This point being raised, it is time for the US to spend money on education to support its own democracy.
All of the people involved in these foreign war debacles were highly pedigreed. (Fun fact: the President of Afghanistan, who fled Kabul yesterday, is an Ivy League-educated professor who "literally wrote the book on fixing failed states.")
The education, in fact, the problem. Universities is where people learn hare-brained ideas like Wilsonianism. It's where people learn to view government as a set of laws and policies and boxes on org charts, rather than the manifestation of the culture and political tradition of people.
Coming from a traditional Muslim country ourselves, my family knew in 2001 that nation building in Afghanistan was an absurd idea. Our own country has a thousand-year head start on Afghanistan in terms of civilization, and has still struggled with democracy. It's not in the people. But Americans are so far separated from their culture--that is to say, their village won't die of starvation if they indulge in cultural experimentation--they can't even locate the wellspring of democracy in culture and traditions.
It needs to grow over decades organically for the people to get used to the idea and the institutions, for example, like in Hong-Kong. Singapore is another example and they yet don't have completely open democracy.
The ground must be fertile, as they say in allegorical terms, for democracy to take root. You can't impose it and then wish it to work and have it work. You can't throw money at it (as AF has shown us). It's a messy process. Sometimes, like Panama, you have the right accidents happen and it works --but at least then they could rely on the legacy of Marti (as they were part of Columbia during independence from Spain) and they had the US administer the Canal Zone till '00, I believe.
It's not economics--our PPP GDP per capita is about what the U.S. was at in the late 19th century (at which point it had been a successful multi-party democracy for 70-80 years).
That is not a clear cut in Afghanistan. Perhaps the US just invaded because the Russian tried and it was believed that its hub location could enact control on neighboring countries. Terrorism netted the needed excuse, but it continued after Bin Laden was out of the picture.
Many former USSR countries are doing quite well with their new democracies. Consider, for example, that Ukraine had basically as much democratic tradition as Poland had (big parts of it literally being parts of Commonwealth of Poland for centuries), and yet Poland’s democracy has been doing much better.
I agree that culture and traditions matter, but with your examples, you are overstating your case.
Nor does it help the Ukraine. All the industry was destroyed in the last 30 years. And agriculture is not enough: if you seed all available land of Ukraine, it would produce only about $40 bln of agricultural products, while Ukraine yearly imports from abroad are $60 bln. The country is unsustainable, it would eventually collapse. It's not the only country in the world that consumes more than it produces, but other countries have some kind of advantages allowing them to subsist while being netto importers. E.g. USA also consumes more than it produces, but it can freely print world reserve currency and buy whatever it needs. If someone objects, it has most expensive army with bases all over the world to suppress any discontent. Ukraine doesn't have a single possible way out.
Eventually people that have any skills and energy will migrate to Europe/Russia/other countries (I was constantly surprised how many there're Ukrainians working in every part of the world - even the most remote ones), existing population will wither. There's a conspiracy theory that Ukrainian government is afraid to organize population census (the last one was long time ago), because they know that results will be unpleasantly surprising.
Source: I'm a Ukrainian still staying in Ukraine because I believe the above is true. Otherwise I'd move to EU with very little effort or to Russia with no effort at all.
I'm not going to discuss all of your wrong assumptions, just mentioning "closing media". Do you know the narrative those media were spreading? Do you know who is Medvedchuk? These media were pro-russia propagandists.
Am I wrong that all the industry in Ukraine was destroyed (aviation, shipbuilding, cars and trucks, etc)?
Am I wrong that energy consumption in Ukraine is declining (means that industry and/or population are declining)?
Yes you are. You showed (without evidence but let's assume) that $40bn of agricultural exports don't cover the $60 of Ukraine imports. Only 15% of people there work in agriculture. The other 85% of workers are just as capable of creating value for export.
> Am I wrong that all the industry in Ukraine was destroyed
Yes, and it is so obvious a lie that it strains credulity. Even just ignoring the well known mining/iron ore/iron/steel/pipe industry that has at least a dozen well known big companies. Plus of course Ukraine manufactures a lot of other things from cars to armament to confectionary.
