A few years ago in Jordan, I sat down with a teenage Iraqi refugee named Ahmad to talk about his future. Having served as an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, I knew what he and his friends had survived. Caught in the crossfire of a sectarian conflict, without even the chance to go to school or land an honest job, Ahmad and his friends were prime recruiting targets for insurgent groups and terrorists. They had been offered a simple but brutal choice: pay and protection if they joined the fighting against their neighbors, violent retribution if they did not.

Without opportunity or hope for the future, many young men made tragic choices. And now, here he was, working toward medical school instead of joining a dead-end terrorist group like too many others. What made the difference for Ahmad was a school, partially funded by USAID. American soldiers had safeguarded Ahmad’s family in Baghdad. Now, American international development was giving him a future.

It’s stories like Ahmad’s that make me proud to be a part of the Truman National Security Project’s Make US Strong campaign. As an Army Captain who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, I know that international development is key to keeping America strong — but it wasn’t these modern conflicts that taught us how critical it is. We learned this from the Greatest Generation, who, after winning World War II, rebuilt Europe so that our allies and former foes alike would not fall back into instability and conflict. They knew that international stability depends on more than bullets and bombs: it depends on democracy, economic opportunity, education, health and the rule of law.

It is in this spirit that, last week, Make US Strong released an ad supporting international development called “Tell ‘em Joe Sent You.” This ad reminds us of what our grandparents knew: international development keeps a great nation strong and secure.

In the coming months, we’ll be running “Tell ‘em Joe Sent You” in coordination with our Cycle For Security campaign. Help us spread the word: watch the ad, sign up to learn more about Make US Strong, and become a fan of our campaign on Facebook. Together, let’s spread the message that cuts to international development are cuts to America’s security.

This is Sakila. Fourteen years ago she nearly died giving birth to her son.

“I was giving birth at home, there were complications and I fell unconscious. Eventually my family found a way to get me to a doctor. I was lucky I survived.”

Sakila was fortunate. Over the past 14 years, many thousands of mothers in Afghanistan have not been so lucky. But a new survey shows this is changing –- the number of children and mothers dying in Afghanistan has fallen significantly.

It is women like Sakila that are to thank. Sakila is now a community health worker: “My experience motivated me to serve my community. I want to work to support other women and their children.”

Sakila is one of a growing force of community based life-savers in Afghanistan. There are now 22,000 trained community health workers across the country, from just 2,500 in 2004. They are men and women that serve their communities, unpaid, to save lives every day.

Community health workers treat illnesses like pneumonia or diarrhea, which can otherwise be deadly, and play a critical role in promoting healthy lifestyles and encouraging their community to make best use of the health facilities.

By bringing care closer to the community, we are seeing mothers and children’s lives changing, yet the survey shows more attention needs to be given to the plight of newborns. While the rate of children dying under the age of five has halved, it has fallen by only one-third for newborns.

Shakila is part of an innovative pilot project, run by Save the Children, in a district outside Kabul, that trains and supports community health workers to provide specific support to mothers and newborn babies.

“We register pregnant women, and visit them to explain why it is so important to go to a clinic and have a skilled birth attendant with you when giving birth. Then we check up on them and their new baby to make sure they are healthy,” Sakila continued.

Many women that become community health workers aren’t able to read or write, so the project uses pictures and visuals in learning materials. The approach is working. In a country in which only one third of women give birth in a health facility, in the area where the project is taking place, only a quarter of women still give birth at home.

Fourteen years ago, Sakila nearly lost her life. Now Sakila is one of many women that have brought care to the doorsteps of their neighbors. The news today shows that engaging communities to save lives works. It clear that by continuing to invest in the success so far, we can maintain momentum and save many more lives. Women like Sakila are ready to take on the next challenge –- to bring a new focus to saving the lives of newborns.

My recent trip to Afghanistan is one of the most satisfying trips I have done for GAVI. Security remains difficult, but the sense of optimism is palpable. We’re supporting immunization in Afghanistan, working with our partners in-country who are bursting with innovation and enthusiasm.

