Now Ghani failed as the head of the state, together with the state he was the head of

Monday, August 16th, 2021

There are many ironies in the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Peter Turchin notes, but for him the main one is that Ashraf Ghani started as an academic who studied state collapse and nation building:

Back in 2008 I reviewed, for Nature, the book written by Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States. My review was not gentle. One of my comments was that the authors

review four examples — post-war Europe, Singapore, the southern United States and Ireland — that, in their opinion, prove that countries confronted with devastation, chaos and entrenched poverty can transform themselves into prosperous and stable members of the global community. Apart from Singapore, however, these are not examples of state collapse. Europe in 1945 was devastated by interstate war; Ireland was poor before its economic miracle but not a collapsed state; and few would consider the United States to be weak.

[….]

My review concluded that Fixing Failed States failed as an academic book. Now Ghani failed as the head of the state, together with the state he was the head of.

Comments

  1. Altitude Zero says:

    Their answer to the question of how to salvage a failed state was, as near as I can tell, “Give more money and power to people like us”. No surprise there, and also no surprise that it failed miserably.

  2. Ray says:

    This is one of the funniest things which I have read. I think the Greek word was hubris. Thank you.

  3. VXXC says:

    Ghani succeeded at getting rich LOLZ. If not off the book then off we taxpayers. He didn’t write the fsking book to sell the book, it was a very long resume…and it worked.

    As for looting, let’s understand the new Imperial economics: You don’t loot the broke country you invaded; you set up a regulatory and oversight free economic zone and loot your own taxpayers. It happened in Iraq, it happened in Afghanistan, it happens in every NGO-istan disaster zone (NGO’s with houses in Long Island with inground pools, BMWs and Benz out front, etc).

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