hospitals and schools, but also to work with the African Union to provide security in areas that have been ravaged by rebellion and war. A starting point would be a serious effort to confront genocide in Darfur — and at least an international force to prop up Chad and Central African Republic, rather than allow Africa to tumble into its second world war.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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The Poets of War

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: June 11, 2007

Last month I invited readers to send in poems for my second Iraq Poetry Contest.

More than 500 poems poured in, and one of those that moved me most was from Frances Richey of New York City. Her son, Ben, had been deployed in Iraq. Ben always sent a gift for Mother’s Day, but this time nothing arrived and he was unreachable.

“I was terrified,” she told me, and she wrote a poem about what happened:

Last Mother’s Day, when

he was incommunicado,

nothing came.

Three days later, a message

in my box; a package,

the mail room closed.

I went out into the lobby,

banged my fist against

the desk. When they

gave it to me, I clutched it

to my chest, sobbing

like an animal.

I spoke to no one,

did not apologize ...

Susan Donnelly, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., and has written several books of poetry, wrote this poem after seeing photos from Iraq:

These figures stand the way we

humans do always:

one covering his face,

another looking to heaven.

But it is the gesture of the third,

perhaps a brother,

who has placed his open palm,

protective, firm,

on the chest of a dead man

there you can go now

that makes me, miles away

and in the wrong country,

cover my face with my hands.

In April, The Times published an article about Sam Ross, who had been welcomed as a hero in his Appalachian town when he returned blinded and disabled from the war — but whose life then spiraled downward and out of control, leaving him in prison and then a psychiatric hospital. Gordon Fain, a U.C.L.A. professor, wrote a ballad about him:

Just a coin toss,

Heads it was someone else, tails it was Ross

A volunteer

Who went to Iraq, was helping to clear

Mines to a pit

Then heard a discharge, felt the metal hit

His legs and face,

The fragments finding every open place

Of flesh and bone;

And when he woke, he lay in bed alone

Amazed to find

That he had one leg cut off and was blind.

The whole town made

Sam Ross a hero: bagpipes, a parade

A home they set

On top of a hill, but he could not forget ...

Insistent dreams

Of floating, in which his whole body seems

In peaceful flight

To burst apart in searing flames of light ...

So he began

To drink, and young men took him in a van

From his house, down

To every bar and strip club within town. ...

Then a fourth-grade student in the South Bronx, Raphael Sosa, submitted this:

I feel sad.

my friends are angry;

I’m scared.

how did my father die?

who killed him?

my father has died.

the tv tells me we won

but my father died.

my father is dead.

A lump in my throat, I checked with Raphael’s teacher. He assured me that the poem was only a product of the boy’s imagination.

These excerpts don’t do the poems justice — please read the full versions on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

Throughout history, the most memorable accounts of war — from Homer to Wilfred Owen — haven’t been journalistic or historical, but poetic. For whatever reason, the ugliest of human pursuits generates some of the most beautiful human handiwork.

So let’s add these poems, as one more monument to the folly of this war — and one more memorial to those who will never rejoin their families.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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Repression by China, and by Us

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: June 7, 2007

BEIJING

I’d meant to focus this column on a Chinese woman whose battle for justice has led the police to arrest her more than 30 times, lock her in an insane asylum, humiliate her sexually, shock her with cattle prods, beat her until she is crippled and, worst of all, take away her young daughter.

The case of Li Guirong, a graying 50-year-old who now hobbles on crutches, reflects China at its worst — government by thuggery. But each time I start this column, I feel that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have pulled the rug out from under me. Do I really have the right to complain about torture or extra-legal detentions in China when we Americans do the same in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba?

I keep remembering a heated conversation I had in Yunnan Province when I lived in China years ago. I reproached an official for China’s torture and arbitrary imprisonment, and he retorted that China was fragile and had lost hundreds of thousands of lives in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. “If you Americans ever faced the threat of chaos, you would do just the same,” he said.

“Impossible!” I replied.

Yet I owe him an apology, for he has been proven right. The moment we did feel a threat, after 9/11, we held people without trial, and beatings were widespread enough that more than 110 of our prisoners died in custody in places like Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantánamo.

Our extrajudicial detentions and mistreatment of prisoners are wrong in and of themselves. But they also undercut our own ability to speak against oppression and torture around the world.

If I protest here about the abuse of Ms. Li, Chinese officials will simply say that we Americans are hypocrites who should clean up our own house before we go around pointing fingers. But let me protest anyway.

Ms. Li’s story began in 1994, when her husband was badly injured in a fall in the state-owned coal mine where they both worked. Rather than pay medical care and disability, the mine fired him.

Ms. Li protested to local officials — and then the mine fired her as well. So she made a series of trips to Beijing to appeal for help from the central government — but each time the police just rounded her up and sent her back to her native Jilin Province.

Twice the local police sentenced her to a labor camp. The first time, she was imprisoned for a year for trying to tell her story to a British journalist. The second time, she was imprisoned for 18 months for escalating her protests and trying to contact government leaders.

Local officials once had her stripped naked in front of male police officers and strapped down to a bed in a mental hospital, where they gave her injections of drugs that for a time left her in a stupor.

Another time, she was beaten and kicked so badly that she is still unable to walk without crutches. But the worst outrage, she says, is the targeting of her children.

The authorities threatened to deny her eldest daughter, Wang Lingli, a place in university, although in the end she scored so brilliantly on her college entrance exams that the officials backed off. Ms. Wang, who confirms her mother’s story, is now looking after her severely disabled father and is about to graduate from university — but only if she can pay $2,850 she still owes in college fees.

As for the younger daughter, now 12, the authorities carted her off to an orphanage. That just breaks Ms. Li’s heart. I brought two of my own children when I interviewed Ms. Li, and she told me how much she missed her own little girl as she held my daughter and wept and wept.

The United States must stand up against such human rights abuses around the world — and our first step should be to clean up our act.

