AHC: U.S. does much better job rebuilding Afghanistan?

For example, we do have a strong suit with religious liberty, as well as imperfections of course. So, what if we get it about right between Sunnis and Shiites. With the result that a substantial majority of people in each faith tradition have confidence they will be treated fairly?

Or the Joe Biden principles ('08 debate), of no genocide, no attacking your neighbors, a few other similar guidelines, and otherwise pretty early and wide delegation to local authorities. (and like a good poker player, we don't entirely say what these principles are in advance!)

Unannounced inspections of places of detention is probably almost uniquely helpful in building a society which is genuinely democratic. But first, we've got to set aside the idea that we're going to get all this great 'security' data by allowing the abuse of prisoners.

And early on, it was decided that sex between men and adolescent boys was part of the tradition of Afghanistan. Making that initial decision was not the big mistake. Sticking with it, even when U.S. officers and soldiers on the front lines raised real objections, and even when a mother complained to American authorities, that was the big mistake. Such a clumsy implementation of abstract theory, could be written about in a business management book, and you have wonder what other clumsy implementations there have been.

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But if the U.S. does get it right, we maintain a good reputation where we can potentially rather easily play a major role during the Arab Spring. And maybe Syria goes very differently. Potentially huge POD.

And Oh, did I say trade's part of it? Has to be. And good trade deals at that!
 
Preventing the Iraq war would do well in this goal, as much funding and resources was sucked away by Bush since he viewed Iraq as a priority.
 
Given how we've been there a full generation now, it seems such a waste that we didn't focus on educating Afghan children, boys and girls. You want to modernize and Westernize a country, start with the kids. Try and repress a literate, educated population now Islamists, especially if we ensure the women are educated.

We really should have at least cracked down on the very worst of local practices, like the previously mentioned rape of young boys. Learn a lesson from the British, Napier specifically. "It's your custom to rape children? Well its our custom to hang people when they do."
 
Some propositions for a more effektive occupation and modernizaton of Afghanistan:
a) don't rely on democracy before you have an educated middle class able to support it. Prefer a liberal, modern but centralized and appointed government for the first years.
b) educate the children of BOTH genders.
c) enforce women rights with all power (effective way to gain the support of 50% of the population
d) liberalize the secular press, the religion, the sexuality ...
e) build up a laicist state. Exclude priests from government.
f) Pay the officials high enough to counter corruption.
g) help the peasants and disarm the old ruling class with an agrarian reform to gain their support against the Taliban.
h) forbid the burkha, since it's the symbol of women's oppression.

Basically French Revolution 2.0.

We really should have at least cracked down on the very worst of local practices, like the previously mentioned rape of young boys. Learn a lesson from the British, Napier specifically. "It's your custom to rape children? Well its our custom to hang people when they do."

Rape shouldn't be allowed - that's for sure. But cracking down on pederasty that hard before anything else could have the adverse effect that the already homophobic Afghan society would associate crime with homosexuality - so such a move would actually worsen the situation of sexual minorities.

Also, consensual intercourse between men shouldn't be forbidden, for the same reasons.

You want a modern and democratic state - Athens had consensual homosexual relationsships and was a democracy at the same time.
 

Cueg

Banned
Doing anything of noteworthy effectiveness is going to be near impossible with the military-industrial complex alive and well. There's just too much money to be made from not actually "nation building".
 
And while we could potentially have a great, wide-ranging discussion about what to do regarding borderline cases of sexual abuse, these cases are blatant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/w...-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html?_r=0

'In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

'“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.” . . . '
And a U.S. captain and sergeant beat the shit out of one of these warlords. *Actually, I think the captain just pushed the guy to the ground. Rather wished he would have beat the shit out of him. But in either case, instead of being backed up, this captain was relieved of his command.

And that's generally the way it works. Institutions do not want to acknowledge earlier mistakes. And you'd think, well, certainly if the mistake is big enough. But no, it's kind of the opposite. The bigger the mistake, the more the institution does not want to acknowledge it.
 
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Doing anything of noteworthy effectiveness is going to be near impossible with the military-industrial complex alive and well. There's just too much money to be made from not actually "nation building".
And if you're too focused on 'security,' you're not working economic development.
 
If the US puts in more troops during the occupation of Afghanistan and not invade Iraq, they can prevent the resurgence of the Taliban and probably destroy it entirely by 2010. This would go along way in modernizing Afghanistan.
 

jahenders

Banned
In a lot of ways the things that would cause better rebuilding in AFG are similar to in Iraq:

- Don't pretend we're there to let them run things
- Don't set them up as an unfettered democracy when it'll just become a chance for the guys in power to suppress their opponents and still large portions of what ever we invest
- Just write their constitution for them (secular, equal gender, right to vote, checks and balances, etc). When they're ready to work under it then we let them in on portions of power -- until then, we're in charge
- We have them write certain laws as directed -- sex with a minor is a crime, spousal abuse is a crime, supporting terrorists is a crime, etc.
- Initially we have veto power over who they appoint/elect -- no radicals, no former taliban, etc.
- The king is put in as a figure head
- We more directly run police forces and stuff, firing or jailing corrupt police
 

Deleted member 1487

Don't go into Iraq, put all effort into rebuilding Afghanistan instead.
 
g) help the peasants and disarm the old ruling class with an agrarian reform to gain their support against the Taliban.
And whatever the Afghan equivalent of railroads and grain elevators, see that they give peasants a decent deal.

And people can certainly vote on whether to do project A or project B. Feedback might be in four, five, or 6 weeks as the project is either working well or not. And the people might get pretty good at democracy!
 
