The USA sought to nation build in Afghanistan, however despite being there for 20 years the Afghan state lasted barely a week when the USA began pulling out.
Many people blame corruption, afghan soldiers being weak, and the Taliban being strong for it, and while those are major factors it is not that cut in dry. The afghan soldiers weren't weak, they just weren't stupid, they rarely got paid and their casualties were extremely high and escalating in the final days of the war, the Taliban simply told them it's not worth it to die for nothing, and they agreed. The Taliban were heavily underestimated, however they are not popular among the Afghan's either, many of them are traumatized from what they did to the country when they ruled.
Did the USA fail in Afghanistan because they didn't understand spiral dynamics? They were too idealistic with the Afghanistan government rather than considering their level of development as it is, and putting them in a position to live it and progress to the next stage, not suddenly behave the way they want them too.
Examples:
$787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan to help women and girls. While there are huge problems with Afghanistan involving abuse of women, what exactly was this money going towards?
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1367146062868226049
In Afghanistan the two most popular languages, Dari and Pashto, have NO word for gender or gender equality. The Afghan's just used the term 'gender' in english and seem to believe it means 'women and girls', because all the US gender programs were for women and girls
https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/gender-quotas/country-view/44/35
The Afghan constitution, guided by the US, set a 27 percent gender quota to their lower house, this is as high as the amount in the USA. This resulted in some female politicians representing provinces they had never been too.
US forced rural Afghans to have gender balanced councils to get money for infrastructure projects. Some of the men continued to interfere and would block information or ignore their input.
A National Masculinity Alliance was formed that gave trainings to one thousand Afghan men to examine their gender roles and toxic attitudes towards women
The Army set a goal for 10 percent female participation in the army, but only achieved 1 percent
Instead of listening to local people about where to put wells, the US would put a well in between two tribes so that they would be forced to work together.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1204538220299423744?s=20
USAID official: "focusing on gender made things more unstable because it caused revolts," and "gender had to be part of so many projects." This is a recurring theme through the documents, a lot of complains on both US and Afghan sides about focus on gender issues. 69/n
Conclusion:
Think about how ridiculous it would be to travel back in time to America at its founding, and force the population there to have full gender and racial equality and quotas for representation. It simply would not work. It takes time to develop a country and ultimately it should be left up to the population to decide what they want.
It took countries like the USA over two hundred years, and massively rapid economic development to get as far up the Spiral as they did, why would Afghanistan be expected too do it in less than 20 coming off of endless wars and a destroyed country?
Ultimately the USA's actions in Afghanistan were breathtakingly incompetent and showed a complete inability to objectively look at the situation and secure it's own interests or even help the Afghan's in the long term.