Our own equivalent of Ms. Li is Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera who has been held in Guantánamo for more than five years. He still suffers from painful injuries that he apparently received in beatings while in American custody.

The U.S. government has never offered a hint of evidence that he is anything but a journalist. Indeed, Mr. Hajj’s lawyers say that the interrogators have offered to release him immediately if he will spy on Al Jazeera.

So, Mr. Bush, give prisoners like Mr. Hajj their rights — and give America back its moral authority to speak up for human rights around the world.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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Escape From North Korea

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: June 4, 2007

CHINESE-NORTH KOREAN BORDER

In an archipelago of safe houses here, part of a 21st-century Underground Railroad, I met groups of people who live every moment with sickening fear.

These are North Koreans who have escaped to the “free world” — China — and are now at constant risk of being captured by Chinese police. The Chinese government, in a disgraceful breach of its obligations under the 1951 Refugees Convention, hands these escapees back to North Korea, where they face beatings and imprisonment, occasionally even execution.

In one shelter is a 14-year-old North Korean girl: shy, sweet and terrified. Her parents led her across the frozen Tumen River from North Korea in the middle of winter, but then they became separated while trying to flee the police. “I don’t know where my parents are, or if they are even alive,” she said.

Now a joint crackdown by the North Koreans and Chinese is greatly increasing the peril for people like her.

The North Korean authorities used to detain citizens returned by China for a few weeks or months and then release them after a bit of “re-education.” But about a year ago, North Korea greatly increased the penalties.

Now those returned by China are often sentenced to prison for several years, and repeat offenders or Christians can be sent with their entire families to labor camps for life.

Some North Koreans told me that their government now holds regular sentencing rallies, at which the punishments are publicly announced — or in extreme cases, such as those who became Christian evangelists while in China, the accused are executed in front of the crowd by firing squad.

One Christian I spoke to had been beaten so badly after his return by China that he tried to commit suicide by swallowing a handful of pins. The prison, not wanting to have to dispose of a corpse, freed him — and he eventually made his way back to China.

“If he is sent back again,” said his wife, “he’ll be beaten to death.”

China has also increased its punishments for its own citizens who are caught helping North Koreans. The penalty used to be a fine, but now it is jail for a year or two — or for a decade or more if someone smuggles escapees to South Korea.

“Now most Chinese don’t dare help the Koreans,” said one local official who secretly protects a safe house full of North Koreans — and who even stood guard outside as I interviewed them. “But I feel so badly for them. They’re just wretched.”

With the help of incredibly courageous conductors on the modern Underground Railroad, I visited four shelters that together house dozens of North Koreans, and residents of a fifth shelter were brought to my vehicle so that I could talk to them safely. My entire visit was conducted under very tight security to make sure I did not lead police to the safe houses.

The North Koreans I talked to described a society that is increasingly corrupt and disillusioned. One said that even with the latest crackdown, a $400 bribe to guards will win a prisoner’s immediate release. Another estimated that up to 20 percent of North Koreans in her area are disaffected enough that they listen illegally to Chinese broadcasts.

Chinese and South Korean missionaries are also beginning to evangelize secretly in North Korea, a sign of weakening government control. One Chinese Christian I talked to had made four trips into North Korea to evangelize. “If I’d been caught, I don’t think I would have been executed,” she said, “but it wouldn’t have been good.”

All the same, none of these North Koreans thought an uprising was imminent. Indeed, a surprising number of them are so steeped in propaganda that they still insist that “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il is a good man. “The problem is with lower officials, not with Kim Jong-il himself,” claimed one man who has arranged for smugglers to bring his entire family out to freedom in China. (For more on the North Koreans, go to my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)

President Bush should raise China’s breach of its international obligations with Hu Jintao. Mr. Bush might think of that 14-year-old girl, who spends her days minding two 9-year-old boys whose mothers were caught and sent back to North Korea. Those three children are modern reminders of the terrors of Anne Frank. They fear with every footstep outside their door that China will arrest them and send them back to their national torture chamber.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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From Torture to Plaintiff: a Pilgrim’s Progress in China

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: May 31, 2007

WEIHAI, China

Every evening in a little village near this coastal city, peasants gather in a private home and do something that used to be dangerous. They pray.

They are Christians gathering in a little “house church,” reflecting a religious boom across China. But their story also underscores another trend: the way the legal system here offers hope of chipping away at the Communist Party dictatorship.

The tale begins a year ago when the authorities here in Shandong Province raided this house church and carted 31 Christians off to the police station. Such crackdowns are the traditional way the Communist Party has dealt with house churches in rural areas, and some Christians have even been tortured to death.

But this incident ended differently.

Tian Yinghua, a 55-year-old evangelical Protestant who runs the church in her living room, was outraged after she was ordered jailed for 10 days.

“We had done nothing wrong at all,” explained Ms. Tian. “We weren’t criminals.”

So Ms. Tian contacted a prominent Christian and legal scholar in Beijing, Li Baiguang, who traveled to Shandong Province to do something that once would have been unthinkable: Sue the police.

Even more unthinkable, Ms. Tian won. The police settled the case by withdrawing the charges. The police also formally apologized, paid symbolic damages of 1 yuan (a bit more than a dime) and promised not to bother the church again.

It was a historic victory for freedom of religion in China — and, even more important, for the rule of law.

“The police don’t bother us at all,” said another church leader, Wang Qiu. “They just stay away.”

That seems to be a growing pattern. The central government’s policy toward religion is much more relaxed than a few years ago, and in coastal areas the government usually lets people worship freely.

“In most places, it’s no problem today,” said Mr. Li, who himself was imprisoned for more than a month two years ago for his legal activism. “It’s just a problem in backward areas, or if you directly attack the Communist Party.”

Mr. Li, who enjoys a bit of protection because President Bush invited him to the White House last year, says that last year he filed suits like this one in eight provinces. The other he lost, but even in those cases the authorities were shaken enough that they have stopped harassing Christians, he says.

