To use one of your examples, the occupation of Japan was from 1945 to 1952, less than 10 years. Allied occupation of Germany was even shorter, at less than 5 years.

So, in short, no, it does not take decades.

It has been established that the German and Japanese cultures are a lot more compatible with "western" ideologies, compared to the more culturally diverse system in Afghanistan.

At the risk of coming off rather callous, it is believed that the sustained conflicted has created a significant amount of value for the stakeholders at varies millitary contractors, as well as provided invaluable experience for the US millitary to trial out their latest weapons and doctrines.

Is it really a loss in the grand scheme of things though?

America still has military bases in Japan and Germany.

Sure. But neither of those places is an ied survival camp every time when leaving the base.

The Okinawans might disagree with you.

I would really love to have someone summarize how we "oversaw" Japan and Germany as opposed to Afghanistan. I wonder if we built more or less schools (or any at all) and invested in different ways in the past or now.

I always lament the trillions spent on war machines and (bad assumption?) very little spent on improving society through education.

People in the US lament the high cost of education here, but I really wonder what would have happened if we had just taken all that money and handed it to the Afghan government with an expectation it needed to be spent on infrastructure or education instead of our military bases. Am I totally wrong to think that's how it went down?

I might say "you've been lied to" rather than "you're totally wrong", but basically yeah. The US followed precisely the strategy you're suggesting for most of the occupation, the Afghani government could not or would not reliably channel the funding towards real schools, and the US found it expedient to avoid pushing too hard for accountability. (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azmatkhan/the-big-lie-t...)

More on the Afghan corruption, written in 2015, as an overview of a book on corruption: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev...

The book author Sarah Chayes argues that corruption leads to insurgencies or at least normal civilians turning a blind eye to them, why help the government/police when they've been grafting all over the place.

To me it's also clear why the Afghani army gave up, (if it even existed, it's probably like the ghost schools and students): a leader that was (or appeared) clean and inspirational might've been able to generate a sense of national pride, which the soldiers would've fought and died for. But the soldiers probably knew the elites were corrupt scumbags, who wants to die for that? (Unless the embezzled riches tricked down to them...).

Edit: reading your article makes me think of "reality must take precedence over public relations". It's disgusting to see how the US institutions deluded their way into reporting success, it's almost comparable to the legend that said Saddam Hussein probably thought he had a great WMD program, because all his subordinates were too afraid to bring him bad news..

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for improving my understanding of the last twenty years. I'm happy to hear we (as an American) at least tried to do the right thing and it wasn't entirely as my cynical mind thought.

> I would really love to have someone summarize how we "oversaw" Japan and Germany as opposed to Afghanistan.

Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, bad as they were, still had traditions associated with modern civilization. After the war, the infrastructure was devastated, but they had what economists refer to as "human capital"-- experienced engineers, miners, farmers, architects, people in all construction trades, etc. They had the knowledge and the desire to rebuild, and with the Marshall Plan, the money to do it.

The Taliban doesn't want to build/rebuild Afganistan. They want it to remain firmly in the 7th century, albeit with modern weapons. There is certainly human capital in Afganistan, but they face a real uphill battle.

Germany/Korea/Japan had a sense of shared identity dating back centuries (or more). Also two of them just lost a total war they started themselves, so arguably not in a position to complain too much. So, very different situations.

> America doesn’t have the patience to oversee Afghanistan like was done with Germany, South Korea, Japan, etc.

In what way are a loose collection of tribesmen dwelling in the hill country in Afghanistan comparable to Germany, among whose exports to the US are the most brilliant minds of humankind?

You didn't mention that before the post-war occupation, there were functioning institutions in Germany, South Korea, and Japan. This is different from building a state from scratch. Can't do "nation-building" when a nation is not there to begin with.

Seeing these comparisons is frustrating and makes it easy to understand why Afghanistan continues to be an enigma to westerners who think they know and understand the realities there on the ground.

It's a post hoc comparison of attempts at nation building, sorry for the confusion if it seemed like I was implying.

Decades? We let Japan run itself after seven years.

Funnily enough, Noah Smith at Bloomberg had a great take just today about how trying to use Japan as an example of how nation-building in Afghanistan could’ve been successful is a farce: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation...

