In a review of two books on the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole sums up the problem of the U.S. attempt to bring democracy to Afghanistan:
]The prevailing assumption over those years was that a stable democracy could be created and sustained without a commitment to telling the truth, without controlling the distorting effects of money, without standing up to the avidity of the rich, without proper mechanisms for open scrutiny and rational deliberation, without a commitment to moral standards that apply as much to our allies as to our enemies. Democracy without those values and systems has no substance. It will fall–and not just in Afghanistan.
Read those last five words again.
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