What's modern history? You can't just pick a date and modern history is considered to be during WW II. And the fact remains is I gave you an answer to your question, you did like it and are now wanting to change the discussion. You already stated that nobody really believes in nation building so why does the question need to be evolved.
Lol, are wanting to change the discussion? Do you compartmentalize any conversation, say thats it. don't evolve from there what so ever as if answers in poltics, geopolitics are black and white? That may work for multiple choice, school, or text books...it doesn't reflect much of reality or allow multi faceted perspectives to unfold as well...I'm not sure of you're point. Why does it need to be evolved, I suppose this is a place for self selected people who are looking to understand, to question, to come up with new ideas of why and what. So as you mentioned its important to study japan, germany, korea...modern history I'd say things have taken a turn in the world in terms of what it is built on. No long on land, maybe not even manufacturing are the pivotol points in todays conflicts and science and technology also changes whats valued and pursued too. Its just a totally different climate and situation than those wars and things are done differently too. So s ou said, no one believes in it, perhaps not then and even more less in this day and age. Yet we're still bombing yemen and meeting with Saudi yesterday and of course relationships and compromises will continue to move on. but its always a discussion of why and questioning it as it should be i'd hope for something so costly and ongoing
Should have stay laser focused on Afghan then to distract and spread thinly over to Iraq. They already have significant control over almost half of the provinces. But I don’t think they can plow through an army of 180k easily. I’m guessing peace negotiations and fighting will continue for months or years after the US exit in August.
On the issue of nation building yes it worked in Europe and in parts of Asia following WWII but there are some key differences between those countries and Afghanistan, Iraq or Somalia countries where nation building appears to have failed. Germany and Japan going into WWII were among the most advanced countries in the world. They were already industrialized and well educated. While the war was devastating it's not as though there needed to be a major change in attitude or culture regarding industrialization and the importance of education. Further the people of those countries were used to a functioning government and understood the importance of a civil society. In Japan it was a very homogenous country and the reverence of the Emperor made social control easier. It was less nation building and more nation restoring. We don't have any of those conditions in Afghanistan or some of the other countries we've tried to nation build in. These countries borders are remnants of colonialism that encompass multiple tribal groups without a unifying sense of nationhood. For Afghanistan that has been at war for more than 40 years there isn't much sense of civil society and many parts of the country don't value education other than a very narrow religious education. To build a functioning country required convincing that the nation is more important than the tribe, to have a civil society that respects the rule of law and rights of others, and to value broad based education for all. That's on top of the physical stuff like building functioning infrastructure, housing, manufacturing and commercial developments. The physical stuff is the easy stuff and in a country like Afghanistan that is still billions of dollars requiring decades. All of that said while things look very bad in Afghanistan it's too early yet to say that it's a definitive failure. Why in much of rural Afghanistan the government is in full on retreat the Taliban is also taking major losses and it's not certain they will be able to take the major cities. There are many Afghans that don't want to go back to living under a medieval theocracy and they have been left a lot of weapons and munitions. The US is still going to support them with air strikes and intel. Also while the Afghan regular army isn't very good Afghan special forces that have been trained and conducted joint operations with US forces seem to be very capable.
That's basically right. I think we were successful a few times in the immediate postwar era. Just successful enough to make ourselves believe that it's possible to do. But I don't think we've had any further success in such endeavors in the last 70 years. To our credit, we were already pretty skeptical of the strategy when we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, that skepticism didn't prevail.
The same argument could be made (and had been made) for Iraq. And that one is pretty shaky. For that matter, the US is pretty industrial and educated and we're also backsliding on the whole democracy thing.
In Germany and Japan, we were building them up and wanting them to be strong economic countries while trying to turn them into allies and friends. That was the whole idea behind the Marshall Plan. In Iraq, the original mission was a personal vendetta and then we tried to profit off their oil while shadow-controlling their government. In Afghanistan, our primary interest in rebuilding has just been to stop the Taliban from bothering us. We never Marshall-Planned those countries, partially due to modern selfishness and unwillingness to commit the resources, and partially because modern warfare makes insurgencies very powerful and difficult to deal with. So we never actually reached the point of capitulation like Germany and Japan where they fully accepted defeat and bought into our assistance, and even if they did, we were unlikely to ever provide the kind of assistance necessary as we did in Germany/Japan.
Iraq was far more industrialized than Afghanistan or Somalia but the country was a relic of colonialism with borders drawn by the British. Pre US invasion the civil society of Iraq was Baathism which itself was a reaction to colonialism. It was less adopted out of a sense of nationalism and Iraqi identity but out of authoritarian rule literally enforced at the point the of a gun.
When looking at Afghanistan and Iraq there is a host of consideration as to why they couldn't/didn't turn out like post war West Germany or Japan. The first that springs to mind is the ethnic rivalries and tribal factionalism that comes into play. I read a book on the 1839 British invasion of Afghanistan. A million parallels to the U.S. invasion of 2001. My big take aways.... Afghanistan was known for instability in governance longgg before any Europeans ever stepped foot in that country. Regimes/Dynasties came and went very quickly. The country has been at war almost its entire history. It's at a strategic crossroads in Asia. Different Empires have fought there for forever. The country is badly broken into tribal factions who hate each other. They have incredibly bloody histories. They just happen to hate foreign invaders more. It's almost impossible to coalition build amongst these tribes. Essentially impossible to state build. Afghanistan has basically never had a State and has only ever had peaceful rule for very brief periods in its history. Furthermore, its hard to overemphasize the aversion of the Afghan people to any foreign soldiers in their country. They cannot stand it. That, seemingly, comes before anything else. Obviously, huge differences compared to Germany/Japan but I don't want to write a huge thing so I'll let you imagine what those historical/societal/economic/governance differences are.
Negative, anti-American p*****s, always betting against America and Old Glory. **** them all, every single one of them.
While I agree with a lot of what you say, the fact is that we really have not attempted to nation build in the Middle East. At BEST private businesses hoped to strip the precious minerals abundant in Afghanistan and then leave the territory. We certainly could have rebuilt Iraq. Indeed many Iraqis wanted us to rebuild it.... but we were not willing to spend the time or money to do so, and were fearful of political backlash. We have made minimal effort to understand the culture in Iraq or what the citizens there wanted. My wife is Iraqi, and could tell immediately that we lacked the effort.... and she would tell me about how disappointed the majority of people in Iraq were, and how over time they came to feel betrayed by the USA.
I don't think we did nothing but I agree we certainly didn't do enough and what we did wasn't that good. What made things much worse was as I said the physical stuff was the easy part. We completely failed at building a civil society in either Iraq or Afganistan and in Afghanistan I'm not sure we could.
Great point, we have tried nation building on the cheap and never invested in these countries like we did in the Marshall plan and those countries where war weary and did not have much fight.
