Maybe with another fifty years.
Of course it could have. Control the schools for twenty years and itâs curriculum.
Man if only this could have been delayed ninety days so we could have pretended it didnât matter. Itâs a real shame.
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Donât agree with that. The Japanese and the Germans were both civilized people who had gotten a little too militaristic for their own good. They had vibrant cultures and were economic powerhouses throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Germany even had a republic for a few years before things fell apart in the early 30s. Japan had advanced from a feudal state to a great power in less than 30 years.
All we had to do during the occupation was root out the militarists in both regimes and allow their natural desire for a state of free citizens to take hold. Both had extensive liberal minded (and I mean anti monarchist, pro democratic not modern liberals) political minorities who sprung into action once their nationalistic governments running them were taken out to pasture and shot.
The Afghans arenât any different than their ancestors from the 1500s. Theyâve never âcivilized.â I donât like that word, but itâs the only word you can really use. Thereâs simply no way we could have fixed that society.
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So how do you explain all the other countries whose governments weâve overthrown outside of Germany and Japan?
Call me crazy but the fact that A-Stan has been occupied or at war continuously for more than forty years may have something to do with their situation
We werenât attempting to nation build or âfixâ those countries. In places like Iran in the 50s we had economic and political goals in mind. Basically the people chose leadership we didnât like.
And yes the constant conflict in Afghanistan since 1978 has certainly played a key role in their lack of stability. Afghanistan isnât a nation state. And you canât even start to build one when the country is on fire for almost 50 straight years.
Same thing has plagued sub Saharan Africa. Places like the Congo had maybe five years of relative peace. Other than that, itâs been a warzone since decolonization.
We didnât control Germany or Japanâs educational systems for anything close to twenty years.
We gave their politically liberal minorities that had existed in those two countries for decades the ability to actually run the countries for the first time.
Especially in Japanâs case. There had been underground democratic movements since Emperor Meiji took power. Some were even in the government during the 1910s and early 1920s.
Then the military, specifically the mid level officers of the army, took over the political sphere. Any political reformer that stuck his head above water was shot to death by some crazy major who felt that militarism was the only way forward for Japan. Hundreds of political reformers were assassinated during the 1920s and thirties. The entire time period is called the government by assassination.
You know what schools do right? Doesnât much matter if your civ is 1500 years behind, your children can be taught everything we know.
If the people accept your teachings.
The Japanese people and the Germans easily accepted their new governmentsâ plans for the future. Mainly because there was already a sub culture of political liberalism in those states. Especially in Germanyâs case. A good portion of the great liberal thinkers of the 1800s were German by birth. Despite its numerous flaws, the German Empire of 1871-1914 (when wwi broke out) had some democratic processes. Namely universal male suffrage above 25.
I donât think the hardcore religious Sunnis in Afghanistan would take too kindly to it.
Then by the end of twenty years, the ones who forcibly opposed it would be dead or in jail. We also disarmed them. Any idea why we didnât disarm the Taliban? Would we have tolerated armed Naziâs in post war Germany?
They didnât surrender.
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Doesnât seem smart.
Kind of hard to disarm a bunch of people when theyâre still fighting.
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Maybe we should have made that a priority. If the people we trained couldnât defeat them, why would we expect them not to be defeated when we left? Like I said, no way we would have tolerated armed nazis or imperial japanese after we occupied those countries. We wouldnât have called the invasions a win until they were eliminated let alone have left without defeating them.
We didnât defeat them.
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Well, throw Afghan from the plane just happened. So thereâs that.
We never defeated the Taliban. They were and still are willing to fight for their cause. You canât disarm people who are still fighting.
The enemy gets a say in how things go down.
Thatâs not all they dropped.
We didnât invade Japan. They surrendered unconditionally on our terms and per those terms we actively occupied them until about 1950.
Japan was a very easy occupation for the United States. It was surprisingly smooth. Most of the US government was expecting an insurgency to break out almost immediately. There were incidents caused by both sides of course, but as a whole it went better than anyone on either side could have expected.
Luckily for us, the Japanese people as a whole were open to the idea of a new form of government and building a new society. The military mid level officers who would have started an insurgency mostly gutted theirselves in the days after the surrender to avoid the great shame of surrendering.