And if it came to an export/currency collapse people would and could adapt and buy the local food/cars/trucks (even if they don't have the same quality or variety as foreign goods).
It looks like you know nothing about Ukraine too.
IMO, taking a bit of an environmental hit or trading with Canada is far superior to spending trillions blowing up the middle east and causing more problems than were there to begin with in an already historically unstable region.
The factors are way more complicated then just that.
An authoritarian regime that liberalizes the underlying foundation of the country often creates the stage for a functional democracy. That happened in Germany, South Korea, Singapore, etc. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom
But you can’t go from being a tribal society based on kinship ties and the only rule of law being the decisions of village elders to democracy.
The Kaiserreich had a parliament. Weimar failed in the end and had plenty of problems but still it was a democratic government and that despite major challenges (Civil War, lost World War, bad economy).
And if you are willing to look into the many states and small countries that made up Germany before its unification you have 'democratic' city-states going back to the middle ages. Don't forget that Germany was and is deeply federal (Its official name is 'Federal Republic of Germany' after all).
Even right before the democracy was abolished by the Nazis the largest federal state was governed by the Social Democrats (Prussia).
Hell, our social democrats keep telling everybody that their party was founded on 23 May 1863 even if nobody cares.
Some debates and some representation does not constitute "democratic tradition".
And I am really curious what would constitute a "democratic tradition" in your opinion. By 1945 the German people had been organizing themselves for around a hundred years in different parties, unions, parliaments. They had newspapers discussing everything from politics, culture, society and democracy. They had organized countless nationwide strikes and participated in two revolutions. The first chancelor of Germany after 1945 had been a democratically elected mayor of Cologne for around 15 years. Was part of a political party since 1907.
Maybe look at the Kapp Putsch. Right wing politicians and militias occupied Berlin in 1920. The democratically elected government called for a general strike and for the next couple of days the whole country stood still. No trains. No work in any factory. No news paper. No telephone. In Berlin there was no water. No electricity. Absolutely nothing. This doesn't happen in a nation with an apathetic populace which has no democratic tradition and just wants it's Kaiser back.
Democratic tradition doesn't just consist of having a parliament as the highest authority in your country if you ask me.
Those things are the foundation for what becomes democracy. To use England as the clearest example, Democracy there evolved with feudal aristocrats creating a parliament to have input to the king’s decision making, and from there parliament taking on more and more power and eventually being turned over to popular control through elections.
Germany differs from Afghanistan in having had centuries of experience with bureaucratic society, e.g., implementing the world's first welfare state in the 1870s.
Way to ignore Bactria there, Khwarezmia, Kanishka, Mes Aynak, Mundigak, the Indo-Greeks. Do better. You should be ashamed.
Just like it does with health care... And apparently, it's just as effective in education.
What always astounded me was that even though the faculties are nuanced and respect both sides, the students are just blindly leftist or rightist when they graduate. For instance, teachers at the pro-markets university know that markets have failures so blindly free markets is usually not the answer. But students? Hell no.
So universities are indeed effective at imparting not just tools and teaching people how to learn, but at brainwashing maybe 90% of the students into following the beliefs they teach them. How do you break that? No clue. But I see the same thing with people consuming media, etc. so I guess it's just a human trait.
As a former academic myself, I can confirm that universities are unfortunately good at building cult-like followings - not only cult-like followings, thankfully, but still.
Do you think that this has an impact on the situation in Afghanistan?
I'd say the US elites are still somewhat in denial of what actually happened and that it didn't happen in a vacuum, but was years if not decades in the making. Remember that Bill Barr had the unitary executive theory in mind long before Trump came into power, but previous Republican leadership considered it too radical for the American public to accept.
Those times have changed...
The unitary executive dates back to the Federalists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory#Adopt....
You're invoking an anachronism--it wasn't until the 20th century that we even got the idea of "independent" bureaucrats insulated from accountability to the elected President. George Washington's original cabinet consisted of just four members: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. All of those were plainly intended to be subordinate to Washington as the President.
The same goes to millions of middle class employees of those entities. They might want to teach independent thoughts to their own kids but other than that they have zero incentive to promote independent thoughts to their customers because it's profit and power that feeds their family.
