@Glaurung’s right, but I don’t think it’s even a feature of colonialism, actually. India was a colony and, yeah, it has problems but it is working. Botswana and Kenya were colonies and they are, by all accounts, perfectly okay places to live and downright wonderful compared to the African mean.
Not to defend colonialism, of course—it ranged all the way from very bad (India) to Holocaust (Congo Free State, Jesus Christ Congo Free State)—but countries do bounce back. What’s harder to bounce back is what America did back in the fifties and sixties. See, most of the developing world was doing some sort of socialism. Not the fire-and-thunder glory to the Proleteriat kind you’d get in the Soviet Union but the much, much softer sort that’s a natural fit for a closely-knit developing country. This would have made things develop nicely—consider the Bitter Lake documentary and what the Afghanistan it shows in the beginning was like.
Then America shows up and, well, better dead than red, don’tchaknow, and so they decided that the socialists had to go. To do this, first, they made a deal with Saudi Arabia (a deal they still hold to) where they were given protection which they use, again, to this day to spread a benighted, horrifying, twisted version of Islam that’d strike the Mu’tazila school as unforgivably backwards in the eight goddamn century. They also shot as many of the socialists as they could and gave guns and gear and money to the lunatic fringe.
Imagine, if you will, the worst possible group in America. I’m sure you all have a favorite one. Someone dangerous and crazy and foul. Now imagine that some sort of extraterrestrial force[1] shows up and starts giving them support and intel (you can see a lot from a starship it turns out), and these crazy alien weapons in unlimited numbers.
[1] Since it needs to be a vastly bigger power.
How long d’you think America would last?
The current chaos and despair in the Middle East is largely the result of that. It’s also why Russia’s so leery of America and anything to do with America. A significant amount of Russians think you’d like to do much the same to them and they really don’t like the notion.
Actually the Soviets invaded because they were invited, and they were invited because the local semi-skimmed socialist regime was terrified of the Taliban (rightly) and the Taliban were so terrified because they were engineered to bleed the Soviets. The whole country was a trap. The geopolitical engineers who dreamed that one up didn’t seem to give much of a damn what happened to the country afterwards.
I maintain that merely physical devastation is much easier to fix than damage to the social fabric, to the bonds of trust, and to the necessary educated classes. Vietnam was incredibly damaged in the war, but by all accounts they are managing fine. Not perfectly but way better than Afghanistan. About as well as Moldova, in fact, which never had to go and fight and defeat the United States of America.
