"We should not get involved to begin with if we are not willing to pay those high costs.
" That being said, we are now fully committed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are likely to take on other nation-building commitments in the future, simply because the failed-state problem is one that we cannot safely ignore."
"The Failed State Problem!" Oh yes- another thing we have to wage "war" on in addition to wiping out "evil". And of course we need a huge federal bureaucracy to "solve" this problem.
But perhaps at least Fukuyama really does think that what we are doing in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is really an honest attempt at "nation building".
The reality in Afghanistan is quite another story. The US installed Karzai government is dismissed by Afghanis themselves as the "Mayor of Kabul" since his authority does not extend beyond the city limits. Our forces in Afghanistan reside in Fortress bases and do a minimum of patrolling or peacekeeping. The rest of the country is under the de facto rule of local war and drug lords. Karzai himself is protected by an elite US military unit acting as his bodyguards. "Development" projects are scatter shot at best since our forces won't expose themselves to attack by protecting aid workers or civilian contractors. Most of the money earmarked for Afghanistan is for security.
The same process is rapdly underway in Iraq as well where we have consolidated 11 large fortress bases. We are turnig over "security" to poorly trained Iraqis and leaving the population to the mercy of whatever local thug has the most firepower. "Aid" projects have all but dried up.
This was utterly predictable from our behavior in Kosovo and Bosnia. In both cases we created bases- moved troops in- and then basically refuse to leave them while the population is subjected to wholesale chaos, crime, and poverty.
True imperaialism would be more merciful than what we are doing.