This exquisitely beautiful country introduced the pentavalent vaccine in 2009, protecting Afghan children against five deadly infectious diseases with a single course of three injections. This incredibly cost-effective vaccine literally saves tens of thousands of young Afghan lives every year. And because it’s a five-in-one vaccination, it saves on money, time and transport, too.

Now our colleagues in the health ministry are pressing to know more about the new pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines that help protect against pneumonia and diarrhea, two of the world’s biggest killers of children. I’ve always gotten a buzz from working with immunization, an incredibly simple technology at heart. The challenge is to save lives on an enormous scale in the most sustainable and cost-efficient manner.

There’s something even more special about doing it in a context of murderous instability. A previous visit in 2008 began with news of a suicide bomb that killed two of our colleagues from WHO. Conflict has been rumbling throughout this mountainous country for more than 30 years now.

No wonder its health system is such a wreck.

As in many other fragile states, though, Afghanistan’s NGOs do a fantastic job of providing basic health services to the population. That partly explains why some of Afghanistan’s basic health indicators have been improving rapidly.

Maternal mortality ratios have fallen by about a quarter in the past six years, and with immunization coverage rates doubling in the previous decade, we will soon see large reductions in child mortality, too.

Afghanistan is still one of the world’s poorest countries, likely to remain heavily dependent on external donors for quite a while to come. But with GAVI helping protect young children from vaccine-preventable diseases, I¹m also optimistic for the future.

-Raj Kumar, GAVI senior program manager, Afghanistan

In her testimony, Verveer said:

To combat barriers to women’s political empowerment, the United States has launched a broad grassroots effort to train women at local levels and to build their capacity to take on leadership roles. We are also working with women and men in law enforcement and in the judicial system to diminish the impunity that allows the threats, intimidation and violence to continue that keep women out of public life.

Freeing women to participate in public life also frees them to participate in the economic activity of their nation. Jobs creation is among our most urgent goals, and agricultural development in Afghanistan is a top U.S. priority. The key to increasing agricultural productivity is to increase skilled human capital – and an efficient way to accomplish that is by training women.

To further build Afghanistan’s skilled workforce, as well as to extend the many other benefits of education, the United States has promoted programs that rebuild the education infrastructure to enable more girls to go to school and women to achieve literacy. We are also working to rebuild Afghanistan’s healthcare services, and particularly to change its maternal mortality rate, which is one of the worst in the world.

Here’s the video:

You can read the full piece here, excerpts below:

For the cost of deploying one soldier for one year, it is possible to build about 20 schools.

Another program that is enjoying great success in undermining the Taliban is the National Solidarity Program, or N.S.P., which helps villages build projects that they choose — typically schools, clinics, irrigation projects, bridges. This is widely regarded as one of the most successful and least corrupt initiatives in Afghanistan.

“It’s a terrific program,” said George Rupp, the president of the International Rescue Committee. “But it’s underfunded. And it takes very little: for the cost of one U.S. soldier for a year, you could have the N.S.P. in 20 more villages.”

These kinds of projects — including girls’ schools — are often possible even in Taliban areas. One aid group says that the Taliban allowed it to build a girls’ school as long as the teachers were women and as long as the textbooks did not include photos of President Hamid Karzai. And the Taliban usually don’t mess with projects that have strong local support. (That’s why they haven’t burned any of Mr. Mortenson’s schools.)

America’s military spending in Afghanistan alone next year will now exceed the entire official military budget of every other country in the world.

Over time, education has been the single greatest force to stabilize societies. It’s no magic bullet, but it reduces birth rates, raises living standards and subdues civil conflict and terrorism. That’s why as a candidate Mr. Obama proposed a $2 billion global education fund — a promise he seems to have forgot.

