> useless goal
Is bringing peace, civil rights, and good governance to a corrupt, poor, and violent country useless? (Obviously, we ended up failing in large part.)
Is bringing peace, civil rights, and good governance to a corrupt, poor, and violent country useless? (Obviously, we ended up failing in large part.)
Dropping bombs on a country rarely makes it less prone to conflict unless you intend to occupy it, it just gives more recruiting material to the "violent" radicals.
If "our" means the US and it's people as a collective, then it really seems clear that it wasn't in our collective economic interests either. If our means military contractors, then yes they made out very well.
But yes, "our" in this case was perhaps a poor choice of words to refer to the interests of, for lack of a better term, the ruling class, whose interests do not align with the vast majority of the country.
“God has promised us victory, and Bush has promised us defeat. We’ll see which promise is more truthful,”
- Mullah Omar.
Afghanistan isn't a nation. And you can't externally force people to believe they're part of a nation.
Either they do, in which case they're willing to accept sacrifices for the greater good of their fellow citizens, or they aren't.
It's a bit like dieting. You take someone who has been chubby their entire life, put them through a bootcamp, and then look at their weight 5 years later. The stats are not looking good in those cases, and I think they largely reflect our efforts in up-leveling the political landscape in historically corrupt countries.
I am not saying that we shouldn't keep trying. But I think we should internalize that the chances of success are slim, and then make that a part of our upfront decisioning process on budget, casualties, political cost, etc.