The U.S. Military is really awful at nation building.
I say this because it seems somewhat relavant these days. The U.S. is really great at going into a country and tearing the fucking house down. They can rampage like the best of em. But when the current regime is torn down, and the ruthless dictators are out of power, that's where our expertise ends. We're able to go into countries and help them rid themselves of the brutal regimes they are living under, but have no idea what we're doing when it's time to set them up for the future.
"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world...and then we fucked up the end game." - Charlie WilsonMost of the countries we go into, the most recent examples being Iraq and Afghanistan, are poor countries, with an impoverished and illiterate population. These countries can't run themselves. They just don't know how to. At the end of the movie Charlie Wilson's War, a movie based on the true story of Congressman Charles Wilson's exploits in helping the Afghanies flight back against the Russians, they depict Wilson asking Congress to continue funding the effort in Afghanistan, even though the Russians had left, in order to build schools and help rebuild in infrastructure. And they laughed at him and turned him down. They couldn't be bothered. So now there was this country that had no leadership and no education...it's just ripe for a brutal regime to come in and rule by force and fear.
There was a recent story out of Somalia (LINK), where a couple of teenage girls were executed because the men in charge said they were spies. Not only were they executed by a firing squad, the entire community where this was taking place was forced to come out and watch it happen. This is ruling by fear and preying on the ignorance of the populace. If something like that happened in the U.S., or in Canada, or in Europe, do you think the people would stand for it? Hell no! There'd be an uproar, and rebellion. But in these poor third world countries, nothing. The people don't know any better or don't know how to go about telling their stories because they are illiterate and don't know anything outside of their little towns.
My coworker and I were talking during lunch today, and he brought up a really interesting thought. What if we had taken all the money we had spent on these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (now over $1 Trillion since 2001) and instead set out to educate the women of the world...specifically those in these third world countries. While women in this country are finally getting their fair shake of things, and are educated, and can run countries, can probably be president (soon enough, I suspect), etc...there's still loads of places where women are tortured, beaten, held hostage in their own homes, etc. These women aren't allowed to go to school, aren't allowed to know how to read, and damn sure aren't allowed to participate in shaping the leadership of their countries. If we spent a trillion dollars on trying to educate that section of the population, and defending that education from outside attack, don't you think things would change pretty fucking quickly? You think the men running these countries would still be able to control the population by fear if these women were educated, able to organize and rise up, and knew where to go for backing in the world? Not so fast....
But really, we spend all this money on going into other countries to take out bad leadership regimes, but never spend any money on the after, on the rebuilding of said country. On educating the population. On making sure they understand how to run a country, and how to integrate that country with the world. Why does this never happen? Because people get antsy, and elections happen, and its hard to tell someone in the U.S. that we dont have a job for them here because we're spending a couple hundred billion dollars stabilizing the world. This entire country has become so me-centric that nothing is ever good enough. People are never happy, so politicians always feel the need to change course, appease the whims of the public, just to save their jobs. I'm really tired of these half-finished, half-assed foreign policy ideals because our politicians are more concerned about their jobs than actually helping make the world a better, more stable place.
Education and infrastructure. Two things that would be a better use of our foreign budget than more guns and troops on the ground (both important things in their own right...but not as the ONLY thing we use), and would make a world of difference towards ending the atrocities that happen overseas in places we don't always see in the papers or in the news. I guess, overall, my point is that we need to spend money on both sides of the game, not just the initial military actions. If we really want to set up happy, healthy, sustainable countries in which they can police themselves and gruesome atrocities don't happen, we have to spend at least as much money, if not more money, on setting them up for success once we take out the ruling regimes. Otherwise, we're just opening the door for another brutal regime to take over, and they'll be back at square one.
Otherwise, why even bother spending that kind of money overseas? Just keep it home and take care of the issues here at home.
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