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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Nobody discusses it anymore because it 's widely understood to have been a bad decision - there's no friction. The problems of Afghanistan and Iraq didn't disappear from US domestic politics. Obama arguably ran because he was untainted by Iraq, Hillary suffered because her selling point was foreign policy experience ("bad experience" as Trump said) when the entire US populace was angry or tired of dealing with these adventures and the lies their own governments spun about them for no gain.

Remember the GOP foreign policy establishment bashing their heads against Trump and being the ones who were dismissed by their voters? What do you think all of that was about? Both sides had challengers to the establishment on this but the GOP was utterly unable to fend them off because it was seen as the most guilty.

Societies have been forcefully reshaped in the past and they will be in the future. Take Germany or Japan for example.

These were advanced modern nations that had already done most of the work to build state capacity and a national identity (and the Soviets were around to play bad cop). We're talking about Afghanistan.

Did the US even try over there?

Yes. The Afghanistan Papers goes through the omnishambles that was the attempted development. Turns out, ancient problems of legibility and legitimacy don't disappear, even for the most powerful nation on Earth. There's a reason empires just didn't bother trying for effective control of some regions.

The US was dealing with a poor and alien culture with a weak central government and a limited view into things. There's all sorts of weird stories of money or the US military's efforts being wasted because the US government just had limited visibility (especially early on) into Afghanistan and its politics. No amount of money can help if it isn't being directly properly or the new institutions aren't accepted by the people.

We should expect this no? We see all sorts of corrupt countries being showered with oil or aid money and failing - even when they make real efforts - to reach developed world status. This hurts even major nations like Russia with an autochthonous elite that isn't living thousands of miles away. Rampant lying and corruption gave the central government a false view of its military readiness.

There's also probably just unavoidable tradeoffs between beating the Taliban and building a minimally viable state and attempting massive social engineering you wouldn't dare pull on your own people (like having a quota for female legislators). The US was at war with an apparently ineradicable insurgency and was trying to prop up a weak state and give it legitimacy but was also offending people and providing an incentive for corruption and nepotism in the name of feminism. Even America can't do everything at the same time.

(like having a quota for female legislators).

For legislators that’s not possible but our elites have tried to do it to private companies. NASDAQ board diversity quotas was just shot down by a federal appeals court: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-appeals-court-tosses-nasdaq-board-diversity-rules-2024-12-11/

The US was dealing with a poor and alien culture with a weak central government and a limited view into things.

And just to riff off my previous post, the Afghans had within-living-memory ejected the Soviet-backed-then-Soviet-direct government that had attempted to do the same thing.

There are echoes here of the US involvement of Vietnam. The Vietnamese had fought off the Chinese for centuries. Resistance to foreign occupation is a learned skill -- once enough nations have tried and failed to occupy/pacify a country, it becomes harder and harder.

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