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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (74475)	2/16/2003 2:56:04 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<no line in the budget for aid to Afghanistan> I note that the amounts spent for the "nation-building" projects are 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less than the 17B$ spent on the "regime change" project. That tells me what the relative priority is, of those two projects. Much of what is listed, falls under the category of "crisis management" (averting famine and epidemics), not "nation-building". The U.S. is very very good at crisis management, and very very bad at the long slog needed to get to unglamorous longterm goals. A nation-state has to have territory, territory that it controls. Without that, anything else it does doesn't make it a nation. That means the government has to have an army, and the army has to have most of the armed force inside the nation's boundries. In Afghanistan today, by the above definition, there is no nation. Well, maybe a very small one, the city-state of Kabul. Sort of like, in the early 1400s, the Byzantine Empire had been reduced to the city of Constantinople. If the U.S. had been serious about "nation-building", we would have started by disbanding the warlord militias that control the rest of the country. That would have required about 10 times as many troops as we ever had in the country, and a willingness to take casualties. The schools and the Afghan Army are the main Nation-Building activity on the list. Maybe, at some point, years from now, the army will be strong enough, to be able to expand the territory held by the Kabul government, beyond the capital. Maybe. Instead of making a serious committment to nation-building, we moved on to #2 on Bush's HitList.