America likes stability and certainty in the locations around the planet where we perceive our interests to manifest.
One major component of our current challenges in the post Cold War era is that in many of those locations populaces are evolving in their expectations of governance more rapidly than the "US-approved" systems of governance that serve them. Those systems that have the flexibility to evolve in nature along with the evolving expectations of their populaces are doing better than those that rigidly seek to sustain some status quo of governance as defined by those who control the government. But changes are so rapid that all systems are struggling to some degree. Flexible systems are being bent, rigid systems are breaking.
All of that leads to instability and uncertainty, and that makes America nervous, so we launch into a massive program of excessive engagement to seek to re-establish the stability and certainty that we have come to see as so essential to our interests. It is an unsustainable situation.
We are fairly flexible at home, but very rigid abroad. A mix of domestic bending and foreign breaking. If we could only learn to allow others the same fundamental principles we demand for ourselves we would be less compelled to overly engage those breaking systems abroad, and there would likely then be less bending at home. Instead we over-engage and see the solution as pushing modern US values rather than simply allowing classic US principles. But to allow the latter is to relinquish the control and certainty we see as so essential to making our current system work.
We need to think about "stability" differently. It is not just a "phase" or an "operation" that we can conduct to "fix" an unstable situation. In fact, such operations more often than not only serve to suppress the current set of challengers to the existing unstable situation. They freeze instability rather than produce stability, then require constant input of energy to sustain that unnatural condition.
We also need to learn to deal better with, and fear less, "uncertainty." Become less of a control freak. The problem is that we have become so intertwined in the governances of some places that relinquishing control is labeled as "abandonment." Big corporations love certainty as well, and the pressure they apply to sustain status quo relationships does not help either.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do believe we need a new model better tuned for the world we live in today. That the model we apply was designed for a world that no longer exists. It demands too much energy (measured in money, engagement, influence, etc) to sustain, and as it is inappropriate for the emerging world it actually serves to make us less secure rather than more secure through its execution.
This leads us back to Afghanistan and this thread. We emplaced and now protect a system that we think will give us the stability and certainty WE "need" and are therefore reluctant to pull way back on all of the programs we are applying there to make the current system work, and to instead focus our energy on an approach designed to allow the current system to evolve to a more natural state.
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