Bret Devereaux

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.

I think we should have left Afghanistan to the Russians and let them bury their heads in the mess for 20 years. I have no illusions that I prefer what Kabul wanted to what a bunch of rural religious extremists wanted.

Pardon, but that kind of moral equivalence, while rhetorically convenient, is also foolish and sophomoric. The Taliban in power were brutal and murderous, not merely corrupt. Even when out of power, in any year Taliban forces were responsible for 70+% of civilian casualties.

I would prefer to have lived in Kabul under the US imposed system, warts and all, to living in a religious dictatorship. But, colonial regimes, per my African history professor, tend to last only 90 years, and in Africa rarely penetrated the hinterlands.

That rule of thumb doesn't seem very useful. All it really tells us is that colonial regimes that exist longer than a century no longer seem to us to be colonial regimes, but just regimes.