This all comes via Little Miss Whatsherface.
Kenneth Anderson writing over at The Volokh Conspiracy says:
It’s heartbreaking, if you’ve spent a lot of time and energy over years of your life, figuring out how to deal with the local village elders and try and start development projects and improve governance and send Afghan girls to school, to realize that the institutions that one believes one has started and got off the ground are far more likely to blow away like a Potemkin village. You have these hard-won skills and these small, on the ground achievements, and it looks like maybe you’ve started something that might someday bear fruit. You’ve actually done remarkable things, by any ordinary measure. But then it doesn’t bear fruit, because it isn’t rooted, not culturally or institutionally, and the belief that it will have a life after your funding is gone is illusion.
But it’s not an unusual story, if one looks beyond Afghanistan and indeed beyond war. It’s actually the oldest story in the world in development work. In development, we believe we need to develop institutional governance capacities so that the efforts that shelter and take root under those institutions will not be in vain. No doubt that’s true. But unfortunately we don’t have a clue how to do that — and even less of a clue how to do that in war.
I highly recommend that you go read that whole quote. Because if this is broadening feeling among Conservatives; we could be looking at a total change in attitude among the right.
Mark Steyn over at National Review puts it in more plain terms:
Before I got into the Derb/Andy discussion, I was reading an obituary in The Daily Telegraph of Anthony Brooke, former Rajah Muda of Sarawak, whose family reigned over much of the Borneo jungle for over a century until 1946, when the kingdom lost its independence and was formally incorporated into the British Empire. As often with flotsam and jetsam (Flintstone and Jetson?) from the imperial byways, you’re struck by how much London accomplished with so little. By contrast, we’ve spent a fortune in Afghanistan and have nothing to show for it.
I think the difference is this: When America goes into Afghanistan, it doesn’t think it’s prosecuting American interests. Quite the opposite: Regardless of whether it’s officially UN- or Nato-sanctioned, America goes in as the expeditionary force of “world opinion” or “the global commons”. It doesn’t believe it has a national interest in Afghanistan, and indeed assumes that it would be a kind of transnational faux pas to be seen to have one, so it’s hardly surprising that the “nation” it winds up “building” doesn’t look much like anywhere any American would want to have anything to do with. Even nation-building requires the builder to build it in what he perceives as his national interest – as the British did in India and the Americans in post-war Japan. If you have disinterested, transnational nation-building, you wind up as we have in Kabul.
To go back to Sarawak, it was ceded to His Britannic Majesty in 1946 and became independent in 1963, when it joined the new Federation of Malaysia: Seventeen years from colony to statehood – versus a decade spent presiding over Take Your Catamite To Work Day in Kandahar. And, as a New Jersey reader wrote to me the other day, “Does anybody really think we’re leaving anytime soon?” In Afghanistan and elsewhere, transnational nation-building is like a mangled Hotel California: We never seriously check in, and yet we never leave.
Now, if I were a rabid Ron Paul or Pat Buchanan type; I would say something to the effect of, “See? Now that the Neo-Conservatives are not controlling the war, they want to stop it!” Well, rest assured I am not a rabid anything at all. I think that it is encouraging to see that the Conservative Blogosphere is finally starting to figure out, what the rest of the America already knows; that we went into Afghanistan to hunt down, and capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and destroy Al-Qaeda. Now that has become like the secondary mission and defeating the Taliban and setting up Government there is now this goal, which is essentially “Nation Building.” Something that never works, ever. Especially in the middle east, where some, if not all, of the Governments are inherently corrupt.
Either way, it is good to now see writers question the very thing, that back in 2003, they were mindlessly cheerleading.