“On the surface we lost,” he said. “But in reality, we won in every case.”

Han Dongfang, a Chinese labor activist now exiled to Hong Kong, says that he has also found that suing the authorities is often an effective way to increase labor protections. Mr. Han was a leader in the Tiananmen protests of 1989, but now he is trying to bring about change from within. “I believe this is the way to develop a civil society, not through a revolution,” he said.

Of course, the legal system is still routinely used to oppress people, rather than to protect them. China imprisons more journalists than any country in the world, and one of them is my Times colleague Zhao Yan. Judges never go against the Communist Party; what they can do is rectify local injustices where the higher party officials are indifferent.

Moreover, even when lawsuits are allowed to go forward, many Chinese police and judges are so corrupt that they sell themselves to the highest bidder.

A common saying, which I even saw in an illegal poster pasted on a government building in Beijing, goes: “The bandits used to hide in the hills. Now the bandits are in the courthouses.”

Still, the rule of law has gained immensely since the 1980’s, when a defense attorney was imprisoned for having the temerity to claim that the police had arrested the wrong man and that his client was innocent. If the Chinese government continues to nurture the rule of law, China could increasingly follow the path of South Korea and Taiwan away from autocracy toward greater democracy.

Easing the repression could also change the religious complexion of China. Estimates of the number of Chinese Christians vary widely, but the number may be approaching 100 million, many of them evangelical Protestants who aggressively recruit new believers. And with the more relaxed policy, the numbers are soaring.

“In 20 to 30 years China will have several hundred million believers,” said Mr. Li, the lawyer who helped the Shandong church. “That will make China the biggest Christian nation in the world, with more Christians than the entire U.S. population.”

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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The Educated Giant

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: May 28, 2007

Taishan, China

With China’s trade surplus with the United States soaring, the tendency in the U.S. will be to react with tariffs and other barriers. But instead we should take a page from the Chinese book and respond by boosting education.

One reason China is likely to overtake the U.S. as the world’s most important country in this century is that China puts more effort into building human capital than we do.

This area in southern Guangdong Province is my wife’s ancestral hometown. Sheryl’s grandparents left villages here because they thought they could find better opportunities for their children in “Meiguo” — “Beautiful Country,” as the U.S. is called in Chinese. And they did. At Sheryl’s family reunions, you feel inadequate without a doctorate.

But that educational gap between China and America is shrinking rapidly. I visited several elementary and middle schools accompanied by two of my children. And in general, the level of math taught even in peasant schools is similar to that in my kids’ own excellent schools in the New York area.

My kids’ school system doesn’t offer foreign languages until the seventh grade. These Chinese peasants begin English studies in either first grade or third grade, depending on the school.

Frankly, my daughter got tired of being dragged around schools and having teachers look patronizingly at her schoolbooks and say, “Oh, we do that two grades younger.”

There are, I think, four reasons why Chinese students do so well.

First, Chinese students are hungry for education and advancement and work harder. In contrast, U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.

Here in Sheryl’s ancestral village, the students show up at school at about 6:30 a.m. to get extra tutoring before classes start at 7:30. They go home for a lunch break at 11:20 and then are back at school from 2 p.m. until 5. They do homework every night and weekend, and an hour or two of homework each day during their eight-week summer vacation.

The second reason is that China has an enormous cultural respect for education, part of its Confucian legacy, so governments and families alike pour resources into education. Teachers are respected and compensated far better, financially and emotionally, in China than in America.

In my last column, I wrote about the boomtown of Dongguan, which had no colleges when I first visited it 20 years ago. The town devotes 21 percent of its budget to education, and it now has four universities. An astonishing 58 percent of the residents age 18 to 22 are enrolled in a university.

A third reason is that Chinese believe that those who get the best grades are the hardest workers. In contrast, Americans say in polls that the best students are the ones who are innately the smartest. The upshot is that Chinese kids never have an excuse for mediocrity.

Chinese education has its own problems, including bribes and fees to get into good schools, huge classes of 50 or 60 students, second-rate equipment and lousy universities. But the progress in the last quarter-century is breathtaking.

It’s also encouraging that so many Chinese will shake their heads over this column and say it really isn’t so. They will complain that Chinese schools teach rote memorization but not creativity or love of learning. That kind of debate is good for the schools and has already led to improvements in English instruction, so that urban Chinese students can communicate better in English than Japanese or South Koreans.

After I visited Sheryl’s ancestral village, I posted a video of it on the Times Web site. Soon I was astonished to see an excited posting on my blog from a woman who used to live in that village.

Litao Mai, probably one of my distant in-laws, grew up in a house she could see on my video. Her parents had only a third grade education, but she became the first person in the village to go to college. She now works for Merrill Lynch in New York and describes herself as “a little peasant girl” transformed into “a capitalist on Wall Street.”

That is the magic of education, and there are 1.3 billion more behind Ms. Mai.

So let’s not respond to China’s surpluses by putting up trade barriers. Rather, let’s do as we did after the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957: raise our own education standards to meet the competition.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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Pirates and Sanctions

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: May 24, 2007

DONGGUAN, China

This is a city you’ve probably never heard of, yet it has a population of 10 million people who fill your dressers and closets. By one count, 40 percent of the sports shoes sold in the U.S. come from Dongguan.

Just one neighborhood within Dongguan, Dalang, has become the Sweater Capital of the World. Dalang makes more than 300 million sweaters a year, of which 200 million are exported to the U.S.

Keep towns like this in mind when American protectionists demand sanctions, after the latest round of talks ending yesterday made little progress. Some irresponsible Democrats in Congress would have you believe that China’s economic success is simply the result of currency manipulation, unfair regulations and pirating American movies.

It’s true that China’s currency is seriously undervalued. But places like Dongguan have thrived largely because of values we like to think of as American: ingenuity, diligence, entrepreneurship and respect for markets.