And I'm not talking about some junior version of democracy. With multiple iterations of decision, feedback, decision, feedback, the Afghanis may even have a thing or two to teach us!
 

Ian_W

Banned
In a lot of ways the things that would cause better rebuilding in AFG are similar to in Iraq:

- Don't pretend we're there to let them run things
- Don't set them up as an unfettered democracy when it'll just become a chance for the guys in power to suppress their opponents and still large portions of what ever we invest
- Just write their constitution for them (secular, equal gender, right to vote, checks and balances, etc). When they're ready to work under it then we let them in on portions of power -- until then, we're in charge
- We have them write certain laws as directed -- sex with a minor is a crime, spousal abuse is a crime, supporting terrorists is a crime, etc.
- Initially we have veto power over who they appoint/elect -- no radicals, no former taliban, etc.
- The king is put in as a figure head
- We more directly run police forces and stuff, firing or jailing corrupt police

Considering this program failed in Appalachia and the old Confederacy when tried as part of Johnson's Great Society, the odds of the USA of the 1990s and early 2000s successfully picking up the White Mans Burden in Afghanistan arent good.
 
So, a U.S. military commander could just ask the people of a village which of two public works projects they want to start first. And U.S. jobs are likely to be plums, so rotate them among different people as possible.

So, what I'm talking about is more of a jazz improv approach to rebuilding, and not the perfect plan from above.

And I agree with the person who says, don't pretend like the Afghanis are in charge, at least not in the beginning and middle stages.
 
If the US puts in more troops during the occupation of Afghanistan and not invade Iraq, they can prevent the resurgence of the Taliban and probably destroy it entirely by 2010. This would go along way in modernizing Afghanistan.

I'd suggest watching the Adam Curtis' documentary Bitter Lake which deals with the occupation of Afghanistan. By 2010, the Taliban of 2001 effectively didn't exist, NATO did a great job of blowing them to smithereens. Problem is they also killed thousands of civilians, add that to rampant corruption from Kabul, and Afghans (like most peoples) not being keen on foriegn troops policing them for a generation. The Taliban name has been taken up by any goatherd with an AK-47 and an axe to grind over his mother being clusterbombed. By 2010 the name effectively meant "I don't like the invaders". Try destroying that.

Thing people forget is the Taliban were the modernisers, the centralisers who battled opium production and official corruption, who wanted a stable, yet certainly Islamist and authoritarian state. The Northern Alliance, the guys who got the goods when the invasion ended, where the localist, traditionalists who were cool with pederasty and opium and beyond their tribal links only cared about the Afghan state when the modernisers (King, Communists, Taliban) pushed too hard on their way of life.

These groups were given power over a state they didn't care about. The rampant corruption didn't come from low wages, its came from trumpeting familial, tribal connections over a state they couldn't give a shit about. Add to that mix, they gained new friends with insane firepower, desperate to kill Taliban and no clue about local culture or customs. There are numerous cases of "hidden Taliban commanders" being fragged only to discover it was a farmer who the informant had a beef with. Which in turns leads to people either with no past connection to the Taliban or even had experience of fighting the Taliban taking up the name because its an anti-American/anti-occupation symbol.
 
This is a fool's errand. The US has limited options at rebuilding Afghanistan, as does any power in the world. Afghanistan is simply too isolated to hope you can change things around.

The best you can hope for is a stable government that can maintain power in most of the country and not allow the country to be used as a terrorist base. Perhaps if the old king returned, the loya jirga was institutionalized as a part of the government, and key members of the northern alliance were kept on board to keep things pro-US.

The best option would likely be to declare victory and return home ASAP in 2002.

There are no good options, only less bad options.
 
The problem with a lot of these proposals is that they seem to suggest a lot of the same strategies that have failed in Afghanistan: both from external and internal attempts at implementation. It really doesn't matter if you don't like Islamic law, tribal politics, and the inherent regionalism of the Afghan nation, there's a reason that these things have endured and that nearly every effort to eradicate or weaken them has failed.

The Coalition in Afghanistan would be hardly the first group to try and break the cycle of violence and tribal warfare by putting Afghan children, including girls in school. This has been attempted as early as the Kingdom of Afghanistan (in other words: this was a reform effort directed by Afghans for the betterment of the Afghan people, not to satisfy an ideological agenda or win popular support) but it ran into the same problem any reform runs into in Afghanistan: there are entrenched regional and tribal elites with deeply traditional views of society who are wary of any infringement on their rights and customs, especially by foreigners.

The best policy would undoubtedly be to try and accommodate these power-brokers and finance gradual, long-term reforms to develop the internal Afghan economy and promote commerce and eventually national education and political centralization.

Inevitably, both ambitious Afghan leaders and foreign military and political officials without an appreciation for Afghan culture and the fragmented nature of its politics attempt to change everything instantly and this unsurprisingly provokes massive resistance. And then others soon make the same mistake as their predecessors.
 
These groups were given power over a state they didn't care about. The rampant corruption didn't come from low wages, its came from trumpeting familial, tribal connections over a state they couldn't give a shit about.
This might actually play to our advantage. Think of the United States during the early days when many people felt more connected to their particular state than to the U.S. as a whole. Or, any of a large number of modern countries where people like their country just fine, but do not feel the need to pick a fight in order to 'prove' that they're better than someone else. So I think, the absence of fervent nationalism might end of being a distinct positive.

The general approach might be that we work from good governance which starts local. Of course probably need some luck along the way, say somewhere in the neighborhood of the 50th percentile.

And to the oft-stated goal of transparency, which does help, if we add rapid-cycle feedback, then we might really be on to something. So, what I have in mind is a much quicker democracy which starts local.
 
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