The cost in time and effort would have been astronomical, and it would have precluded the establishment of an Afghani-led democratic state. The United States would have to build an administrative state from the ground up, with American oversight and enforcement at incredibly granular levels of government, all backed by an American military with the authority to pass down summary judgement. You would need to build out a rural economy from scratch, dismantle and replace systems of patronage, and integrate the country in a way which it has never been integrated before.

For every colonial success story, there are dozens of failures, and they had the luxury of employing brutal tactics that would be completely unacceptable today.

Over 50% of the Afghan population are illiterates[1] and an even larger share are devout, conservative muslims. The country also happens to be piss poor, with virtually no economy of note and not even much fertile land. Like I've explained to you when we had this discussion weeks ago, the aggregate value of all of Afghanistan's natural resources, particularly rare earths, would stand at something like $14k per capita. Once. Before mining costs. Before the profit margins for the companies who do the mining.

It really baffles me that you think it would be possible to achieve "great improvements" in economic or social terms in such a country. When it comes to nation building, Afghanistan is one of the most hopeless places on the entire planet.

Perhaps it would have been possible if the U.S. government had stayed in Afghanistan for 50 years and been willing to funnel something like 10-20% of the total wealth of the American people into this effort. ($12 to 25 trillion!)
No amount of investment which comes anywhere close to being realistic would have come anywhere near the amount needed for such a project to succeed.




[1] https://uil.unesco.org/interview-literacy-rate-afghanistan-increased-43-cent

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 1 2021 12:54pm

afghanistan only exists on paper and afghans respect nothing except their own blood, family, tribe

they are 10 generations away from a modern society if you would start a rebuild right now

you will have more luck teaching a fucking penguin how to fly

Biden be like
>the mission is Afghanistan was a success!!
>the mission in Afghanistan is Trumps fault!1 REEE

Time to trade rice and beans for those black hawks and night vision goggles capitalism stonks

This post was edited by addone on Sep 1 2021 04:32pm

lmao they reallie did parade him up there to say that verbatim. pathetic

You mean like, evacuation was mostly successful and a lot what went wrong started with Trump? How is that not true.?

Mother of slain soldier banned from twitter. The twitter google facebook propaganda mafia deserves justice in fire and blood. Retake the truth.

This. We can't even run our OWN country properly so asking us to rebuild Afghanistan to be the Muslim version of Israel is an insane ask.



She reminds me Cindy Sheehan.

biden needs to go. six feet under preferably.