I am traveling the next 2 days, but plan to respond to your critique after I get back.

all the best, Bill

I’ve been violently ill all day and just saw your response. Approving it now.

And Una, those links are a joke. Is that seriously the best you can muster as your final defense?
—–
Here’s the post that I tried to send to Transitionland’s blog entry:

“Una: Do I think foreigners can “build Afghanistan”? No. Can they help Afghans rebuild it? Yes, and that is what Afghans say they want every time they are asked”

A more pressing issue is whether foreigners are even capable of allowing Afghans to rebuild their society. I would argue, that as long as Afghanistan is framed as a battleground for the War on Drugs and War on Terror, US interests and Afghan civilian interests will always collide.

““Our simplistic approach to the country.” Whose approach? Foreign involvement in Afghanistan is many things, comes from many sources, and answers to many different authorities.”

I think it’s pretty clear that the US government has laid out a specific policy with regards to Afghanistan, so when I say “our” I mean “our government”. Are you really denying that the US has laid out an approach to Afghanistan or were you just once again playing the pedant?

“me: I have to say, this is coming across more and more as a “gotcha” game and not as intellectual discourse.”

your response on twitter: “LOVE the one who accuses me of playing gotcha at the expense of intellectual discourse”

You really do come across as petulant and immature when it comes to Easterly. The way you framed this post, hell the way you continuously built this issue up on twitter, was spiteful and insincere. Bill doesn’t need to understand the ins and outs of Afghanistan’s society in order to critique “our” (and just so we’re really clear, when I say “our” I mean the US gov’t) our approach is flawed and naive.

In fact, if anything, the fact that that graphic isn’t representative of the way Afghanistan really works, just makes Bill’s point that much more salient. If the most prestigious newspaper in the US doesn’t get the country, who’s to say our policymakers can?

Hell, I’m Pathan/Pushton, and I don’t understand much of it. Fortunately, I don’t pretend to know what’s best for the country or the people there, I just know what doesn’t work and what hasn’t been working.

And that lack of knowledge and that confusion is precisely Bill’s point.

Which you would’ve seen if you weren’t so rabidly against him.
—-

Please don’t give this person any more blog time, Bill. She is incredibly disingenuous and manipulative.

Well , I’d like to see him do that too. At least with respect to Afghanistan, since in human rights and development issues, Bill has been remarkably unresponsive. If you read through those posts and comments, you will see that a lot of people — both in favor, or critical of Bill’s position — were stating that they would like to see him respond to his critics. I would have greatly enjoyed being rebutted on substance, for it would help me frame my own views on the issue too…

I think Transitionland has a point about Bill’s lack of responsiveness to critics, and his overall negative attitude, or snarkiness. Don’t take her word for it: just go read the “evaluation” of the blog that Bill carried out… many readers complained of the lack of ‘what works’stories, of his snarkiness, etc.

You really should not be giving as much prominence to her “critique” as you have here. Her responses to you are laughable.

Go read Easterly’s Afghanistan “nation-building” posts before that. I SERIOUSLY doubt he was mocking the article because he thought it was incorrect. His Afghanistan commentary follows a consistent pattern. Compare the post in question (http://aidwatchers.com/2010/01/whats-so-hard-about-nation-building/) with these:

1. http://aidwatchers.com/2009/12/where-was-the-person-in-the-room-who-laughed-out-loud/

2. http://aidwatchers.com/2009/12/is-our-nation-building-a-wee-too-ambitious-the-prosecution-rests/

3. http://aidwatchers.com/2009/10/will-aid-escalation-finally-crash-in-the-mountains-of-afghanistan/