I really don't see an easy way out of this downward spiral.
You are mistaken. Social media and things like youtube, just like elections, provide the appearance of power and choice, but just safely let people to let out pent up emotions. Then they safely contain it without it being spilled to the real world to a certain extent, at the same time give the people who participate in them a certain feeling of "doing something", a fallacy that even I am committing right now while I write this comment down..
As Noam Chomsky said "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum".
We already know that youtube and other media like reddit even HN "strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion", and as you said, they also allow very lively debate withing the rest of the spectrum..
Like January 6th? Safe containment indeed.
> youtube and other media like reddit even HN "strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion"
Which results in an ever increasing number of extremist refugees. The Fediverse appears to be growing consistently and I think the systemic mechanisms that are concentrating extreme viewpoints there should be cause for concern.
On the plus side, if a particularly interesting video is removed from YouTube you can often find it mirrored there.
Also, YouTube (and Google in general) manipulates search results. E.g. in Russia you're fed by force with Navalny's channel. If you block his channel explicitly, YouTube starts to show you one of the thousand clones of it. Or other content with similar views. While content that contradicts the YouTube censorship policy will be well hidden from view.
It's not a freedom of speech.
I understand that US has the strongest propaganda and state of the art brainwashing techniques. So the usual reply is something like: "But it's the absolute truth! Anyone trying to refute it is a bigot!" But I know the only truth: there's no absolute universal truth. Imagine what science would be if it would be disallowed to refute theories?..
US bigotry is something resembling a religion: "We know better how people in country X should live!", "We know better how all the world should view same sex marriage!", "We know better how the country Y should be governed!", etc, etc. But the point is that most of the time people saying this don't know where the country is located, it's culture and traditions, why the people live the way they live, do they like it or not, etc. They just sure that everyone would be happy to eat hamburgers, drink Coca Cola and have Disneylands everywhere. It's such an arrogant dumb view, but it's ingrained in every western person by the best media and propagandists.
This point is about the only bright spot in an otherwise grim perspective. Just about everyone, and that appears to include Putin, wants to do well by their kids education-wise. The rest can fuck off and die, but the self-preservation in the sense of preserving genes by teaching the ability to think critically is important enough that at least there is a chance that spiral will hit a bump here and there.
However, they are also empire builders whose agenda requires weakening the power, wealth and stability of every entity that they consider targets and/or competitor. As someone who lives in one such entity, I consider this threatening.
Not glorious-nuclear-self-destruction dreadful, but still potentially life-threatening.
No, we didn't, we were perpetually militarily engaged in Iraq, at a lower level, between the 1991 war and the 2003 war.
We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either.
> Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars
Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization.
I mean, we never left Germany or S. Korea, so... Playing big brother to Q8? I'm not mad.
Like other countries, we can pick sides and aid whatever side we think has our interest. I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle of "nation-building". Not everyone wants democracy right now. It may come later.
>Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization.
True, but they gave him blanket authorization for use of military force (open ended) rather than a declaration of war), this open-endedness allowed Obama! to use the same AUMF to engage in further conflict.
Grave danger was cited by the President, and concurred in as justifying war by Congress, in both of the long wars commenced under Bush.
> True, but they gave him blanket authorization for use of military force (open ended) rather than a declaration of war)
The Supreme Court has long recognized exercise of Congress’ war powers without magic words as legitimate declarations of war, and also recognized conditional declarations of war (including, again, those without magic words) as declarations of war. Magic words may be relevant to the application of other domestic law (because Congress may have chosen to make them so), but it does not change the fact that any time Congress, with or without magic words, and unconditionally or conditioned on some other fact (including a Presidential determination) “authorizes” war, it is in fact exercising its Constitutional power to declare war. In fact, it first did so in regard to the Congressional authorization for the Quasi-War of 1798-1800, which was the very first Congressional exercise of its power to declare war.
Have you looked up polls of Afghanistan’s citizens on whether they want a democratic election process, whether they preferred life under the Taliban, etc? They overwhelmingly preferred the state of things under the US’s support and overwhelmingly support democracy. They can’t fight for it because they fear being shot or beheaded by Taliban terrorists. To read their lack of resistance as a rejection of democracy is to deny everyday Afghanis their agency just because they want to survive to see tomorrow.
