[The Federalist] The most striking couple of sentences in the breathtaking report from the Washington Post about the West’s failed nation-building in Afghanistan were right in the middle. The report stated, in no uncertain terms, "Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights."
Think about that for a moment. More than $1 trillion spent, more than 2,000 lives lost, more than 20,000 men and women maimed and scarred physically and psychologically for life, all to shape the semi-feudal Afghanistan into modern Switzerland. To do what the British Empire and the Soviet Empire failed before: to impose a Western idea ‐ developed and practiced in the West, with all the cultural forces that shaped it ‐ in a land which has historically never had a Magna Carta, a James Madison, or an October Revolution. It doesn’t even have a normative society such as erstwhile pre-colonial India, Egypt, or China, or pre-1945 Germany or Japan.
The jaw-dropping hubris behind this idealistic endeavor was staggering, incapable of being explained in words. Forget about President George W. Bush or President Barack Obama, forget about the impeachment nonsense or the inspector general report ‐ this story of how administration after administration repeated half-truths while paying lip-service to norms is the most important revelation in recent years. But even then, it is not unexpected, nor will it go away unless the root causes are discussed. |