Culture is fractal. For the first division, Northern Africa and subsaharan Africa are very different entities with very different histories. Northern Africa has been part of the great Roman and Muslim empires and has long traditions of law, trade, and government on a large scale. This does not mean it is necessarily western or compatible with westernism. But the first step to wisdom is to recognize the quality of the clay we work with (perhaps the second step is to leave the goddamn clay alone).

If the Western powers wanted to make a difference in many of these countries, they could try to broker deals to decentralize the governments and give ethnic regions large amounts of autonomy, much like the Americans have done for the Kurds in Iraq. Afghanistan should be at least two states, not one, and Americans might have to recognize that the Taliban is the popular representative of the national will of the Pashtun people in the south. The problem with SS Africa vs. the Middle East is that the African countries, having no history of large-scale states before the Europeans came, have so many national divisions that it becomes impractical. So I don't have answers to everything. Perhaps city-states?

I would note that the popular revolutions in North Africa don't appear to be doing so good by the welfare of the people. I enjoyed this article in the Telegraph - "The Arab Spring has failed because constitutional democracy needs nation-states"[1]

> "what should we be telling poor nations in Africa or the Middle East to be striving towards, if not economic growth, democracy and respect for human rights?"

Yes you are a good American that believes in the American ideals. So much destruction is done trying to impose them on others, though. At some point we need to make peace with the fact that not every country can become an America within a decade. And what happens when the people we are trying to bring to the American way of life don't want to be American?

[1] http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100232225/her...