The people in Dalang, the Sweater Capital, used to be farmers, until a Hong Kong investor opened a sweater factory at the dawn of the 1980’s. After a few years, the workers began to quit and open their own factories, and both the bosses and the staff work dizzyingly hard. One factory worker here in Guangdong Province told me that she works 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, 365 days a year, not even taking time off for Chinese New Year. She chooses to work these hours to gain a better life for her son. If protectionists want somebody to criticize for China’s trade success, blame that woman and millions like her.

Remember that China isn’t like 1980s Japan, which had a sustained huge surplus with nearly everybody. China’s global surplus has surged in the last five years, but traditionally its global trade position has been close to a balance, and it still has a trade deficit with many countries.

China imports components, does the low-wage assembly, and then exports the finished products to the U.S. — so the whole value appears in the Chinese trade surplus with the U.S., even though on average 65 percent of the value was imported into China. When a Chinese-made Barbie doll sells in the U.S. for $9.99, only 35 cents goes to China.

Sure, China pirates movies and software — but the U.S. was even worse at this stage of development (when we used to infuriate England by stealing its literary properties without paying royalties). Pirated DVDs are sold openly on the streets of Manhattan, while sellers in China can be far more creative. A couple of days ago, I dropped into a small DVD shop in Beijing to check its wares. Everything seemed legal.

Then the two saleswomen asked if I wanted to see American movies — and tugged at a bookshelf, which rolled forward on wheels. Behind was a door; one of the saleswomen whisked me into a secret room full of pirated DVDs. That’s piracy — but also capitalism at its harshest and hungriest. There are plenty of reasons to put pressure on China, including its imprisonment of journalists and its disgraceful role in supplying the weaponry used to commit genocide in Darfur. But whining about the efficiency of Chinese capitalism is beneath us.

All that said, the Chinese development model is running out of steam.

Labor shortages are growing and pushing up wage costs. Factories are having to spend more money to improve worker safety and curb pollution. The environment is such a disaster that 16 of the world’s most polluted cities are now in China.

China will also be forced to appreciate its undervalued currency, further pushing up costs. The “China price” will no longer be the world’s lowest, and millions of jobs making T-shirts and stuffed toys will move to lower-wage countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh.

So if China is going to continue its historic rise, it will have to move up the technology ladder and shift to domestic consumption as its economic engine. Yet the share of consumption in China’s economy has fallen significantly since 2000.

So as one who has been profoundly optimistic about China for the last 25 years, I think it’s time to sober up. President Hu Jintao is China’s least visionary leader since Hua Guofeng 30 years ago, and China has the burden of unusually weak leadership as it navigates a transition to a new economic model as well as a political transition to a more open society.

I’m betting China will pull it off, but I don’t think the world appreciates the risks and challenges ahead.

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In Its Match With China, India Penalizes Its Own Team

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 24, 2007

KHAWASPUR, India

India is stirring after many centuries of torpor, and it has a chance of ending this century as the capital of the world, the most important nation on earth. You see up-and-coming cities like Hyderabad or Ahmedabad, and it’s easy to believe that India will eventually surpass China.

But here in rural Bihar state in northern India, there’s no economic miracle to be seen. And it’s difficult to see how India can emerge on top unless it takes advantage of its greatest untapped resource: its rural population.

The village of Khawaspur has no electricity. It has a school with 600 students, but — as is common in Indian state schools — many teachers show up only rarely. “We go to school, but the teachers don’t,” explained Doli, a second-grade girl.

On a typical day there will be just one or two teachers in the whole school, and the students learn next to nothing. “You have to bribe your way to be a teacher there,” explained Yogender Singh, who tutors children for payment.

No child I met in Khawaspur had ever been vaccinated for anything. And the local government hospital exists only in theory.

“There is a hospital,” said a villager named Muhammad Shaukat. “But there’s not even a door or a window. Forget about a doctor.”

That’s a common problem: the government pays for schools, clinics or vaccinations, but someone pockets the money and no education or health care materializes.

In a village in Gujarat that I visited on this trip, all the children were out of school because the teachers had decided to take a monthlong vacation. One sixth-grade student, Ramila, could not write her name, not even in Gujarati.

Another sixth grader, Janah, said that when it came time for exams, the teachers wrote the answers on the blackboard for students to copy so the exam results wouldn’t embarrass the school.

Then there’s the toll of malnutrition. India has more malnourished children than any country in the world and one of the highest rates of malnutrition, 30 to 47 percent, depending on who does the estimating.

Those malnourished children suffer permanent losses in I.Q. and cognition, and are easy prey for diseases. There is some evidence that widespread malnutrition lowers economic growth in affected countries by two to four percentage points a year.

So in the middle of this century, India will still be held back by its failure to educate, feed and vaccinate its children today. This failure will haunt India for many decades to come. Sure, China has many similar problems, with growing gaps between rich and poor and an interior that is being left far behind. But rural Chinese schools provide a basic education, including solid math and science skills.

India’s boom is real, and its overall growth rate puts India right at China’s heels. Its middle class is expanding, governance is improving, and the transformation is one of the most exciting things going on in the world today. The 21st century will belong to Asia, and young Americans need to study Asia, live in it and learn its languages.

But Indians refer to the “Bimaru” states — a play on the word “bimar,” which means “sick” in Hindi. The Bimaru states are Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, and Orissa deserves a spot as well.

In the Bimaru states, there is no boom. “We see nothing here,” said Vidya Sagar Gupta, a businessman who once operated many factories in northern Bihar. Now he has closed most of them down and is trying to sell his properties.

Electricity is unreliable, crime is growing, corruption is endless, the agricultural sector is in crisis, supplies are difficult to get, and criminal gangs and politics are so interwoven that it is difficult to foresee improvements, he says.

