Article

2010-12-07 Afghanistan

You Cannot Turn Afghanistan Into Switzerland: Petraeus

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Posted by Fred 2010-12-07 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11128 views ] Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 00:44|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 02:23|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 03:56|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 05:51|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 05:55|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 06:48|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 08:31|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 09:07|| Front Page Top

#9 Lililililililililililililililililililililili

(I'm ululating at CrazyFool's remark)
(or would that be yodeling?)

Posted by ryuge 2010-12-07 13:16|| 2010-12-07 13:16|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 17:19|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2010-12-07 21:00|| Front Page Top

00:05 Mikey Hunt
00:04 anon1
00:00 trailing wife
23:57 trailing wife
23:49 trailing wife
23:45 Fire and Ice
23:43 Skidmark
23:26 tipper
23:16 Fire and Ice
23:15 tipper
23:14 Thing From Snowy Mountain
23:03 trailing wife
22:55 Frank G
22:54 SteveS
22:53 Frank G
22:47 Frank G
22:45 anon1
22:45 Water Modem
22:44 Frank G
22:44 Fire and Ice
22:42 Water Modem
22:42 trailing wife
22:41 Fire and Ice
22:39 gorb