In a plot twist which should surprise approximately no one, it seems that the August presidential election in Afghanistan was not entirely on the up-and-up. It’s not that the United States is particularly keen to create a warlord-ruled narco-“state” in perpetual war and essentially ungovernable…it’s more just that nations with no literacy, centralized power, or democratic tradition probably aren’t reasonable places to expect elections which are clean, or produce good governance. If someone thinks that holding some elections will produce a Jeffersonian paradise in the Hindu Kush, they are probably not to be taken seriously.
It seems like a fundamental issue w/ nation-building is that it is by default taking place in terrible places under terrible conditions and virtually guaranteed to result in poor outcomes. The factors that augured for the success of the American market-democratic revolution were, most notably, already-functioning markets and democracy spanning the territory. While not the case in, say, Germany and Japan after WWII, there certainly existed the institutional memory (and in many cases existing institutions and infrastructure). On the other hand, there are many Afghans who not only don’t really understand democracy or market capitalism, but have never even heard of the country of Afghanistan or grasp the underlying concept of the nation-state. And it’s hard to blame them! The nation-state is pretty complex and built on a lot of things, but primarily institutions and traditions that Afghanistan lacks.
All things considered, it might be a bad idea to stake our national prestige on something so, for lack of a better word, hard.