For anyone who wants to see this country succeed, a visit to rural India is a bitter disappointment. Ela Bhatt, who founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a union of poor women that now has nearly one million members, told me that India’s economy is profoundly limited: “It is like a car having one motorized tire, and the others are cart wheels.”

So in the great race of this century, the race to see which country will lead the world in 2100, I’m still betting on China for now. I’m having my kids learn Chinese, not Hindi (or Indian English, a remarkable language in its own right).

Until India’s economic boom becomes much more broadly based, and until Indian schools manage to teach their students, this country will continue to waste its precious brainpower and won’t achieve a fraction of what it should.

Please post your comments on this column on my blog. In particular, tell me which country you think will dominate the world in 2100, and why.

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The 21st-Century Slave Trade

Meena Khatum, right, had to fight against brothel owners to be reunited with her son, Vivek.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 22, 2007

ALONG THE INDIA/NEPAL BORDER

Anyone who thinks that the word “slavery” is hyperbole when used to describe human trafficking today should meet Meena Khatun. She not only endured the unbearable, but has also shown that a slave trader’s greed sometimes is no match for a mother’s love.

Human trafficking is the big emerging human rights issue for the 21st century, but it’s an awful term, a convoluted euphemism. As Meena’s story underscores, the real issue is slavery.

Meena was kidnapped from her village in north India by a trafficker and eventually locked up in a 13-girl brothel in the town of Katihar. When she was perhaps 11 or 12 — she remembers only that it was well before she had begun to menstruate — the slaver locked her in a room with a white-haired customer who had bought her virginity. She cried and fought, so the mother and two sons who owned the brothel taught Meena a lesson.

“They beat me mercilessly, with a belt, sticks and iron rods,” Meena recalled. Still, Meena resisted customers, despite fresh beatings and threats to cut her in pieces.

Finally, the brothel owners forced her to drink alcohol until she was drunk. When she passed out, they gave her to a customer.

When she woke up, Meena finally accepted her fate as a prostitute. “I thought, ‘Now I am ruined,’ ” she remembered, “so I gave in.”

Meena thus joined the ranks of some 10 million children prostituted around the world — more are in India than in any other country. The brothels of India are the slave plantations of the 21st century.

Every night, Meena was forced to have sex with 10 to 25 customers. Meena’s owners also wanted to breed her, as is common in Indian brothels. One purpose is to have boys to be laborers and girls to be prostitutes, and a second is to have hostages to force the mother to cooperate.

So Meena soon became pregnant. The resulting baby girl, Naina, was taken from Meena after birth, as was a son, Vivek, who was born a year later.

The two children were raised mostly apart from Meena. Meena alerted the police to her children’s captivity (the police were uninterested), so her owners decided to kill her.

At that, Meena fled to a town several hours away and eventually married a pharmacist who protected her. Every few months, Meena would go back to the brothel and beg for her children.

She was never allowed inside, and the children were told that their mother had died. Still, Naina and Vivek regularly heard their mother’s shouts and pleas and occasionally caught glimpses of her. Other enslaved girls told them that she was indeed their mother.

When Naina turned about 12, the brothel owners prepared to sell her as well. At that Vivek, who was being forced to do the brothel’s laundry, protested vigorously. The owners beat Vivek, an extremely bright boy who was never allowed to go to school, but he continued to plead that his big sister not be sold. Finally, he escaped to search for his mother, in hopes that she could do something. Eventually, they found each other.

They received help from a terrific anti-trafficking organization called Apne Aap (www.apneaap.org), run by a former journalist named Ruchira Gupta. Ms. Gupta covered trafficking and was so horrified by what she found that she quit her job and devoted her life to fighting the brothel owners.

Ms. Gupta agitated for a police raid (apparently the first such raid on behalf of a trafficked mother ever in the state of Bihar) that rescued Naina last month. The girl, who is now about 13, is still recovering in a hospital from severe beatings and internal injuries.

The brothel is still operating, and the police have not arrested the main traffickers. But the brothel owners are threatening to kill Meena, her children and the Apne Aap staff, because they are potential witnesses in a criminal case against the traffickers. One Apne Aap staff member was stabbed a few days ago.

But whatever happens to Meena or Vivek, they are in the vanguard of a new global abolitionist movement. (Video of them and the brothels can be found on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)

This is an issue crying out for world leaders — and community groups — to seize and run with. President Bush has pressed the issue more than his predecessors, but he could do much more. If a little boy like Vivek can stand up to modern slavers, why can’t world leaders do the same?

*****

There's a video about Meena and Ms. Gupta, "Power of a Mother's Love," that accompanies this column. You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof's blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. You can also find links in the blog to past columns written by Mr. Kristof about sex slavery.

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Resolve to Be Ambivalent

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 15, 2007

One of the essential flaws in President Bush’s Iraq policy is that America comes across as wanting to be in Iraq more than the Iraqis want us there.

So in that context, the Congressional efforts to restrict funding for U.S. troops there don’t undermine the war effort. Rather, they support it, by usefully signaling that American patience is wearing thin. The more we send that signal, the better off we and Iraq may be.

Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney signal an unwavering commitment to supply American blood indefinitely to Iraq, and they are overseeing the development of military bases that frighten Iraqis because they look so permanent. The results are perceptions of nefarious American designs on Iraq, consequent Arab suspicions, empowerment of nationalist anti-Americans like Moktada al-Sadr, and an Iraqi government that feels insufficient pressure to make concessions to achieve a political solution. In short, the firmness of our resolve to stay is a military and diplomatic disaster that leads to more Americans coming home in body bags.

The latest poll of Iraqis, by ABC News, USA Today and others, shows that 80 percent of Shiites and 97 percent of Sunni Arabs oppose the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, and over all, 51 percent support attacks on U.S. troops. But only 35 percent want the U.S. forces to leave immediately.

That may seem a contradiction: why blow up Americans now if you still want them to stay a bit longer? But it makes sense to Iraqis, who believe that Mr. Bush is so determined to keep troops in Iraq that killing them today is the only way to dislodge them in a year’s time.

