More than once, I think, I have said that it's futile for the U.S. or others to believe that democracy can be built in a few years in a country that has never experienced that political arrangement and has neither democratic traditions nor democratic institutions. There are exceptions, of course - Japan after WW II? - but mostly such efforts fail.
Phillip Carter, a former Army officer and senior fellow at the Center for A New American Security, has come to the related and equally self-evident conclusion that you can't have much success in getting others to fight your battles for you. The client armies we have tried to build through security assistance programs have also tended to fail to meet our expectations, the most recent example(s) being our training and equipping of surrogates in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course we try to put the best face on the results, not wishing to suggest that we may have expended big bucks without getting a big bang, yet it hasn't generally worked out so well. The Romans discovered this, and the Ottomans, and look at them now.
The truth is that any group we can support, in a fluid situation where power is up for grabs, is likely to have its own agenda. If they don't, and if they have no agenda at all beyond getting from one day to the next, they are hardly likely to fight effectively for someone else's - hence the run from battle, the abandonment of expensive equipment and technology, that we hear of so often.
Still, we try, and probably will continue to do so. It's very attractive to think that we can save American lives and still achieve our objectives. I wish Mr. Carter and the Center for A New American Security luck in advocating a "more humble" approach to security assistance.
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