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Forcefully reshaping Afghanistan was completely possible, it just required a competent administrator with a deeply seated superiority complex. A hundred years ago every other British colonial administrator would've qualified, the last suitable American I can think of is probably MacArthur.
It would've required something like Highland Clearances: raze all mountain villages and relocate their residents to the Sistan Basin or to the valleys of the major rivers.
We (the Brits) held it for nigh-on 100 years and couldn’t make much headway. Not that we really tried, I suppose, there’s nothing there that anyone wants. We just needed to make sure the Russians weren’t moving through it.
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I think the problem here is that this isn’t the 1940s and you aren’t your grandfather. There’s a reason why 19th and early 20th century Western leaders could change cultures and we can’t. They believed in their own civilization. They hadn’t yet been demoralized into tge pathetic people we are today. They still believed in the rightness of their ideas, their way of life, their culture. As such they’d have no problem in saying “no, you will not rape boys and if we find out you did, we have a gallows waiting.” They had no problem saying “no, you cannot teac( your kids that because it’s morally wrong to believe that.” Today, most people have been given enough sensitivity training that they’d never actually believe that kind of thing.
There are entire chapters in the Qu’ran about war, killing the infidels, etc. there are Hadith’s about the end of days that suggest that the rocks and trees will betray the Jews to slaughter by Muslims. We’ve been taught not to notice this stuff. We’ve been taught to not notice that Muslims treat women pretty badly. Or that being gay is a capital offense in almost all Muslim countries. If we’ve been taught not to notice, let alone criticize bad ideas and practices, the result is inevitable. We can’t say our practice of allowing women to drive cars and speak outside of their own home is better than their treatment of women. We can’t say our tolerance for people of other religions is superior to their theocracy.
Given that, I don’t understand how anyone believes it could have really gone differently if nobody in the position to run the country was willing to impose on them. Creating a culture that would be peaceful and not fall to fundamentalist Islam immediately would have required a colonial government willing to do what is necessary to remake the cultures. They can’t insist that people adopt better farming methods, or more efficient technology. All they can do is hold the country until they leave it.
The things you point to as being superior about western culture are features of modernity, not inherent to the west. The Spanish empire was arguably the most successful western society; it ran on a theocratic ethnic hierarchy. Likewise women being allowed to vote was new in the forties, and not yet universal even in the west.
Men (as a group) hadn't had the right to vote for particularly long by that point either. Pre-21st century western society was obviously not completely equal with regard to gender, but it does seem to have been generally more gender-equal than Muslim countries.
Incidentally, I'm curious that you chose the Spanish empire (rather than British empire, or the USA) as the most successful western society?
An entire hemisphere speaks Spanish. Mexico and South America saw yamnaya expansion level gene replacement. Spain ruled the Atlantic for
300 years(Britain did it for150), elites in Latin America brag about pro-Spanish sentiment and ties to Spain to this day(compare the conspicuous anti-Englishness of Indians). Spanish culture was replicated in Latin America in a way that English culture was replicated in Anglosphere countries with few natives left around.Britain and America are its only real competition, but Spain edges it out.
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