Likewise, Saudi Arabia’s king, Abdullah, felt free to denounce the “illegal foreign occupation” of Iraq, even though he has made clear he wants it to continue for the time being, to protect the Sunni minority.

If it looked as if Congress (or a new president) might actually bring the troops home, the tone might change, and we might start hearing pleas for us to stay a little longer.

Look, neither I nor anyone else has a good solution to the mess in Iraq, and there is a real risk of a genocidal bloodbath after our departure. I’m not sure that the policy I’ve been advocating (a timetable for withdrawal within one year, accompanied by a clear renunciation of permanent bases in Iraq) would work. But I am sure that no American policy will ever succeed as long as we want to be in Iraq more than the Iraqis want us there.

There’s a parallel with South Korea, where the U.S. troop presence outraged Korean nationalists for decades. We showed great public resolve and determination to stay in Korea, and there was constant resentment at our troops’ behavior and at the land taken up by our bases. It was an article of faith among many Koreans that we were there not to protect them but for our own dark purposes.

Then a few years ago, Donald Rumsfeld ordered U.S. troops pulled back from the border with North Korea, and there was talk of slashing the U.S. troop presence. Suddenly, the U.S. force in Korea didn’t seem so inevitable or permanent. Instead of grousing about the U.S. troops, some Koreans began to worry about the risk that they might be withdrawn. By showing ambivalence of our own, we actually created more support for our troops.

You saw something similar in former Soviet bloc countries like Mongolia, where ordinary people used to roundly denounce the way they were exploited by the Soviets. Then with the collapse of old military and economic arrangements in 1990, the former satellites shifted to worrying how they would get by without the Soviets.

That’s the kind of change of tone we need in Iraq, and it would have a second salutary effect.

The best hope for peace in Iraq is a political settlement, in which Shiite leaders make political concessions to bring Sunnis out of the insurgency and into decision making. That’s the only real way out of this civil war. But as long as Shiite leaders see that Mr. Bush is determined to keep troops in Iraq to protect their rule, they don’t make the necessary compromises.

So instead of signaling that we will stay in Iraq to the last gasp, President Bush should be showing ambivalence of his own, signs that our commitment is not open-ended. He seems incapable of that.

Now Congress is rising to the occasion — and the resulting battle over troop funding sends the right signal to Iraq and the world, that we might actually pull out. In this case, a mixed message is the right message.

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A Woman’s Work Earns Her Enemies

Hasina Bibi and her husband, Rashid Ahmed.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: April 8, 2007

MEERWALA, Pakistan

You might think that the worst tragedy that could befall a couple would be for their young daughter to be raped and murdered.

But here in rural Pakistan, that was only the beginning for Hasina Bibi and her husband, Rashid Ahmed. Their story underscores how to be poor in the developing world often means having not only no food but also no justice — and how any war against poverty must be devised not only to enrich the world’s poorest people but also to educate and empower them.

On the morning of July 3 last year, Ms. Hasina and Mr. Rashid were cutting grass in the fields along with their daughter, Shamshad, who was 11 years old, and a group of other laborers. Shamshad carried a stack of grass to a pile across the field — and then disappeared.

Villagers found Shamshad’s body a few hours later. She had been raped and tortured: There were many bite marks, and burns from cigarettes.

Everybody guessed who could have done this: the grandchildren of the local feudal lord. These grandchildren, in their teens and 20s, often harassed girls.

The grandchildren, however, said that the culprits were their servants — and so the police arrested the servants (who presumably would be beaten until they confessed). But Ms. Hasina and Mr. Rashid knew that the servants could not be guilty, because they had all been together when Shamshad vanished.

“We went to the police, and after five minutes the police said, ‘Go home,’ ” Ms. Hasina related. The police told the parents to forget about making accusations against anyone in the feudal lord’s family.

So Ms. Hasina traveled to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, 400 miles to the north, to appeal for assistance from the government — but she received no help and her trip infuriated the feudal lord’s family. The feudal lord’s family members beat up her family members and warned them to be silent.

“They said, ‘We killed the girl, and if you don’t keep quiet we’ll kill all of you as well,’ ” Ms. Hasina explained. She sighed and added: “Everybody says, that is just what happens to poor people.”Yet there is one place that Ms. Hasina and Mr. Rashid have found a sanctuary: the shelter run by Mukhtar Mai here in the remote village of Meerwala. Mukhtar (who also goes by the name Mukhtaran Bibi) survived a gang rape to become a fervent campaigner for voiceless women in Pakistan.

I’ve written about Mukhtar repeatedly over the last few years, and she now runs several schools, an ambulance service and a women’s aid group. Her home and courtyard are full of women and girls who trickle in each day, shellshocked by injustice or disfigured by beatings or acid attacks. Mukhtar arranges medical or legal help and does what she can to address their needs.

A year ago on a visit to Mukhtar’s village, I wrote about a young woman named Aisha Parveen who was fighting efforts by the police to return her to the brothel from which she had escaped. Mukhtar helped rescue Aisha, and now Aisha is trying to replicate Mukhtar’s work farther south. One of Aisha’s first cases was to help Ms. Hasina after her daughter’s murder.

Mukhtar is a hero of mine. But her work has earned her many enemies, particularly among the feudal lords — and even in the government of President Pervez Musharraf, who fears that Mukhtar displays Pakistan’s dirty laundry before the world. So the Pakistani authorities are harassing Mukhtar, trying to break her organization. (For readers who want to help, I’ve posted some ideas on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. You can also post your comments about this column there.)

Most of the pressure right now is on Mukhtar’s top aide and soul mate, Naseem Akhtar. Lately Naseem’s brother was in a mysterious vehicle accident, her father was ordered arrested for no apparent reason and her own house was broken into.

Farooq Leghari, a police chief, was transferred away from Meerwala because — he and others say — he tried too hard to protect Mukhtar. He now is police chief in another town and, when I visited him, he told me that “this harassment and pressure on them is from very high up, from Islamabad.”

