America has spent more rebuilding Afghanistan than it spent rebuilding Europe under the Marshall Plan

[gracchus]

@anon61221983

I’d argue that was in part because they were seeking to impose their will on other people, working with friendly individuals on the ground, for sure, but imposing their world view on how humans should “naturally” progress on people who maybe had different ways of structuring their lives. It’s about the specific historical situation, not anything inherent in Afghan culture. We can possibly see that they were insistent upon independence, rather than just so backwards and tribal, that they couldn’t be tamed.

I see it as a combination: no-one likes to be a colonised people, but the thugs and priests also wanted the independence to maintain the core crappy political-economic culture they thrived under. “Offers” of alternate political-economic cultures were either met with rejections or attempts to alter and corrupt them to resemble the core crappy political-economic culture.