Dayuhan:

You hit the nail on the head: Who is being represented/served?

Darwin assures, in a stable situation over time, that a bad "big man" will either destroy himself or his followers.

Take away all the natural/rational conditions, and the "big man's" feed back loop is something completely different. A game theory optimizer within some kind of weird cargo culture thing where coke bottles drops out of the sky and you have to grab what you can.

Very disruptive, very hard to "reconstruct" anything if it has gone on for a generation or more.

Afghan solutions must get beyond the simplistic through more money and influence at a broken and alien system.

Isn't that what this thread was about?

Whether we keep doing what we are doing or find a new strategy that could actually work there?