Could NATO do this? Of course, but it would do great damage to our society. Will it happen? LOL. Sudan is even bigger than Afghanistan - so much for the people who believe the "rich nations" have responsibility to interfere in civil wars in other countries.
By the way if we are talking about orphans. The Iraqi Gov claims there are 5 million orphans in Iraq. That's about 25% of the population. Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den MenschenVolker Pispers
history indicates that you can pacify a country by force
f 4. If the answer to 3. is "yes", how long did the changes take?
From what I've read in the past, the required time is about 200 years, depending on how big a change you want to make. The big problem is that the changes seem just as likely to occur in your own society as in the society you're trying to change. basically you need to get past grandchildrens grandchildren to remove the memory of the initial invasion and memory of culture.
The only truely reliable way to chqange a society is for them to want to change themselves, and you can never guarantee that they will chose to change in the way that you want. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
I don't know much about Somalia, and I hope you're right about the future of former Yugoslavia, but we know from discussions here that your view of the usefulness of military intervention is far from shared by people of those countries.
The number of generations for lasting change, as ceebs suggests and I agree in other comments, is likely to be considerably higher than one or two.
And the same can be said of any war fought in denial of what war is really about: punitive action, killing and destroying.
The niceties - democracy, freedom and prosperity, doing good to the people you fought - only come later, if the victor is smart.
Additionally, I think that there is a case to be made that there is a qualitative difference between Germany and Japan - which were both highly centralised countries with very developed governments, good infrastructure, etc. - on one side, and most third-world countries - where these factors are notably lacking - on the other. I would think that such strong centralisation would make it easier to enforce a top-down change in the culture, because the bureaucrats and government officials (that are easy for a conqueror to replace quickly) play a comparatively bigger role in a centralised society.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
And when carpet-bombing helped in Germany and nuclear weapons helped in Japan, the solution is easy: Nuclear carpet-bombing in Afghanistan. Without humans left, there are no terrorists, who could attack us, no women, who could be treated bad, no orphans, nobody who could grow poppy.... the real all in one solution. Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den MenschenVolker Pispers
It may of course be, that only into those areas ever enough troops were deployed, in which there seemed to be potential for success. But against this speaks, that there was a study to find that out and otherwise it would have been common knowledge.
That there was a study is something I find entirely unimpressive. There's always 'a study' for everything. Some of them are good, some of them are hack jobs made by think tanks paid liars.
I would, however, propose that even if they did succeed in all the cases where they used enough troops, this may very well be because the only cases where they used enough troops were centralised countries - the Americans have an unfortunate tendency to not take military threats seriously unless they take the form of panzer divisions on an open field of battle.
If you first have to defeat the army of a modern state which has technological parity with yourself, on its own territory, you will already have enough troops at the start of the occupation, because otherwise you won't defeat them in the first place. The Americans' problem - well, one of their many problems - is that they think that they can transfer this logic to pre-modern states without technological parity. In other words, they think, based on their experience with modern states, that defeating the army is the hardest part, and if you can defeat the army, then you will have little trouble occupying the country.
This is silly, of course. And they really should know better, considering how badly they have gotten their asses kicked over the last half-century. But an integral part of their political culture seems to be an inability to admit mistakes - and the consequent inability to learn from them. That, by the way, is a feature of American democracy that Europe had better take care not to import.
I would think that such strong centralisation would make it easier to enforce a top-down change in the culture, because the bureaucrats and government officials (that are easy for a conqueror to replace quickly) play a comparatively bigger role in a centralised society.
Makes me think of something Machiavelli wrote. He divides larger states (not city-states) into feudal societies with decentralised power and centralised empires. In a feudal society it is easy - especially for a foreigner with a decent army - to become the king, but hard to stay as king. The warlords will support whoever serves their interest for the moment. In centralised empires it is hard to become the king but once there you just take over the old power structure and rule. Except of course if you fire the old power structure, and put the soldiers out of work, but few are that crazy. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
The Pentagon will gladly supply, on request, such information {10} as the quantity of ordnance expended in Indochina. From 1965 through 1969 this amounts to about four and a half million tons by aerial bombardment. This is nine times the tonnage of bombing in the entire Pacific theatre in the Second World War, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Next time I'll check my sources before posting... Wait this is important. Someone is wrong on the Internet.
Afghanistan is barely a country. It hardly has a national identity, and it can't be made to surrender formally, because there's no single clique which can be forced to accept defeat on behalf of the population.
Even Yugoslavia is different, because it spent enough time as a Soviet vassal state to develop a central structure.
Pacifying Afghanistan is like trying to pacify an amoeba. There's no central point to hold onto, and without that political leverage it will always keep growing back at you from all directions.
The Age of Empire ended with the Victorians. Since then it's been much more common to set up client states by influencing elections and applying media and political pressure. Indirect military action (e.g. Nicaragua) has been tried too, but the outcome is rarely conclusive.
So military adventuring hasn't worked well. That doesn't mean it couldn't work in Afghanistan, but it would mean a draft in NATO, the complete decapitation of the Taleban hierarchy, and support from the surrounding 'Stans to make sure that the remaining survivors aren't given a safe haven.
None of these things will happen.
But the real problem is that strategically, the invasion has no point. Politically it looks like an example of the US deciding to throw a random country against the wall and getting its arse kicked instead - as it did in Vietnam. Morally, it's ridiculous - the most powerful country in the world bullying the smallest.
The bottom line for NATO is that even if all of the allies committed all of their resources to the war, it still wouldn't be won, and it would barely make an impression on the resources the US has available to it.
So squeaking from Gates about allies who don't want to commit is self-serving nonsense. If there's a solution at all - which there may not be now - it's certainly not a military one.
Politically it looks like an example of the US deciding to throw a random country against the wall and getting its arse kicked instead - as it did in Vietnam.
If you look at history there probably arent two worse countries to throw against the wall than Vietnam and Afghanistan. Both have constantly been invaded and occupied for the last milenium, and have a history of resistance of any and all occupiers as part of their national myth. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
National Review: Jonah Goldberg quoting Michael Ledeen in 2002 ... here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago
