Bob,
I think we try to project our concepts of governance onto societies that do have the same needs and desire. In many places and throughout much of history the Right to govern simply meant that you were more powerful than the other competitors. I don't mean power to subdue the populace but the power to provide for the populace. The description of the Khan in Jon W. Anderson's "There Are No Khāns Anymore: Economic Development and Social Change in Tribal Afghanistan" indicates a level of pre-state and even pre-monarchical society that are looking for something completely different from what we are trying to force down there throats. More of a patron-client relationship and more on a local level. We keep trying to establish a State where the concept of a State is a relatively recent development.
Besides the problem of the level of needs of the society there is major problem we have in Afghanistan is that there is no economic base. What you really have there now is a rentier society living not off the "rents" from a natural resource like oil but from external aid. It is not sustainable. A State requires a certain level of economic development. I don't see that in Afghanistan. Unless we decide to suddenly legalize heroin.
Without trying to go through the entire process of governance I want to propose a completely different alternative - why don't we simply establish a protectorate. We will provide protection from outside invasion; we will reserve the right to go in and attack any element that we determine is a threat to our security interests, but other than that we let the populace develop their own governance.
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