What has failed in Afghanistan is the Western belief that it can transform illiberal societies and build decent states in regions that are far away from the Western zone of liberal-democratic stability — with rather modest engagement.
This belief was a key element of the post–Cold war Western worldview, based on the assumption that after the end of systemic competition, all countries and regions would, earlier or later transform into liberal-democratic states.
The role of the US and its European allies in this "new world order" was to accelerate the change that would come anyway, by pushing back against the forces still stuck in the past, and by supporting liberal-democratic forces, representing the future.
This whole approach has been frustrated not just at the periphery, Afghanistan and Iraq, but also at the center, in Russia and China.
Question is, where do we go from here? In my view, interest in liberal-democratic stability still overwhelming. Yet we should see it as our interest, not as something written into history as an inevitable future. A pro-democracy foreign policy must be far more strategic.
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