For a quick survey of the thinking that’s already been done in the field of development studies, as well as several tidy frameworks for thinking about the daunting challenges ahead of us in Afghanistan, you couldn’t do much better than reading Francis Fukuyama’s concise tome State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century.

Being written in 2004, the book seems to be primarily geared towards understanding our options in Iraq. Nevertheless, in the final chapter, Fukuyama broadly outlines the problem of Afghanistan, and it’s none too rosy a picture.

It is not clear, given the low to nonexistent level of stateness in many failed states, whether there is any real alternative to a quasi-permanent, quasi-colonial relationship between the “beneficiary” country and the international community. In a sense, the latter has recreated the earlier mandatory system of the League of Nations period in which certain colonial powers were given explicit charter to govern a given territory on its behalf. The problem with our current system is that contemporary norms do not accept the legitimacy of anything other than self-government, which makes us then insist that whatever governance we do provide be temporary and rule transitional. Since we do not in fact know how to transfer institutional capacity in a hurry, we are setting ourselves and our supposed beneficiaries up for large disappointments. [p. 104]

I suppose it should be stressed here that Fukuyama isn’t taking the activist Max Boot neocolonial stance—that even though we Americans don’t like the term ‘empire’, we should just get on with paternalistic administration of the rest of the world. Rather he’s saying that though the colonial worldview is of a bygone era and is unthinkable today, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that there has been any kind of record of spectacular success in state-building in the post-colonial era.