Maybe there was some support for this in some areas of Kabul, but certainly not in the countryside.
That seems very arbitrary. I would say twenty years is not enough, because a longer time period would mean that older, experienced Taliban fighters and organizers would be too old to continue their activities or just dead. It also isn't enough time if we haven't done a good job managing our efforts there, and we needed better leadership and accountability around our efforts to establish the new government and their military (more at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/how-americ...).
I cannot understand why you think 2-5 years is the magic time to judge an effort like this by. Do you think that's true for everything in life? If a company can't IPO in 2 years they should just cut their losses and run?
> Maybe there was some support for this in some areas of Kabul, but certainly not in the countryside.
What's your evidence for this? Every poll I could find on Google suggests there is broad support for democracy in Afghanistan.
If anything, your points here only go to demonstrate how irrelevant the nominal power of congressional authorization is, in the current political climate (and for most of the history of the republic.)
What makes it mostly irrelevant is that almost any representative voting for caution will be tarred with the "soft on America's enemies" brush, marginalized, and quickly removed from office. That's democracy in action, and it has been that way, for the most part, since the founding of the nation.
What kept the USA in Afghanistan, and the USSR before, was a form of sunk cost fallacy (in blood more than dollars), in which nation-building became more of a prayer for a non-catastrophic exit than an arrogant goal of a self-appointed elite.
This short sightedness might cost more in lives globally and money loss from trade and resources being restricted.
Nation-building is hubris. Work with someone local who fits hand-in-glove.
Is the unstable "stability" worth 6T and thousands of soldiers' lives and many tens of thousands traumatized? Not to mention the losses from the locals. What was the human cost of Saddam in power vs the cost after toppling him?
Aside from ethical issues, the inevitable case is what they think is theirs and what you think is yours end up conflicting, which is how that strategy fell apart with the Soviets in Afghanistan. And with the US and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Among other places.
On top of that, "preventing the production of terrorists" (to paraphrase) was a stated goal of Afghanistan and it doesn't seem obvious how it can be fulfilled with either the current outcome or an "invade, accomplish, withdraw" operation unless we intended to just entirely massacre the populace to the point that the nation becomes a giant wildlife reserve.
There are relatively few (if any) cases of forced national reform lasting 40+ years with the intent to have a relatively "free democracy" at the end so I'm also having trouble considering your contention about transformation proven. (Though I definitely concur a single birth to adult score of years seems an unlikely interval for success with half-measures.)
Kosovo? Bosnia?
Let's say something came up in Puerto Rico... and then we have Europe come in and fix things instead of the US, does that seem the way it should work?
By the way Europe is in fact fixing American problems, by dealing with of refugees from american (and russian) wars, at the price of political and cultural turmoil.
It's the same for Russia or Ukraine as it is for Afghanistan or Libya. These people have been under a totally different form of government where they had very little agency. The hubris of thinking, yeah, the CPSU (or Bath, etc.) is dissolved, democracy will take over, it's people's destiny!
When you've known nothing of democracy, it's a foreign concept. You need the culture around democracy to form for it to be successful.
I know the house voted to end them but the Senate didn't act?
The issue there is the massive conflict of interest and legal bribery.
Members of congress are getting obscenely rich from the Military Industrial Complex and their "campaign contributions". Their bank accounts want more wars.
The constitution grants congress the power to declare war, congress being the representatives of the people of the states. It was never intended that a single person, the president, has the authority to launch an offensive war with another country.
I agree with you that the campaigns are financed in the U.S. amounts to legal bribery. Most other civilized countries outlaw or greatly curtail campaign donations from corporations, unions, and trade associations. Many also limit donations to offices you can vote on, subsidize donations with tax credits, limit the lengths of campaigns, and/or publicly fund political parties.
Until we get the big showdown about this in the Supreme Court, both the Executive and Legislative will continue to claim they have ultimate authority here.
Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table.
I'm familiar with how campaign contributions work and the legal regulations involved, including what they're allowed to do - and not do - with the money. How do campaign contributions from military industrial complex firms translate into Congressional members getting obscenely rich?
