If the twentieth century and probably the twenty-first could be summed up with one banal truism, Joseph Fouché says, it would be this:
People prefer being ruled by an incompetent local who looks like them to being ruled by a competent outsider who doesn’t look like them.
T.E. Lawrence said as much:
Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.