“Their lives are in danger,” Mr. Leghari said of Mukhtar and Naseem, adding that they could be killed by assassins sent by feudal lords or by the Pakistani government itself (our close allies!).

So I have a message for President Musharraf: Don’t even think about it. Start protecting Mukhtar instead of harassing her. And if any “accident” happens to Mukhtar or Naseem, you will be held responsible before the world. We are watching.

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The Hand Behind the Taliban

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 1, 2007

KABUL, Afghanistan

The Taliban is on the resurgence, again ruling a swath of southern Afghanistan, and President Hamid Karzai is sure of the reason: Pakistan.

In an interview in his office, Mr. Karzai was scathing in his accusations of official Pakistani duplicity. For starters, he accused the Pakistani intelligence agencies of sheltering Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

“We have solid, clear information indicating that,” he said. “And I’m sorry I cannot be silent about this. As much as our friends in Pakistan may not like my saying that.”

Mr. Karzai suggested that the Pakistani government wants the Afghan government to fail, so that it can use the Taliban to turn Afghanistan into a colony of Pakistan. Speaking in English, he said: “The point that we are trying to tell the world [is] that the Taliban was a name, that there was another power behind — a very criminally intended colonial thinking behind the Taliban movement.”

One of the central mistakes of the last few years, Mr. Karzai suggested, was that the West had tried to battle the Taliban in Afghan villages instead of focusing on preventing Pakistan from financing and sheltering the Taliban. He put it this way: “Rather than concentrating on the sources of terror, on the financiers of terror, on the trainers of terror and on the sanctuaries of terror, [we concentrated] rather heavily on going about in Afghan villages, where there was no terrorism, where there was the result of terrorism, yes, but not the roots of it, not the springboard of it.”

Last September, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan reached a deal with tribal leaders on the Pakistani side of the border and pulled troops from the area. Since then, Mr. Karzai said, terrorism had surged.

“We have almost daily reports of suicide bombers coming from there,” he said, adding: “If we had better cooperation from Pakistan, a great many of these cross-border crossings would stop.”

Mr. Karzai also suggested that extreme Taliban policies — like whipping “immodest” women — were part of a Pakistani scheme to destroy Afghan morale and render Afghanistan a helpless puppet of Pakistan.

These charges were so serious that at the end of the interview I double-checked with him. “I just want to make sure I understand what you’re saying,” I told him. “You’re basically saying that the Taliban was using these policies because it was part of a Pakistani colonial policy to break the will of Afghanistan. And that still is, in effect, what is going on with Pakistan’s policy.”

“Absolutely,” the president said. “Absolutely.” (I’ve posted a transcript and audio file of the interview on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)

My own take, after reporting on both sides of the border, is that President Musharraf today is indeed turning a blind eye to the Taliban and aims to control it rather than wipe it out. But Mr. Karzai exaggerates the degree to which Pakistan is pulling the strings of Taliban puppets — and overstates Mr. Musharraf’s ability to destroy the Taliban.

Moreover, there is plenty of blame to assign to the American and Afghan sides as well. We haven’t done nearly enough to build up the Afghan Army and police, which don’t antagonize conservative Afghans the way U.S. troops often do. We fumbled the reconstruction and aid projects needed to win hearts and minds. My vote is for a big push to battle maternal mortality, because 18,000 Afghan women die annually in childbirth — dwarfing the 4,000 Afghans who died last year in Taliban-related violence.

In addition, the Afghan government desperately needs to curb the mind-boggling corruption and narcotics trafficking by its own officials. In short, Pakistan is only one reason that southern Afghanistan is a catastrophe — but a catastrophe it is.

“Nowadays in Helmand Province, the Taliban is winning,” said Haji Mir Wali, a member of Parliament from the southern province of Helmand. “Ninety percent of the area is under the control of the Taliban, and they are imposing their strict rule again.”

Outside of the provincial capital, he said, shops in Helmand don’t dare sell music, men who trim their beards are threatened with death, and schools have closed for boys as well as girls. “It’s worse now than it was in the Taliban’s time.” he said.

Unless we hear the fire bell in the night from the Afghan south, we could end up losing not only the war in Iraq but also the war in Afghanistan we should have won five years ago.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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Win a Trip, and See a Different World

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: March 11, 2007

Cast your eyes above and meet Hidaya Abatemam, whom I met last month in a remote area of southern Ethiopia. She is 6 years old and weighs 17 pounds.

Hidaya was starved nearly to death and may well have suffered permanent mental impairment, helping to trap her — and her own children, if she lives that long — in another generation of poverty.

Yet maybe the more interesting question is not why Hidaya is starving but why the world continues to allow 30,000 children like her to die each day of poverty.

Ultimately what is killing girls like her isn’t precisely malnutrition or malaria, but indifference. And that, in turn, arises from our insularity, our inexperience in traveling and living in poor countries, so that we have difficulty empathizing with people like Hidaya.

I often hear comments from readers like: “It’s tragic over there, but we’ve got our own problems that we have to solve first.” Nobody who has held the hand of a starving African child could be that dismissive.

That lack of firsthand experience abroad also helps explain why we are so awful at foreign policy: we just don’t “get” how our actions will be perceived abroad, so time and again — in Vietnam, China, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Latin America — we end up clumsily empowering our enemies.

Part of the problem is that American universities do an execrable job preparing students for global citizenship. A majority of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day, but the vast majority of American students graduate without ever gaining any insight into how that global majority lives.

According to a Roper/National Geographic poll, 38 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 consider speaking another language to be “not too important.” Sixty-three percent of those young Americans can’t find Iraq on a map of the Middle East. And 89 percent don’t correspond regularly with anyone outside the U.S.

A survey cited by the Modern Language Association found that only 9 percent of American college students enroll in a foreign language class.

