The Other War

The NYT had a must-read on Afghanistan the other day. I caught up with it today. Hilzoy responds:

Some problems aren't solved all at once; still, you can see points at which things turn slightly from despair towards hope, and then, if you're lucky, a point at which the process of transforming some problem that has haunted the world for what seems like forever into history starts to look irreversible.

Afghanistan had been one of those problems for decades. We weren't in a position to do much about it earlier -- naively, I believed that you don't just go around invading countries out of the blue, ha ha ha -- but suddenly we actually had a really good reason to invade, and there we were, the Taliban was in flight, the people seemed overjoyed, and I thought: dear God, we are actually going to do try to right by Afghanistan, whose people have suffered so much for so long. And back in that era of lost hopes, what gave me real confidence that we would do our best to actually help Afghanistan to transform itself from a failed state into a normal, functioning society was that for once, making a serious effort to do this wasn't just a wild aspiration. It was feasible, it was the right thing to do, but most importantly, as far as its actually happening was concerned, it was clearly, obviously, overwhelmingly in our interest.

It still breaks my heart just thinking about it.