Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
I think this may be a bit backward. Government structures naturally flow from and reflect the cultures and societies they spring from. If Afghans design a government it will very naturally reflect Afghan political culture... unless you're proposing that somebody else should do the designing.

Of course political cultures can and do evolve, and the systems they produce evolve with them. Whether a political culture can be "evolved" by imposition of structures not deriving from that culture is another question. Seems an unlikely prospect to me.

One of the odder illusions embraced in our Afghan enterprise is the notion that Afghans were going to stop governing like Afghans simply because we put them in power. Of course Afghans will govern like Afghans. They will do so no matter what we say or do.
To put checks and balances on Patronage so that one clan cannot legally dominate another is not "changing how Afghans govern" any more than imposing speed limits is "changing how Americans drive." All it is doing is creating structures to ensure that one element of the populace does not exceed their rights to the detriment of others.

This is a natural evolution of their current system, allowing it, and their society to move on to a new level, less tied to a disruptive and destructive cycle of wide swings of who has power and who does not, and the associated legal disputes over land ownership and acts of fiscal and physical vengeance that accompany the same.

It is the current government, that we helped shape and create, that is a change of how Afghans govern, converting a historic system of patronage into a national Ponzi scheme.