well, if it’s like iraq, there are plenty of us companies making bank too. building unasked for things with no local oversight, few local workers, and little in the way of financial reporting.
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Up until the Soviet invasion Afghanistan did have a pretty good government which was gradually modernizing the country under King Sahir Shah. After the U.S. defeated the Taliban the Loya Jurga was set to re-establish the monarchy but it was vetoed by the Bush administration.
It’s long history as a corridor between two powerful regions of the world, which is probably the reason for the perceived instability.
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Although local Afghani corruption and malfeasance are an issue, I would be entirely unsurprised to discover that the money wasted by the locals is massively outweighed by the corruption undertaken by KBR/Halliburton/etc.
There’s a difference between “spent X dollars paying locals to fix things” and “paid US companies insanely inflated amounts in order to run the commissary for the occupation force”.
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We didn’t have a plan. We had a (metaphorical) hard-on that would not be denied.
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Agreed. I was joking about Stalin saving the U.S. a few dollars, but the Marshall Plan was also meant to secure Western Europe against Soviet incursions (not necessarily military ones) and was never intended to help rebuild countries under Soviet control even if Stalin would have allowed it.
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It’s not called “the graveyard of empires” for nothing. In that way, the stubbornly dysfunctional political-economic culture has served them well against a wide variety of invaders and would-be colonisers.
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Sure… but the offer was made, just with strings that they were fully aware that Stalin would not accept. There was certainly paranoia to go around with regards to the situation. But the mutual paranoia pushed the world into the Cold War.
And let’s not forget that the SU and their newly won buffer zone were in just as much of a mess as Western Europe, a fact which Stalin employed to stellar effect to dominate the Eastern Bloc.
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And how much of that directly stems from British machinations in the place?
The “Great Game” between the British and Russians started in the early 19th century. The tribal warlords and the priests and the crap-shoot monarchs were there for centuries if not millennia before that, and are there to this day.
That’s not to deny the destructive contributions of colonialism and imperialism to the culture, but to point out that the core dysfunctional political-economic culture pre-dated and outlasted the machinations of the Americans, the Soviets, the British and Russians, and countless other interlopers.
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To be fair, it had many long dysfunctional periods before the British got there, and was no model of good governance when the British arrived (at which point imperialist Georgia had propped up a government there). I don’t think this is due to the character of the Afghans, so much as their position as a point where many and various more powerful imperialist neighbors were endlessly intent to invade and set them up as a buffer zone against some other enemy.
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I think you’re assuming that same dysfunction across time, when it’s likely the result of specific kinds of dysfunction, caused by whatever was going on at a specific time.
Right. It’s related to specific historical events, rather than anything internal to Afghanis - noting also that who is Afghani changed over time as people moved through the region, some staying and helping to change the culture.
Honestly, I’ll be blunt here and say that the culture argument is just the new race argument, prettified up. It assumes that there is some eternal or at least core Afghan culture that existed unmolested historically, rather than changing over time with new people and new circumstances.
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The same basic dysfunctional political-economic culture, yes. Political and economic life under local tribal headmen and priests and the occasional absolute monarch is pretty miserable, whatever titles they style themselves with and whatever religion/ideology they’re using to justify the institutionalised sexism, bigotry, corruption, thievery and thuggery that keeps them in power. The core dysfunction isn’t unique to Afghanistan or a product of some flaw in the national character or ethnicity or race, but it has persisted there to a degree that it hasn’t in other regions of the world.
I guess I just don’t buy the whole notion that there is some core political economic system that somehow defies other historical forces or is somehow immune to them? I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree.
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I’m not claiming that the political-economic culture wasn’t impacted or slightly altered by outside forces, but my point is that the rotten core has persisted.
Boiled down even further, that rotten core is just a flavour of the feudal phase that Marx described in his historical analysis. Marx believed, based on the experience of Europe, that historical forces could overcome that political-economic system/culture and progress through his later stages to the Communist paradise. Both his Soviet adherents and his neoCon opponents later found that, at least in Afghanistan, that core dysfunctional political-economic phase was indeed somehow immune to those forces.
Marx being Marx, the analysis is a bit reductionist while also being true (the same can’t be said for his prescriptions). In the end, my view of the political-economic culture supports my contention that we should stop meddling militarily and politically in that region.
Can we get around to fixing Murica, again.
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It wasn’t unilaterally Stalin and he wasn’t wrong that the Marshall Plan was in part designed to blunt Soviet influence in Europe. The Soviets were invited, but the Americans offered conditions they knew were likely to be rejected, such as giving the US a lot of control over how aid would be spent. Plus, the Republican controlled Congress of the time would not have approved of billions of dollars going to communists, even if Stalin agreed to US conditions.
I wouldn’t contrast the Marshall Plan too sharply with Afghanistan. The Marshall Plan was still a loan that had to be paid back, required purchasing US goods with the money, and came with many American business executives to oversee its implementation. Not only that, but this money was given to a business/political class that had very profitably collaborated with the Axis. Even the democracies in Europe had restrictions placed on them (like Afghanistan) to ensure people wouldn’t elect the communists.
And this was a huge problem with Marx’s work (as great and important as it is). He was still somewhat hamstrung a bit in teleology, I think, and in sticking with the notion that the developments in Europe were universally applicable and represented the inherent human mode of progress. Let’s not forget his belief in the “asiatic” mode of production, as something of an aberation rather than an example of human variability of social structures:
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.
No arguing there. Although, we can perhaps expand that to include the rest of the world, maybe? 
Indeed. Apparently, we need to start with water pipes.
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Is there an echo in here?
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I guess I should have made it clearer that the comment about Stalin was a joke.
I agree about not contrasting the Marshall Plan with Afghanistan too sharply. I think @doctorow’s point in framing things this way was to give conservatives, who often only think in terms of dollars, a well-deserved poke in the eye.
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