Okay, as a PoliSci student, I firmly believe in not making grand pronouncements on subjects about which you know jack shit. Which makes me a hypocrite for saying this:
This thread gets written about once a month on the SDMB. And I hate it every time, because it’s always Sam Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” versus George Bush’s “We will bring democracy to the Middle East” — a crass generalization, I know. But I am highly dubious about the claim that Afghanis don’t understand democracy (it’s not some grand religion) or that they have no interest in this whole Westernism thing (Afghanistan wasn’t a religiously conservative country until quite recently, IIRC.) At the same time, convincing everybody that they can have a place in the new regime and be satisfied isn’t exactly an easy task. The game of Liberation™ is one in which there are losers, not just winners. At any rate, the US is pretty well stuck there for the moment.