Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [335]
I proposed that the President start a national discussion on this subject and offered a few suggestions of initiatives. The list included such things as a peacekeeping and governance corps that would have a standing capability to respond rapidly to problems abroad before they spun out of control. That could have been useful to handle unrest in Liberia and Haiti, possibly heading off civil strife before it began. Civilian teams could also bolster our military’s expanding humanitarian efforts, such as when the massive tsunami struck coasts in the Indian Ocean in December 2004, killing 185,000, and when a 7. 6 magnitude earthquake in October 2005 left the Pakistani region of Kashmir devastated, with 80,000 dead and nearly 3 million homeless.
Our humanitarian assistance efforts brought about a noticeable transformation of opinion within those important parts of the Muslim world. We did well for America by doing good. After Defense Department tsunami relief efforts, polls in Indonesia showed that 65 percent of its citizens had a more favorable impression of the United States. Osama bin Laden’s approval ratings in Indonesia—the largest Muslim nation in the world—dropped from 58 percent before the disaster to 23 percent Afterward.18 In Pakistan, a country not known for its favorable views toward America, our rescue operations in the wake of their earthquake changed many minds. By November 2005, more than 46 percent of Pakistanis had a favorable view of the United States—more than double the percentage that had held that view six months earlier.19 The favorite toy among Pakistani children quickly became small models of the American Chinook helicopters that had been so visible in delivering American relief supplies to those left homeless. The Chinooks were referred to in the Pashtun dialect as “Angels of Mercy.”
I also recommended some form of maritime organization to which countries with significant naval forces, such as India and Japan, could contribute to combating piracy on the high seas. Because strong and growing economies tended to stem the rise of violent extremism, I suggested that the President consider a new market-oriented institution to provide grants and support to entrepreneurs in developing countries in Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America that would bypass the government level, where waste and corruption in poor countries were often a serious problem. I thought it might be useful to conduct a reassessment of how our country disperses foreign aid—perhaps using microfinance to promote individual entrepreneurship instead of massive block grants to governments, often for large construction projects.
I suggested consideration of a Middle East security initiative to bolster moderate states in the region and to help shield them from threats posed by nations like Iran, as well as consideration of an Asian security organization—in a sense, an organization with some of the attributes of NATO—to engage the United States in building stronger partnerships with our friends and allies in that region. I thought we needed to expand free trade agreements beyond our immediate neighbors to friends and allies around the world.
Here at home, I proposed a review of the executive and legislative branch institutions that were organized and arranged for an earlier era. We needed adjustments so that agencies and departments could function with the speed and agility the new century and the information age demanded. The compartmentalized organization of the executive branch, with its separate elements and the lack