Matt Taibbi: We Failed Afghanistan, Not the Other Way Around | Hacker News Reader

Matt Taibbi: We Failed Afghanistan, Not the Other Way Around

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17 pointsrunawaybottle10 comments

It's spot on.

You cannot "reconstruct" a country if you purposefully put people in power who cannot, and will not do that.

Take a look on South Korea after WW2.

US pushed through Lee Syngman because they sought an "easy to work with" candidate, which came out to be a very weak personality who quickly established a dictatorship, and rotted the system in, and out for self preservation.

US made everything to make the New Korea to be unable to defend itself, and be dependent on US for everything. The penance came just 5 years later.

I'd argue you can't reconstruct a country at all.

We did it after ww2 with West Germany and Japan.

Those were previously pretty productive and organized societies before the Allies took over. There was living memory of a functioning society for civilians to return to.

Afghanistan isn't like that. It has been more like a construction than a reconstruction.

please read history, while there were the 160 years of civil war there, they were not a cavemen society you Westerners imply them being.

I didn't say they were cavemen, but they were much closer to a conglomeration than a unified nation with a central government.

They have certainly never had anything close to Japan's or Germany's level of centralization, organization, or stretches of peace.

Japan had just around 40 years since the civil war once they got into another big one.

Germany was the messiest of all European countries even before the war as well...

Your knowledge of history gives your wrong image of things.

And yes, Afghanistan was close to being a centralised nation, with a running government for more time in the 20th century, than it wasn't.

They did far better than German, or Italian kingdoms at least.

Can you please elaborate a bit? Such as, there was universal literacy (including women) and established law system in Afghanistan like it was early-20 century Germany and Japan?

From my knowledge of history, even German, and Japan had no universal literacy, let alone universal women literacy before their troubles started.

Prussia was very literate (and very crazy as well,) but the rest of German states been a mixed bag.

Japan rural population was super illiterate well into pre-war years, to the point of not being able to write its own name (as was required per law.) Meiji started to require use of personal stamps exactly because of that.

>From my knowledge of history, even German, and Japan had no universal literacy, let alone universal women literacy before their troubles started.

Imperial Germany had free and compulsory school, "Volksschule " which was compuslory in Austria in 1840, and in Germany after 1871.[0][1] The Weimar Republic had instituted free and compulsory education for _all_ children, and in general seemed to make education its top priority.[2] For context, England made school compulsory in 1880. I'm open to more information proving me wrong, but I believe by the standard of other European nations Germany was definitely an educated country pre and during world wars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksschule

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/education/Further-education...

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/education/Further-education...

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