When I was in high school, every April the principal would get on the PA and give his annual speech about “rams butting heads” – which was his way of telling the boys to keep their tempers under control. Fights always seemed to peak in the springtime. Fifteen years after I first heard the speech, I found myself living in the Balkans. The speech would always be in the back of my head when I spoke with my colleagues about how we hoped for a late winter thaw to minimize the potential for springtime fighting. Today, I find myself in Afghanistan.

Right after I arrived – just around the time that Josh Peck started sending emails about the global food crisis and ONE members could help – the demonstrations began in Afghanistan about the skyrocketing food prices. At the time, I was admittedly too busy trying to get used to a new job, making new friends, and adjusting to the altitude to do more research about how extreme poverty affects the Afghan people. But over the last couple months, I have talked to more people and a picture has begun to form.

25 years of war. Landlocked country with extreme summers and extreme winters. Low water tables. Dilapidated, bombed out, under-funded, or non-existent schools. Ditto for health clinics. 70% illiteracy rate – as a population – female literacy rates are the lowest in the world. TB. 40% of the population has access to clean water. Malaria. 53% of the population lives below the poverty line. Highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Unexploded land mines. 40% official unemployment. Life expectancy of 43. The opium trade and the resulting crime. Internally displaced persons.

Afghanistan is a country full of vulnerable groups – widows, orphans, victims of war, IDPs, youth, woman. But there is one vulnerable group that doesn’t get mentioned enough – military-aged males. Boys who are just becoming men and about to make pivotal decisions about their futures. Do they choose the “straight and narrow” path – full of the struggles outlined above – unemployment, food insecurity, lack of access to health care and education for their families? Or do they choose the “easy” way out and join with one of the criminal and anti-government elements so prevalent through the country?

ONE members know the OV08 tag-line – “Saving lives, securing our future” – but increased funding for international development is not just a talking point. Although I see examples of the positive impacts of international development daily in Kabul, I have been thinking about the “securing our future” portion a lot of the last couple days as international news sources carried stories of the prison break in Kandahar. Many of them began with a phrase like “the summer violence in Afghanistan starts with a bang.” Again, I was reminded of my high school principal and his springtime speech. And then I thought of all the military-aged males here who are trying to decide what to do with their futures.

Poverty breeds instability.

As ONE members step up their engagements with presidential candidates this summer and fall – keep these boys in mind when you band the candidates. The “saving lives” part is easy to remember – providing basic medicines, increasing access to education, supplying clean water. But remember that its not just securing Americans’ futures. Giving choices to teenage boys is securing everyone’s future – so the boys then don’t have to resort to “butting heads” every spring to provide for their families.

-Annisa Wanat

-Steve Wilson

Although I have worked in healthcare for more than 30 years, I didn’t know the depth of the crisis of poor sanitation and dangerous water. I was shocked at these statistics when I came to the US Coalition for Child Survival in 2006.

In 2005, I paid a visit to the Children’s Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghanistan has one of the worst infant, child and maternal mortality statistics in the developing world. Although improvements have been made in the last few years, there continues to be a crisis there. When I visited Children’s Hospital of Kabul, I found that each day nearly 1,000 children come to the clinic seeking help. The hospital, at that time, didn’t have clean water or working sanitation. Babies were sharing incubators and the food was horrible. Many children showed up due to malnutrition, dehydration and illnesses related to unsafe drinking water.

I saw so much pain in the faces of the children and families during my two weeks in Kabul.

Creating safe drinking water and making it accessible to children and families is not rocket science. We’re not waiting for any new inventions or technology. The cost is low and the results are truly life-saving. Access to clean water and sanitation can help prevent Diarrheal Disease, one of the leading causes of death among children under 5. Read our fact sheet and learn more about the causes, solutions and success stories. Download our fact sheet at here.

You can make a difference and the support of the ONE Campaign has already generated more than 200,000 letters to Congress to support the Global Child Survival Act. Our website has all the information and details on the causes and solutions to the global child survival crisis.

You can also learn more about safe drinking water here. Watch the flash program and get all the facts!

-Andrew Barrer, Executive Director, US Coalition for Child Survival