Why America keeps building corrupt client states
economist.com
economist.com
And it applies domestically as well. I would argue that, e.g. American education system is one huge corrupt client state and you can't even withdraw from that one and leave it to random mujahideen to run.
Thought experiment:
What if you just accepted this and went all-in on it, with a dash of MMT and tech, as follows...
Give every Afghan a smartphone.
Lock it way down. Provide a social networking platform that you can monitor. Include a "Fed.ly" banking app. You can control account balances.
Also build stores that accept Fedbucks, to ensure they have value. Basically, Fedbucks would be backed by food, and stuff from China.
Next, require some time consuming activity of Afghans, which is not too obnoxious, but which can't be faked. It needs to produce trustworthy proof-of-work.
For example, it could be like Pokemon Go, with GPS trajectories being proof of work. Or CAPTCHAs. Or taking photographs or videos of different places. Or any combination of these activities. Actually, if you do the GPS waypoint thing, you could have them carry passengers while they're at it.
(You could also imagine using Jira tickets for this, but the interface is a little too clunky.)
Then, on receipt of proof-of-work, deposit money into the accounts.
People will be too busy with these activities to fight you. That activity -- which provides them with food and flip-flops -- will be much easier than fighting. And it will also be easier than whatever they had done before to earn a living. So they will do it.
And if ever you start to see resistance, just increase the wages. Eventually people will comply.
In a way, this was the model behind the Afghan Army. It was UBI in exchange for bullshit. But it kept those men out of trouble, so long as the US was paying.
My proposal is that this model be rolled out, indefinitely, across the entire country, and made attractive enough that even members of the Taliban will do it.
If you insist that this system actually produce economic output, you could organize activities in support of mining or other sectors.
The key is that it has to be much more profitable for an individual to play along, than either to grow poppies, or to fight back.
If you hype it properly, you might even be able to fund it with Softbank money.
In the medium to long term, this would only make education more important, especially for women and girls.
Maybe the FedApp could incorporate something like DuoLingo, again incentivized with Fedbucks. People have a way of learning quickly, when they have an incentive.
This would all be a lot more defensible than the Xinjiang method. It's like this: When the Ottoman sultan wanted to neutralize a nephew, he wouldn't throw him in prison; he'd put him in the harem. Instead of a vast open-air prison, this would be a vast open-air harem. (Or work camp? Unclear which.)
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It is interesting though, this idea that illiteracy can actually be a defense against state coercion/seduction. It's like playing the Chicken game with no brakes: "You have to let me win, because I can't stop."
Proposing to destroy your currency to redistibute wealth from your citizens to another country's citizens is a profound failure to understand the incentives that policy makers face
Who do you think when you read this definition?
Is it really that miraculous, that politicians and secret services expect the same behaviour and control interfaces from the puppets they install? They go for what they know and what they know results into always the same outcome. If they do not obey there masters, they crackt he financial whip.
Imagine, if the afghans voted for swiss style direct-democracy, with every Kanton a small country. No control interface, but - oh sweet irony, a government model proofen to work in a mountainous region, famous for its mercenaries throughout Europe.
PS: Swiss had the last county to ratify womans voting rights in the 1990s, what is it with mountains that makes some men go macho.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
I remember reading a hypothesis on this phenomenon in Steven Pinker's "The better angels of our nature". If memory serves, it was because mountain societies, like that of the appalachians, tended to be naturally more honor-based. So keeping one's family's reputation was very important. This resulted in more conservative societies.
I'm definitely not making justice to the argument, but I found it interesting. Can recommend the book for a delve on this.
It's easy to solve this problem: use real money and the ability to destroy by waging wars disappears.
The UK and EU are also corrupt client states - or kingdoms or unions, as the case may be - whose elites benefit from that corruption. That's why it continues to go on.