Germany and Japan also faced extensive campaigns of cultural reprogramming. Campaigns that already had the foundations of success because both countries were urbanized and covered in mass media. In Afghanistan this was fundamentally impossible because much of the country follows ancient, tribal ways of life that the occupying forces never fully understood or appreciated. This isn’t to say it was easy to rebuild and pacify Germany and Japan—Japan in particular required a very sensitive balance that was probably Douglas MacArthur’s crowning achievement—but urbanized populations that have already been brainwashed by mass media to follow one ideology can easily be reprogrammed by the same mass media to follow a different ideology.
It probably also helped that both countries were so thoroughly devastated that their own “might makes right” ideologies had been clearly discredited by events. You can’t really claim to have racial or spiritual supremacy over your enemies when your enemies have reduced your cities to rubble, driven your people before their armies in vast refugee columns, and occupied your cities with soldiers. Obviously if you take this too far you run the risk of revanchism, so there’s another balance to be struck between domination and mercy.
Another big difference is that both Germany and Japan were accustomed to authoritarianism. Germans and Japanese were very governable peoples, and still are to some extent. The people of rural Afghanistan were ungovernable to begin with, more ungovernable than the people of any developed country. For example, I’m going to guess that your way of life does not involve grabbing your rifle and joining in this year’s season of warfare without any consistent ideological commitment to which side you want to fight for. But this is how many tribal Afghans have lived for centuries. There’s a core of devoted fanatics within the Taliban, but most of the actual fighters literally showed up and treated the war like a pickup basketball game. That’s why we seemed to win so quickly and easily in the beginning—nobody wants to be on the losing side. But as time went on and American commitment diminished, the dynamic shifted before ultimately and dramatically reversing.
> In Afghanistan this was fundamentally impossible
That's an odd idea. The people in Afghanistan aren't magically different -- instead, they're being oppressed by a comparatively small group of violent uneducated men (the Talibans).
You’re showing me pictures of people in cities. I’m not talking about the cities. I’m talking about the tribal populations in the countryside. And honestly, the tribal peoples aren’t the “magically different” ones. They’re closer to normal baseline human. We’re the WEIRD ones.
Yes, it's a pain to read through essays and all the details of various circumstances. But the nuance is helpful sometimes... And seems to be important to elaborate in this case.
People don't need to agree or disagree with previous posts. Simply stating more facts and going into details (especially on complex matters of history and culture) is good and helpful.
One of the many failures of nation-building has to do with property disputes. In a WEIRD society like our own (or Germany, or Japan) there’s an office in the city that has survey records and the question of who owns a piece of land is decided by paperwork. If there’s a dispute or a transaction or an agreement that changes someone’s property rights in some way—perhaps you have an easement or you agreed to move the property line-those changes are also duly recorded in the paperwork in the office in the city.
This is not how human cultures work by default. In fact, the process of writing down everyone’s property deeds for the first time is a massive undertaking that is hard to do well and easy to fuck up. The Ottoman Empire made a hash of this when they did it in Palestine and recorded property rights at such a high level of granularity that a single land deed with a single owner might cover a massive expanse of land that spanned multiple villages. Which made no difference to any of the people in Palestine until those “owners” ended up selling that land to Zionists.
Afghanistan, likewise, had lots of land records, many of which dated back to before the Soviet war. Of course, in the intervening decades, a lot of the tribal peoples had property disputes and settled them in a perfectly normal pre-modern way, involving verbal agreements and codes of honor between extended kin groups. And as long as nobody tried anything like governing them from Kabul based on those written land records, it worked for them. Everyone remembered and respected the traditional agreements. Of course, when the US installed a government in Kabul and backed it up with American troops, eventually everyone who had been on the losing side of a property dispute and realized they could get more or better land based on some dusty old paperwork decided to sic the US-backed Kabul government on their neighbors, completely upsetting the balance of life.
Simply put, a human culture that has been urbanized, governable, and legible to a paperwork-based central authority for centuries is an extremely sophisticated thing that takes a ton of effort to invent. If you grow up in that kind of society centuries after the initial work was done, those institutions are almost invisible to you. How else would society function?
Economic lifting isn't a surefire win either. What works in Germany/Japan didn't work elsewhere.