Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
Afghanistan does not have an industrial capacity, so anything remotely modern has to be brought in from outside. The US does not speak Afghan languages, most Afghans do not speak the Americans' language, so intermediaries have to be used. The US wanted to encourage independence and autonomy, so accounting was lax.

If you don't want wastage, don't do nation building. If you want to reduce wastage, there are ways of doing so. Either you let them work their way up from a low level, thus working with their own resources supplemented by yours. Or you go full on neocolonialism a la China, where you supply materials and workers, and end up with modern infrastructure. If you're more altruistic than China, then you might go the Soviet route and train up a class that runs the infrastructure. But you have to accept that the most efficient way of avoiding wastage is to retain control of the process. Which goes against liberal democratic ideals.
I don't think that nation building requires wastage. Massive cost with no direct returns on investment yes - but that isn't wastage if the goal is a functioning country. For example, building useful infrastructure is expensive and will only provide future utility. But it isn't wastage. Perhaps knowing that the locals will destroy it before it was built makes it wastage?

I'm not sure that encouraging independence and autonomy requires or benefits from lax accounting when the end result was massive theft and a complete dislocation of the "functioning" of the state from what the actual country can provide. Even directly giving the money to the local warlords would have been better. And when that is the case, the concept is so deeply flawed it should be stopped at that point.

One of the reasons that Afghanistan has reached its current state was the USSR providing training / indoctrination that deposed a society that was slowly modernising in a relatively positive and inclusive way to a Communist state that then proceeded to wreck the place, leading to a take over by religious zealots. I'd not call that "altruistic". Blinkered, perhaps.

I do agree that realistically, if you want something to happen then one has to keep control. That is as true when repainting a house as it is rebuilding a country. Liberal democratic ideals forget that the very liberal democratic ideals are built on a vast number of other structures such as a (mostly) working system of laws and can't just be beamed in - and the fantasy that it is self evidently is the "best" is one of the most corrosive concepts that go around.