Great Power contentions

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Sadly true. Our one hope of establishing an Afghanistan that might have really worked died on 9 September 2001 -- two days before the attack that triggered the War on Terror.

I do not believe Afghanistan is conquerable without the use of a level of resources that is unsupportable (and/or a methodology that is entirely unethical by modern standards), and establishing the cultural change needed for the alteration of Afghanistan's self alteration into a modern nation-state does not appear to be any more in the offing now than it was at this same juncture in the previous century.

[Montmorency]

Maybe we can support Iran in holding the fort down?

Sadly true. Our one hope of establishing an Afghanistan that might have really worked died on 9 September 2001 -- two days before the attack that triggered the War on Terror.

I do not believe Afghanistan is conquerable without the use of a level of resources that is unsupportable (and/or a methodology that is entirely unethical by modern standards), and establishing the cultural change needed for the alteration of Afghanistan's self alteration into a modern nation-state does not appear to be any more in the offing now than it was at this same juncture in the previous century.

The only greater alteration would be to pull the US out of its re-exported backwash of corruption and civic lassitude. It should be maddening that not only has the United States done more to wreck the world at large than the Soviet Union and China combined, it's oligarchism has blown back to stupefy and immiserate its own society (the latter indignation is what denotes the patriot).

Keep in mind that the US being the #1 international center and abettor of elite graft undermines its own putative national interests. What an ironic country.

20 year anniversary, salud.

[Hooahguy]

Well as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[Montmorency]

Well as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Only the best.

Not all forms of military aid produce negative outcomes. Recent research by international relations scholar, Jessica Trisko Darden suggests U.S. military aid may actually decrease the likelihood of some kinds of state violence.[18] In part, this is because some assistance, such as surface-to-air missiles, is not particularly useful for repressing dissidents. However, Darden found that U.S. economic aid was associated with an increased likelihood in levels of mass killings, state killings, and repression, which supports her theory that recipient governments can harness foreign assistance to increase the coercive capacity of their security sectors regardless of the intended purposes of the aid.[19] She found that the coercive effect of foreign assistance was most likely in countries transitioning from authoritarian to democratic systems, as well as in countries with weak state institutions or a recent history of armed conflict.[20] Drawing on cases like South Korea and El Salvador, Darden concluded that ending foreign aid to dictatorial regimes may force them to become more accountable to their citizens and thereby facilitate democratization.[21]

More investigation of the relationships between all forms of foreign assistance and the maintenance of repressive kleptocratic regimes is needed. Unstable governments prone to deploying state violence against restive populations are susceptible to the strategic corruption that America’s adversaries, chiefly China and Russia, wield to buy international influence. Effective anti-corruption in foreign policy may require the United States to eliminate foreign assistance to authoritarian states and prioritize assistance for accountable governments.

China and Russia are not the only countries to view corruption as a foreign policy tool. Indeed, America’s Central Intelligence Agency has long leveraged corruption as a tool of control and subversion in diverse settings with questionable results. In the early 21st century, the [CIA] provided President Hamid Karzai with pallets of hard currency worth millions to fund a patronage system that corralled Afghanistan’s contentious landscape of warlords.[22] American reliance on warlords and strongmen was vital to its rapid military victory in 2001 and contributed to post-conflict stability by empowering informal institutions and actors, but it contradicted the long-term statebuilding goals of establishing the rule of law and creating a centralized formal government.[23] The kleptocracy the United States helped build in Afghanistan has pillaged foreign aid and security assistance at great cost to U.S. taxpayers ever since.

How could anyone think America could teach Afghanistan to be a modern state. What, were we going to push them to absorb Central Asia by conquest?