i think Afghanistan problem is that they all primintiv , they old fation , non democrats , and they all hate the usa.

“a woman there has a 50 percent chance of dying during one of her eight pregnancies”

I think this is shorthand for “a) Afghani women have an average of 8 pregnancies, and b) half of all afghani women die in childbirth.”

As to the solution: Arm the women. Start with RAWA.

I live in a lower-income neighborhood in Minneapolis. I receive the police blotter for my neighborhood every 14 days. They pick up crack dealers with shotguns, a group of young boys intent on knocking over a local convienience store with a MAC-10, a guy trying to shoot his neighbor in his backyard, that kind of stuff. From the looks of it, the same two officers, Garcia and Keminski are doing all the work. Sometimes one of them is in the hospital. In a single 14 day period, Garcia and Keminski confiscated 24 illegal handguns in my neighborhood.

With so much peace-keeping needing to get done in my own backyard, the thought of changing another nation around for some purported reason seems like putting the cart before the horse. We all of us here in Fowel-McKinley have just detectives Garcia and Keminski. If for no other reason than to give these guys a break, bring our troops back home.

“a woman there has a 50 percent chance of dying during one of her eight pregnancies”

This is an extremely improbable pair of statistics. If you have 2^8 women, then 2^7 will die in their first pregnancy, 2^6 in their second, etc. It would be pretty hard to have this average out to 8 pregnancies per woman.

Maybe there are some women in Afghanistan bearing 2^64 children to make these numbers work out, but I doubt it.

At the end of the World War II, the U.S. military walked into Japan and within 6 months Japanese women were voting (and man too) for the first time in history. A photo of the Emperor was shown in newspapers – the Japanese ruler seemed unseemly small posing next to General MacArthur. Within 5 years DeBeers had 50% of Japanese young couples buy diamond engagement rings.

The culture and the mentality of Japanese are vastly different than those of Americans or Afghans. Is it also the case that a developed civilization (Americans) can subdue another advanced civilization much easier? The rationale would be that Americans have experts to deal with governments, media, democracy, public opinion, highway/electrical/phone infrastructure, etc. Americans do not know how to handle places without government, media, democracy…

Why would anyone expect anything different from the US? The Soviet Union spent a lot of time and money supporting the modernizing nationalist regime in Afghanistan, and the US did its best to support the most reactionary backwards elements they could find. If daddy did his best to put a backwards regime in power and killing off the liberal intelligensia, why would anyone expect baby boy to do otherwise? Besides, a generation of modernizing liberals are dead or in exile, just who /could/ do this modernizing?

<cite>half of the population of Aghanistan views the other half as personal property and is supported in this view by tradition and religion.</cite>

Maybe by tradition. Definitely not by religion.

So then why bother any nation building at all? Why all the games? Just go in, take out the threat, and get out.