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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

That is largely irrelevant, they weren't in control of their own destiny at that point. What we learned in the 50s/60s was that the US leadership in the 40s/50s had a really good idea of how to build a country up and score diplomatic wins. They did amazing things in Japan and Germany.

Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.

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As much as I lament the quality of leadership at the moment (and not just in the US) I am not sure that we can equate Afghanistan with Germany.

It is one thing to denazify a "modern western country" that shares most of your values, culture and religion, and that has had institutions for some time. It is another thing altogether to pull off the deal in a country that has never had a working civil society, civil institions, education, etc. Especially if you do not share it's culture or religion, and there is a part of the country that is still actively engaged in a military campaign to obstruct you.

Not saying that it couldn't be done, or that mistakes weren't made. Just that you can't compare the two like that.

The US totally blew it in Afghanistan and its well-documented how most of the initiatives there failed due to corruption and mismanagement.

The underlying theory that the GP is getting at is that Japan and Germany were easy to rebuild because they had existing institutions and a society that trusted institutions. The idea is that it is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy; germany and Japan will "remember" how to be civilized, but under different leadership, Afghanistan and Iraq cannot revert to that.

It leans heavily on assumptions about countries and institutions.

It's true to an extent, but its not what happened in Afghanistan.

I don't doubt that, I was just explaining the argument. It has been recently popularized in tech circles by a viral appearance by professor Sarah Paine on the Dwarkesh podcast.

I am fully willing to believe that the US royally fucked up the rebuild of Afghanistan.

That could explain the success of rebuilding Germany, as it shared a lot culturally with the US, but what about Japan? Japan was, and to a large extent still is, a very alien culture, and yet the US rebuilt it extremely effectively.

> Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.

Both Japan and Germany had some semblance of democratic institutions, but they were taken over by authoritarians, often using violence:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_in_interwar_Japan

Iraq had some history, pre-Sadam, and that seems to be returning:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...

Afghanistan has had little of it in the last few decades (since at least the Soviets rolled in), and much less in the more rural regions.

There's a difference between rebuilding institutions and creating (perhaps from scratch) a civil society.

Afg/Iraq became places to funnel money to friends in security contracting.

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