Let’s face it: We’re provincial.

That’s one reason that I always exhort college students to take a “gap year” and roam the world, or at least to take a summer or semester abroad — and spend it not in Paris or London, but traveling through Chinese or African villages. Universities should give course credit for such experiences — and offer extra credit for students who catch intestinal worms.

So I’m now putting my company’s money where my mouth is. On Tuesday, in partnership with MySpace.com, The New York Times and I will announce a second annual “win a trip” contest to choose a university student to travel with me on a reporting trip to Africa. And this year, in addition to a student, I’ll choose a schoolteacher — from a middle school or high school — to accompany me as well. We'll probably travel together to Rwanda, Burundi and Congo.

Last year I chose a young woman from Mississippi, Casey Parks, and we traveled together through central Africa. Casey and I saw malnourished children just like Hidaya, and visited burned-out villages in areas of the Central African Republic that had been caught up in the furies of the spreading Darfur genocide. Pygmy trackers led us through the jungle to see gorillas and elephants, and we managed to be held up at gunpoint by bandits.

In Cameroon, we interviewed a doctor about maternal mortality — and then found a woman named Prudence, a mother of three, dying in the next room. A dead fetus was decomposing inside her, setting off a raging infection, but the doctor didn’t care about her. And so she died. You can know intellectually that half a million women die in pregnancy each year, but it’s still shattering to see a woman die so unnecessarily in front of you.

If you win the trip, you won’t be practicing tourism, but journalism. You’ll blog and prepare videos for the New York Times and MySpace Web sites. I’m betting that you’ll be able to connect with young readers and viewers — and galvanize them to care about these issues — in a way that I can’t.

So please spread the word about the contest. Rules and applications will be posted Tuesday at www.nytimes.com/winatrip and at www.myspace.com/kristofontheground.

And for those who apply but don’t win, go anyway on your own. You’ll learn more than you ever would from an equivalent period in the classroom. And you’ll gain not only the occasional intestinal parasite but also an understanding of why we should fight to save children like Hidaya.

Read Casey's blog about her trip and Mr. Kristof's columns about starvation in Ethiopia from May 2003.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof's blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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Aid Workers With Guns

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: March 4, 2007

CAMP LEMONIER, Djibouti

The U.S. has built a little-known military base here that represents one of our best strategies to fight terrorism in the coming years: The aim is to build things rather than blow them up.

This base in Africa, established in 2003, sits at the entrance to the Red Sea in the small Muslim country of Djibouti, next to Somalia. Security is as tight as the sun is hot, with lots of bomb shelters, but the most apparent threats are distinctly, well, African.

“We’ve got two hyenas out there,” said Cmdr. Darryl Centanni of the Navy, executive officer of Camp Lemonier, pointing to a jogging trail on which troops were running through the semidesert. “So the running gets pretty interesting.”

He added that a pack of wild dogs also speeds up joggers but that the dogs mostly get food by catching fish in the sea. (I’m not sure I trust military intelligence on that one.)

After 9/11, the focus of America’s response to terrorism has been mostly on using military force to destroy possible threats in places like Iraq and intimidate just about everyone. The ethos was borrowed from the ancient Romans: “Oderint, dum metuant” — “Let them hate, so long as they fear.”

Yet all in all, that strategy has backfired catastrophically, particularly in Iraq, and turned us into Al Qaeda’s best recruiter.

So that’s why the softer touch in Centcom’s strategy here is so welcome. It aims to help bring stability to northeastern Africa and to address humanitarian needs — knowing that humanitarian involvement will make us safer as well.

“The U.S. started to realize that there’s more to counterterrorism than capture-kill kinetics,” said Capt. Patrick Myers of the Navy, director of plans and policy here. “Our mission is 95 percent at least civil affairs. ... It’s trying to get at the root causes of why people want to take on the U.S.”

One humanitarian mission for which the U.S. military is superbly prepared is responding to natural disasters. While the U.S. has spent vast sums broadcasting propaganda to the Muslim world, the two most successful efforts at winning good will both involved the military. One was the dispatch of soldiers to help Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami, and the other was the use of U.S. forces to help Pakistan after the Kashmir earthquake.

The 1,800 troops here do serve a traditional military purpose, for the base was used to support operations against terrorists in Somalia recently and is available to reach Sudan, Yemen or other hot spots. But the forces here spend much of their time drilling wells or building hospitals; they rushed to respond when a building collapsed in Kenya and when a passenger ferry capsized in Djibouti.

Rear Adm. James Hart, commander of the task force at Camp Lemonier, suggested that if people in nearby countries feel they have opportunities to improve their lives, then “the chance of extremism being welcomed greatly, if not completely, diminishes.”

The U.S. announced last month that it would form a new Africa Command, aimed partly at blocking the rise of ungoverned spaces that nurture terrorism. The new command offers tremendous humanitarian potential as well, for in some poor countries the most useful “aid workers” are the ones in camouflage carrying guns.

In the Central African Republic in September I visited a town with a lovely new hospital built as a foreign aid project. But the hospital was an empty shell, gutted by militias rampaging through the area. In places like that, there’s no point in building schools or clinics unless you also help with security.

Some of the most successful aid projects in Africa have been the dispatch of armed peacekeepers to Mozambique and British troops to Sierra Leone. In both places, troops brought what the besieged population most desperately needed — order — and laid the groundwork for recovery. We should be far more aggressive about dispatching small numbers of troops to impose a no-fly zone over Darfur or to destroy Sudanese militias that invade Chad and the Central African Republic.

We can also do far more to train armies in Africa. The deal we offer African presidents should be along these lines: You run a country cleanly and tolerate dissent, and we’ll help ensure that no brutal rebel force comes out of the jungle to create chaos and overthrow you.

Helping fragile countries with security is just as important as helping them with education and medical care. So let’s hope that this new base in Africa is the start of a broad new policy that doesn’t aim to make us hated or feared, but respected.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

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