Want to go to a cocktail party and sound like a real know-it-all on foreign affairs?  Spend a few minutes reading the latest issue of The Economist magazine, memorize a few paragraphs from the lead story which you can then repeat to the other guests as if you came up with the ideas yourself.

              While reciting your lines, you might want to throw in a bit of a British accent, because The Economist was founded in London and has always been considered a cosmopolitan and highly literate publication that is read and cited by influential people all over the globe.

              It goes without saying, of course, that the editorial slant of the magazine is somewhere right in the middle, promoting the idea that Western-style democracies are the universal, good government model which should be followed everywhere else.

              The most recent issue’s lead story is an analysis of how and where the global jihad will spread following its apparent success in Afghanistan.  The article states that: “In places like Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, Mali, Somalia and Mozambique, they already control territory.” It goes on to say that the growth of the jihadist movement “will destabilise a large number of countries, endangering both locals and the foreigners who visit or do business there.”

              Instability is no good. It’s not the way things are done in the civilized world, i.e., where readers of The Economist live. It’s certainly not what should be going on in countries whose governments depend on the West for their security and the safety of their populations. Just look at what’s happened in Afghanistan once the government could no longer count on the United States to keep things under control.

              Let’s go back for a moment and review again the list of countries which may soon fall under the jihadist sway – Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, Mali, Somalia, Mozambique.  What do these countries have in common?

              Based on data from the IMF and the World Bank, these countries are all poor as sh*t.  There are 225 countries whose per-capita GDP can be figured out, with the highest being Luxembourg at around $120,000, the lowest being Burundi, at $750.  The United States is 15^th in per-capita GDP, somewhere around $65,000 and change.

              Not one of the countries which The Economist believes are the likely next jihad targets are even in the middle of the world’s per-capita GDP. Somalia, Mali, Mozambique, and Yemen all rank in the poorest ten percent. Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria aren’t much better off. The wealthiest of all seven countries is Nigeria, with a per-capita GDP of $5,100 – one-tenth the U.S. per-capita GDP.

              Aside from how miserably poor these countries are, there’s something else which sets them apart. They all happen to be countries which were colonized by the European democracies, particularly Britain and France. In fact, only Mozambique was not part of the Anglo-French colonial world because it was one of the earliest colonial territories in Africa carved out by the Portuguese.

              Many years ago, I found myself in a conversation with a British lady who had just returned from a vacation in Rhodesia, what is now known as Zimbabwe. I asked her what life was like in this British colony and here was her reply: “Oh, you sit by the swimming pool, and they bring you lemonade.”

              The ‘they’ in this case were the unnamed locals, lucky enough to have jobs bringing lemonade to the white trash who came down from Britain and knew they deserved to sit next to the pool sipping their lemonade because they represented a superior race.

              For every local who got a job bringing lemonade or whatever else the White residents and visitors ordered or wanted, there was another colonial who didn’t get a job and resented both the colonizers as well as his local neighbor who was living better than he could live.

Many of the people who right now are desperately trying to escape from Afghanistan survived by being the first in line when the government or the American military needed to hire an extra pair of hands. These people weren’t our ‘allies,’ they weren’t making a ‘sacrifice’ on our behalf. They were trying to survive in a situation where earning a living isn’t an opportunity that falls now and again into everyone’s lap.

However, for those who didn’t get to take advantage of post-colonial, life-style opportunities provided by the presence of the United States, they could wait for the day of reckoning, when the inability of the government to wield authority (as The Economist would say) would give them their just and due rewards.

This is the real legacy of how stable, Western-style democracies like England and France looted the so-called ‘undeveloped’ or ‘third world’ regions of the globe, a legacy playing out today in Afghanistan and is explained by The Economist as the threat of jihad which must be stamped out.