Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
But the real bottom line is, what do we lose by attempting to reconcile the parties and forcing them to share governance within the constraints of a new constitution under the oversight of the coalition until they prove they can play nice?
Force them to share governance? How?

This is a winner-take-all environment, and neither party will be willing to share. They may play at it if they see the game as something that will bring them one step closer to complete control, but they aren't going to sit down and "play nice" just because we want them to.

I think your faith in Constitutions and structures is more than a bit unrealistic. Documents don't shape cultures, cultures shape documents that suit their needs and priorities. We could impose the US constitution on Afghanistan tomorrow and it wouldn't change a thing: the document would simply be ignored. That's what happens to documents that don't fit the culture they propose to shape. The culture is the culture. It may change, over generations and in unpredictable ways, but we can't change it.

It was foolish of us to try to shape Afghan governance in the first place; it's no less foolish now.

An example of where this sort of initiative can lead may be found in recent memory in the Philippines, where the US supported an astonishingly inept "peace agreement" that was doomed to failure from the start. The parties involved knew it wouldn't work, but went along for reasons of their own. Of course it was shot down, mercifully at an early stage, with generally poor effects on eventual prospects for peace and for US credibility.

We can't make people "play nice" if they don't see "playing nice" as compatible with their interests and goals. It would be lovely if we could, but we can't, and we only step on our equipment when we try.