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.
This point being raised, it is time for the US to spend money on education to support its own democracy.