Every single Congressional member would have been better off buying any number of dozens of various traditional tech stocks than any of the military industrial stocks (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc.).
Amazon/Netflix/Apple/Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Tesla/etc. > Northrop
Cloudflare is up more since its IPO than Boeing is over ~15 years. Watch out for those CDN campaign contributions?
There are two aspects to this.
The first is campaign contributions. Recent US Presidential election campaigns have exceeded a billion dollars. House and Senate races have been millions to hundreds of millions, per election. The people "giving" this money are not doing so out of altruism. It's not secret money under the table, it's all open and disclosed, but nobody thinks it has no effect on behavior. At best the representatives are entirely scrupulous and never allow the money to affect their positions, but then the candidates with pro-corporate positions find it easier to raise money, the money allows them to buy more advertising, and the candidates who want to shovel tax dollars into corporate coffers win more elections.
The second is the revolving door. You go serve some time in Congress, do what the corporations want, and when you retire or fail to win re-election because your constituents got fed up with what you were doing, you have a cushy job paying six, seven, eight figures a year waiting for you after. Or that job goes to a member of your family while you're still in office.
They did not "comply". They came to realize it was better to emulate the US:
> This is not to say that Japan remained fascist (as some left-wing commentators assert). It most obviously and manifestly did not remain fascist. Instead, various leaders who had earlier supported and even participated in fascism decided that liberal democracy was better for the country. One reason they made this decision is that the U.S. had just proven liberal democracy’s economic and military effectiveness by winning WW2. They almost certainly could have restored dictatorship in Japan — the U.S. was clearly willing to tolerate dictatorships among its Cold War allies in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere — but they chose not to. Instead, they drew from a liberal democratic trend that had existed in Japan well before the military takeover of the 1930s.
* https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation...
Both Japan and Germany had liberal democratic histories before they got taken over by fascists, so it wasn't a stretch. Cultures based on clan/kinship tend to have higher corruption and lower stability:
* https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp17-17.html
* https://www.u4.no/publications/the-kinship-in-public-office-...
* https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
You though, but you did not did.
In both prior cases US ran moderately competent occupation government, and by some accounts one better than their own.
The model US followed in Vietnam was not this. Ngo Dinh Diem was a Syngman Rhee 2.0, but even worse. Here, you can say Karzai was Syngman Rhee 3.0.
All shared a history of being overthrown because of progressing nationalist drift within their own power bases.
The only remarkable thing is that we treated Japan so well, considering how its fellow far east countries were treated as client states or worse for so long.
I think it was latent guilt of using the nuke on them.
So they had an industrial base. No so much for (S) Korea and VietNam. They were very agrarian (like Japan before they built up their war machine). So their problem was peasant farmers with no land + a growing population on the brink of starvation.
US advisors made recommendations to alleviate this problem by doing land redistribution for tenant farmers. South VietNam would have none of that. Korea did appease the peasants albeit reluctantly so they avoided the worst.
The US has a pretty good track record when it comes to building insurgencies though, remember that the Taliban were built and trained by ISI and the CIA. Iran had islamic groups that the Shah used to silence opposition forces. There's no way their training and equipment wasn't done in coordination with their US partners given how much of a puppet the Shah was. Or take a look at a lot of the groups that were part of the opposition in Syria.
I wonder if there's any analysis why the US has been so good at building and training insurgency groups, but so bad at making local armies to protect their own territorial borders.
The Gulf War did not take place.
(It was a police action marketed as a war.)
We should open up to voluntarily annexing states like Afghanistan and Puerto Rico instead of continuing to drool over some fuedal age government philosophy. Invite people in. The current system of fight-and-flight is looking a bit dated.
This thinking has undermined our actions in every major war since then, with the exception of GWI. Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out. I'm not sure we should have gone in in the first place, but at least we didn't try to artificially change the government there.
It's disheartening to see the admins of Bush and Obama arrogantly and foolishly pursuing a transformational goal. It does not work.
A nation has to work out its own problems for itself. They have to experience an organic, sometimes violent, process of progression toward democracy for themselves.
Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars and give them sole war-powers with the exception of immediate threats.