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| Afghanistan |
| You Cannot Turn Afghanistan Into Switzerland: Petraeus |
| 2010-12-07 |
| [Tolo News] Gen. David Petraeus recently told ABC that Afghanistan cannot be turned into Switzerland in a decade or less The Commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus in a recent interview with ABC's "Good Morning America", said that corruption had been a part of Afghanistan's history and culture since the country has existed. Discussing corrpution within the Afghan government, Gen. Petraeus said no one has accused Karzai of enriching himslef, but those around him have been alleged for corruption. "But again, this is Afghanistan. And again, you're not going to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in a decade or less," he told ABC. On governance legitimacy in Afghanistan, the general said: "The question is really whether, over time governance can be seen by the people as being sufficiently legitimate to gain their support." The interview with ABC is done after the recent disclosures by the WikiLeaks questioned President Karzai's US-backed government's ability to connect with the people if his key officials commit corruption. Gen. Petareus also denied that he had warned to resign after the Afghanistan's Caped President slammed US forces' night raids in an exclusive interview with the Washington Post. He said he has a good relationship with the Afghanistan's Caped President, adding that he had sat down with him after the Washigton Post interview, and was reassured. Gen. Petraeus commented that he is a military commander and Karzai is the leader of a sovereign country, having a political foundation to maintain. "And we do need occasionally, I think, to walk a mile or a kilometer in his shoes and in these mountains to understand the challenge that he has," he said. |
| Posted by:Fred |
#11 Harry Lime: Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly. |
| Posted by: Eric Jablow 2010-12-07 21:00 |
| #10 Switzerland is an object lesson in how to make a geographically fragmented multi-ethnic state work. All adult males armed, weak central government, all important decisions by referendum (jirga). On the downside it has had regular outbreaks of ethnic/religous/linguistic fighting over the last 500 years, more than any other European state. Rather a good model for Afghanistan I think. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2010-12-07 17:19 |
| #9 Lililililililililililililililililililililili (I'm ululating at CrazyFool's remark) (or would that be yodeling?) |
| Posted by: ryuge 2010-12-07 13:16 |
| #8 In other words, Ann Coulter was right when she said: "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2010-12-07 09:07 |
| #7 I am of the mind that the way to build a nation from a chaotic pile of crap like Afghanistan, is to do something that in a civilized nation is evil and abhorrent, but might be just the thing to restore order and prosperity. Go authoritarian on them. MacArthur did a wonderful job in restoring Japan, because he acted as an intelligent dictator, not working for his own behalf, but for the Japanese people. And that is all the difference in the world. Right at the start, we should have dispensed with any politically correct "sensitivity" to Afghan "culture and traditions", both of which are worthless and decadent. Instead, our attitude should have been to wipe the slate clean and create a new Afghanistan based on pragmatism. While actively fighting both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, we should have: Built an enormous boarding school in Kabul, in the middle of a safe military garrison. Then round up every orphan and upper class child in the country and set them to have a modern, western education by American military teachers, under strict discipline and ethical training. Entirely secular, no religion at all. The purpose of this is to raise and train them to be a new generation of government, with no connection at all to any existing power structure. Second, because of the uniquely tiny Afghan wage, we could have literally hired every unemployed Afghan male in the southern half of the country to work on giant national infrastructure projects involving lots of manual labor. And this would cost just $1B a year in wages. Peanuts. They would do a massive improvement of farmland, rebuild entire towns, dig canal systems and water projects, plant both natural and commercial forests, set up agricultural co-ops, etc. Millions of men productively employed, producing infrastructure that will eventually generate jobs and prosperity. The rural caretaker governments should be entirely female, and any male with no visible means of support would be detained. All women would be required to take self-defense and paramilitary training, along with basic literacy schooling. While at first this would of course all have to happen at the barrel of a gun, the end result, even after a decade, would be to create a future for Afghanistan, not just more chaos and misery, as things are now. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2010-12-07 08:31 |
| #6 #5 First step is to keep Saudi Arabian (and Iranian)influence(Taliban) out of Afghanistan as you see what is has done to Pakistan(Taliban/Le T etc)! Posted by: PaulD As is now taking place once again in Iraq. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2010-12-07 06:48 |
| #5 First step is to keep Saudi Arabian influence(Taliban) out of Afghanistan as you see what is has done to Pakistan(Taliban/Le T etc)! |
| Posted by: PaulD 2010-12-07 05:55 |
| #4 It will take three generations to turn that country into anything resembling what we call a "nation state". Well, we did take a state with a couple hundred years of militaristic social history and altered their behavior to something much less aggressive. Of course we bombed the hell out it and then removed the biggest trouble spot out of it, Prussia, to let someone just as nasty ethnically cleanse it. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2010-12-07 05:51 |
| #3 Gorb, maybe you can turn Switzerland into Afghanistan. Seems Swiss have no inclination in that regard. Not the politicos, but people in general. They have a reasonably unblurred concept of what it means to be a Swiss and the concepts related to Afghanistan are very far from it. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2010-12-07 03:56 |
| #2 It will take three generations to turn that country into anything resembling what we call a "nation state". We are about halfway through the first generation. How are they doing in school? The first step is building a literate population. That generation will build infrastructure that the second generation will grow up with as their sense of "normal". Not until the third generation will there be any sense of Afghan and not tribal identity. You need a national communications infrastructure, you need to teach the kids in a common language across the nation and give them some common culture (tv, radio, newspapers, etc. in that common language). You need to get them mobile and moving around mixing together. What is now a two day trip on a donkey should be a few hours in a car over hard, smooth roads. Once they can read, write, and have all grown up with their version of Gilligan's Island, they will all have more of a common identity. |
| Posted by: crosspatch 2010-12-07 02:23 |
| #1 Well, if you can't turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in a decade or less, maybe you can turn Switzerland into Afghanistan. |
| Posted by: gorb 2010-12-07 00:44 |