Bret Devereaux

But the tension is real! and it comes out clearly when thinking about training local forces. If you want to radically remake a society (say alter its civil & military institutions & rewrite its gender norms), you are going to have to do some imperialist, even colonial things.

My own view is instead that we need to trim back our objectives to things which can be achieved largely through local institutions. That means we can't fix every problem! It places hard limits on what an intervention can achieve and we need to accept those limits.

But in either case, we need to give up the notion of getting maximal solutions out of minimal investment and dislocation. These are trade-off questions and worse yet, ones where 'split the difference' approaches generally fail.

So if full on imperialism, complete with semi-permanent colonial governance is politically unacceptable (and in my view it should be) then you have to accept that only a very limited range of objectives - mostly just picking which pre-existing local elites rule - are possible.

The US tends to imagine that the pre-existing local elites would have support from the people if only the pesky dictators who provide free health care, roads, schools, and medical centers were opposed by American messing about, but not planning to permanently occupy the place.

That is not how I would describe Taliban rule pre-9/11

B. I'm in Nicaragua and the US tends to believe both in Latin America and elsewhere that if only they supported the people who don't have popular support against a regime that does provide those things, the people would rise up. Iran in the 1950s, Cuba, here, etc.

Afghanistan is not Nicaragua. Arming Northern Alliance types against the Taliban is not opposing a "left regime". To the extent that the Taliban had popular support, it was not for economic redistribution or infrastructure investment.