There's also a fundamental difference in the population between these places that might have somethingn to do with it.

Something we shouldn't overlook is that Afghanistan is land-locked, Germany and Japan are not. The lack of coastline is a serious impediment to economic and civil development. Without any opportunity to build serious industry in Afghanistan, the effort would at least take far longer than Japan and Germany, both of which also had an existing culture of manufacturing and industry to build upon.

One may say that Afghanistan is also doomed to forever be a "developing" nation given this constraint. How many first-world landlocked nations can you name? Great, now how many outside the EU trade and border alliances? Right.

Edit: here's some source data with interesting stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landlocked_country

Interesting to me is that the only landlocked countries with higher populations are Ethiopia and Uganda. Also, their only escape from this state of affairs would be a trade/border alliance with a neighboring country that does have coastline. Prospects look pretty dismal in that candidate list.

The "land-locked idea" sounds weird. There are other third-world-countries on the same level of Afghanistan that have direct access to the sea, and as you mentioned yourself, there are land-locked countries in Europe (that have been doing well even before the EU).

The primary hindrance is culture, not coast.

World trade tends to happen via oceans. If you have a cost with a decent port, you can trade with a lot of countries at low cost. If you don't, you'll have to make arrangements to get your goods through neighboring countries to get to the port and that adds costs.

Wikipedia says Afghanistan has rail links to neighboring Uzbekistan and Terkmenistan, which are also landlocked; if planned rail lines to Iran and Pakistan are constructed, that would certainly help with access to ports.

Land-locked, Jared Diamond's East-west theory, tropical vs seasonal, people have been going through gyrations forever to refuse to accept that just maybe different cultures have different outcomes.

In this case, the differences are quantifiable and consistent. Different cultures do have different outcomes. But two similar cultures, one living in a landlocked state and the other having coastline, will have different development speeds.

Having coastal access doesn’t guarantee you become first-world. That’s a bad take-away.

Not having coastal access virtually guarantees a country will stay in second/third world status unless part of an empire or trade federation that can provide such access (as the only examples of first-world landlocked nations are).

So this seems a pretty determinate factor, all else being equal. And one that has been known since day one. The question is, what are you expecting to build the nation into if coastline dictates its access to markets?

I think that's a bad take.

Take Switzerland, for instance, or Austria. They were first-world countries before they were part of a trade federation. And, in fact, they were invited into the trade federation because they were first-world countries.

(Yes, Austria was part of an empire. No, Switzerland wasn't.)

Defining countries as "first world" wasn't even a thing until after Switzerland had joined the League of Nations.

And Switzerland was, in fact, part of (and [charitably] aligned with) a few different empires in its day, to say the least possible about that. They are (and in modern history always were) dependent upon other nations for their trade routes which is determinate in their first-world status.

What argument are you trying to advance? That because Switzerland is first-world and landlocked - one of a few exceptions to the rule, surrounded by and allied with some of the planet's most powerful first-world nations - that Afghanistan could be expected to become one of the exceptions too?

The fact that the word "miracle" accompanies any explanation of Swiss economics ("The Swiss Miracle") should tell you that the odds of replicating their circumstances are long. Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic are all exceptions because they're unusual. They benefit immensely from being small populations with developed and friendly neighbors.

Afghanistan is thirty million people occupying a country whose borders are notoriously unsafe, whose regions are partly characterized by their ruling warlord, and whose chief product is agricultural. Who are Afghanistan's neighbors with coastal access? China, Iran, and Pakistan.

What are the prospects, as you build up industrialized resource development (mining, wells) in Afghanistan, for leveraging your coastal access rights with friends and borders like that? Coastal access is not just about exports, either.

Switzerland's geography, population of 8m, and history in Western Europe are hardly a useful roadmap for Afghanistan because the circumstances of each country are quite different.

The League of Nations wasn't a trade federation, so that's kind of beside the point.

What argument am I trying to advance? That your geographic determinism is flawed. There are a few first-world landlocked countries; there are many third-world countries with ocean access. Trying to say that Afghanistan is doomed because it's landlocked is unsupported by the available evidence.

