Not exactly what I was talking about. Massacring people and wiping out their culture are two very different things. For example, in Iraq, the US military did such a good job of showing a better way of doing things, that even tribal leaders with a vested interest in their jobs thought it was a better system of leadership.
From the start, Afghanistan needed a MacArthur(PBUH) constitution imposed on them. Everyone and anyone who wanted to be in the government would have to do it the hard way, with performance of the new system. Caste, connection, wealth, are all meaningless to the promotion of new government employees.
It is downright Pavlovian. They have to be retrained so that they no longer believe that positions of authority are first, for personal enrichment, second, to reward their friends, and third, to punish their enemies. This is not easy. So at first their jobs are assembly line rubber stamping. Repetition, don’t make waves, don’t change anything. Do it exactly the same way every time for a long time and you get promoted. Get creative, you fail and you stay where you are.
Next, because the minimum wage in Afghanistan is tiny, we could have literally employed most of the men in every troublesome district. Work for free food, and your family gets your pay. And any man walking around not employed is a suspect. Great, huge public works programs to help rebuild national infrastructure, on a budget.
Then set up a system of militarily protected enormous boarding schools for children, and actually pay a stipend to parents to surrender their kids for five years of intense schooling by western standards. Feed the kids up and teach them as much as you can as fast as you can.
The idea is to train them so that they will be the next generation of political and business leaders.
Finally, organize the women, so that they are gainfully occupied while their men and children are away. Bluntly this is reeducation, but it is also teaching them that they have spines and are human beings. Personally, I would require every woman to carry a knife on her person at all times, and all other women to enforce the rule, so that they would no more dream of going out in public without their knife than without their clothes.
Yes, it would be a major cultural purge, and yes, the US military would be doing the very same thing as it is right now. But eventually at least we would start to see some cultural dividends in what are right now people trapped in a hell of their own making.
I agree with you entirely for step two.
But MacArthur’s(PBUH) constitution was made possible by Iwo Jima, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the resultant complete collapse of any idea of continuing support for an insurgency.
I have often compared Iraq to the forgotten lessons of Philippine-American war (1899-1916) in length, scale and number of US casualties (4800 KIA.) Black Jack Pershing(PBUH) took the final fight out of the resistence the old-fashioned way (200,000 casualties) and then we built the country.