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Some More News: Who to "Blame" for Afghanistan

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The Ghost of a Flea8/31/2021 12:22:48 pm PDT

The nations built into democracies by US intervention—Japan and Germany—were already industrialized democracies that were then hijacked by authoritarian nationalists.

Contrast this with the many post-colonial, pre-industrial or de-industrialized countries in which the US intervened putatively to protect “democracy” but doing so by providing money and arms to existing powerful figures who might preserve the facade of elections but are effectively oligarchs.

Contrast this also with the frequency with which interventions bend toward a profit motive.

If we consider how the money flowed in Afghanistan, which model did we follow?

I’m seeing a lot of broad statements about the qualia of Afghans and thus their inability to do the thing—democracy, fight back, etc—-but the current state of Afghanistan resembles a bunch of other places where US intelligence and foreign policy put their stamp: a center of oligarchs that make money disappear, a hinterland of people that don’t trust anyone from outside because they’ve been the field on which the scrummage of ideology is played, another “military” that can’t function because it’s officers steal the wages and the soldiers aren’t trained.

Either vast chunks of the world are homoousian in their lack of character or having the same conditions imposed on them produces the same result.

And there’s two direct comparables for this phenomenon—the common structural character of nations that survived European colonialism and the common character of the nations that survived Tsarist/Soviet colonialism.