Afghanistan is doomed, but it's doomed by the culture of the people (and, as you say, by their neighbors). If you took the same people and put them in Pakistan instead, would the ocean access really improve things? Maybe, a little, but not enough to fundamentally change the situation.

It's not a coincidence that Pakistan is more developed than Afghanistan.

> there are many third-world countries with ocean access

Think about it like this - the vast majority of people that manage to improve their station in life are smart. Not everyone is smart, and not everyone who is smart improves their station in life. Being blessed with natural gifts doesn't determine a nation's fate, but it damn sure helps. Critically, the absence of those natural gifts puts a country at a severe disadvantage when trying to develop (in this case safe, economical access to global markets via maritime trade - a very concrete and measurable asset).

It is not the whole answer, sure. As my original comment and your replies have point out, there are exceptions. Those exceptions are by definition unusual. Some other factor(s) needs to be working overtime to offset the natural handicap. In the case of these exceptional first-world countries we're looking at, their handicap is balanced by having good prosperous neighbors that provide cheap, secure access to maritime trade routes. Afghanistan does not have these compensatory advantages.

Insofar as LoN is concerned, I'll leave that to you to contemplate the very origin of the designator "first world" and what being part of the right "club" means for a nation's prosperity. It is impossible to separate the landlocked exceptions' success from the compensating "gifts" of their neighborhood, as explained by the UN info below.

Check it out:

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2008/06/16/landloc...

"High prices have hit many countries around the world, but landlocked developing countries bear an extra burden. Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Burundi, and other countries without a port pay more and wait longer for imported oil, food, and other goods. And they have an equally hard time exporting, with the result that they trade less and grow more slowly than their coastal neighbors."

https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/developing_countries....

"The United Nations term "Landlocked Developing Countries" describes countries with serious constraints on the overall socio-economic development. Due to lack of territorial access to the sea and therefore remoteness and isolation from world markets causing high transit and transportation costs. These countries are among the poorest of the developing countries."

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BAK96b...

"For LLDCs, their seaborne trade almost always must transit through other countries, mostly also developing countries—a process which involves dealing with cumbersome border-crossing procedures and inadequate transit transport infrastructure. Thus, although LLDCs already face other development challenges, they also face substantially increased costs for trade and transport because of their geographic location. Moreover, of the 32 LLDCs 17 are classified as least developed.

Their remoteness from major world markets is the principal reason why many LLDCs have had less success in mitigating consequences caused by their geographical handicap as compared to landlocked countries in Europe. Landlocked developed countries of Europe are surrounded by major developed markets and their seaborne trade accounts for a relatively small part of their external trade. Their export is mainly high value added products and their distance from seaports is comparatively short.

The distances involved in most cases of LLDCs are excessive. Kazakhstan has the longest distance from the sea (3,750 km), followed by Afghanistan, Chad, Niger, Zambia and Zimbabwe with distances from the nearest seacoast in excess of 2,000 km. Transit time for goods of LLDCs is extremely long because of their remoteness, difficult terrain, road and railway conditions and inefficiency of transit transport."

Make sense? This is not "my" geographic determinism. It's a pretty well-established way to interpret the world.

> Who are Afghanistan's neighbors with coastal access? China, Iran, and Pakistan.

Adding to your point, it's a long way across China, and the border with Afghanistan is far away from populations and ports. I don't think it's great for trade, even though trade with China is certainly important.

Yes, I could see China hoovering out resources from Afghanistan, but I think they have to be concerned about the Taliban. Maybe cash for gas/oil/REM/etc is a way to keep them from finding common cause with their Muslim brethren across the border (the whole Uighur thing). I honestly wouldn't be surprised if we started funding the Taliban again at some point in the near future, as much as it make me facepalm. I don't let good sense be an impediment to my cynicism.

China certainly loves resources, but transporting them from west to east is going to be expensive. It's probably cheaper to get them elsewhere and send them by sea.

Unless they think developing the resources and transportation will keep any trouble from crossing their borders.

I think it would be beneficial for the Afghans, assuming it wasn't too exploitive, more access to trade is usually a good thing, and exporting resources would generate net income.