The "Aircraft Carrier Theory" or how reforms can really happen - with practical applications for Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc

[Dromikaites]

Right now some very interesting things (from a political science perspective) happen in Romania.

As you may know, in 1993 Romania has signed the EU Association Treaty, a document similar to the one which has triggered the current events in Ukraine.

From 1993 till 2007 the successive Romanian governments were coerced by the EU into adopting comprehensive reforms aimed at reducing the bureaucracy, separation-of-powers, instituting the rule of law, etc.

In 2007 the level of those reforms was considered sufficient enough for Romania to become a member of the EU. From the ordinary Romanians' perspective, what has visibly changed for the better from 1993 till 2007 was a major reduction in bureaucracy and a very slight increase in the standard of living. (In the Romanian context of 2007 "major reduction in bureaucracy" meant that the bureaucracy moved from "hellish" to "bearable if you had nerves of steel".) What the Romanians didn't see from 1993 to 2007 was the local oligarchs and the corrupt politicians being investigated.

But guess what? From 2007 till June 2013 they didn't see the politicians and oligarchs being prosecuted either, in spite of the fact Romania was now full member of the European Union. And in spite of the fact the EU was still holding the Romanian governments responsible for continuing the reforms.

The first major breakthrough happened in the summer of 2013, when the former prime-minister who had worked the hardest to get Romania into the EU was finally sent behind bars. Why? Because while pushing hard for the EU integration he was also robbing the country blind.

Then in late autumn of 2013 it was the turn of the first round of oligarchs. Amusing enough, they were sent behind bars for tax-evasion related to football players transfers (a lot of oligarchs got to own football clubs). Things started to look more and more like the anti-corruption was stepping up and the judicial system was finally working as it should.

And then Crimea and the Ukrainian crisis happened and an interesting correlation was noticed by the local journalists.

The more high-ranking American officials were visiting Romania, the more crooked politicians and oligarchs were arrested. That gave birth to what the Romanian media calls "The Aircraft Carrier Theory".

According to that theory, the events in Ukraine have shown how vulnerable a corrupt state is.

Since the Americans are currently operating two military bases in Romania and since thanks to Putin's stunts in Ukraine NATO has decided to build a permanent presence somewhere in the Eastern Europe, the local journalists speculate that Romania is about to become an "Aircraft Carrier". And in order for NATO to be fully confident that the corrupt politicians won't screw things up (from slowing down the building of the military bases to inflating the expenses or plainly selling classified information to the Russians), a major housecleaning operation is under way.

And it is major indeed: Romania has 40 counties, each led by an elected President of the County Council. Out of those 40, 6 are already in jail and the rest are prosecuted. Not a single one was deemed clean enough by the prosecution office. Then, last week, the FBI handed over to the Romanian Ministry of Justice a huge amount of documents indicating a large number of present and past cabinet members were involved in massive corruption cases. The way the Romanian journalists put it, the FBI gave the prosecutors a "turnkey case".

Not wishing to be left behind by the FBI, the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) started to provide evidence on several other corruption cases, involving among others the current Prime Minister and his close collaborators. The current Prime Minister had officially announced he's running for President before the SRI started to spill the beans. Which, if the things go at the same speed as they did lately, means he might be in jail before the elections take place.

What is the takeaway from all this, and how is this relevant for other places where the West tries to build up a functional democracy?

1) It takes a long time (as in from 1993 till 2014 - 21 long years) of constant supervision and funding in order to get to the point a previously rotten-to-the-core system starts to function properly. Quick fixes don't work;

2) 9 years (Iraq) or 13 years (Afghanistan) are not enough. If the West really wants to make a difference, the West needs to be committed for at least 20 years (a whole generation);

3) The reforms should be as complex and as comprehensive as those forced by the EU down the throats of the new members. The governments in the countries the West intends to reform need to be under constant pressure and constant supervision, no matter how much the local politicians would hate that. The general population would love to see the politicians coerced into doing the right thing.

At his point I will explain why free and fair elections are not enough. Never ever.

Free elections means only one thing. That the citizens can freely chose among the candidates the parties put forward.

However a party means a lot of money and a lot of work in order to be able to win the elections. Which means somebody needs to pay a lot of money for that party to operate.

The consequence is in most of the new democracies, the parties are businesses which recover their investments and make profits by getting to power and grafting the taxpayers money.

Therefore free and fair elections by themselves guarantee the voters freely and fairly chose among certified thieves.

The only way to eliminate the corrupt politicians (the way the "Aircraft Carrier" is cleansed now) is to force the real separation between the politicians on one side and the justice and police on the other side.

That took 20 years in Romania to happen, and it would be naive to imagine it could happen faster somewhere else in the world, especially in places where the Western system of values is significantly different than the local culture. If nothing else 20 years are needed for the key people versed in "the old ways" to retire because of old age, and to make room for the people "indoctrinated" by the West into the "new ways".

[Maiar93]

Very interesting post! This was a good read.

I agree completely with what you said. I guess I'm a little bit sorry that there's nothing I found that I wanted to object to(could be due to the weekend) but you're talking lots of sense here.

[Gatsby]

That was a good read. I think it is good to develop a sense of perspective about how deeply entrenched even more mundane cultural and political problems, such as corruption and institutionalised theft, can be; never mind tribalism and religious fanaticism.

[I WUB PUGS]

So your one example of successful nation building is from a country that had roads, schools, heavy industry, codified laws, energy infrastructure, ports, and any number of other modern necessities for a modern state and you think this puts it at all in the same column as Afghanistan? You think 20 years in Romania is somehow the magic number when Afghanistan has had 13 years and will probably get at least another 5 (FYI, we're still deeply involved in Iraq so the clock didn't stop at 9 years).

Your time = progress is missing a lot of support. I'd counter with progress = progress. Could take a week or 20 years. I don't think 20 years is too bright on our part. At some point you should cut your losses. By your model, the US would still be in Vietnam since we were never going to invade the North. We've got a better partnership with the Vietnamese as a unified country than we ever did with the South alone and we started building that partnership not too long after the South fell. Yay pragmatism!

[Dromikaites]

So your one example of successful nation building is from a country that had roads, schools, heavy industry, codified laws, energy infrastructure, ports, and any number of other modern necessities for a modern state and you think this puts it at all in the same column as Afghanistan? You think 20 years in Romania is somehow the magic number when Afghanistan has had 13 years and will probably get at least another 5 (FYI, we're still deeply involved in Iraq so the clock didn't stop at 9 years).

My example says exactly that:

If for a country like Romania it takes 20 years to make things work, Iraq or Afghanistan would require at least that much time and effort invested, if not more. Therefore maybe it would have been a good idea to spend more time in Iraq and not to withdraw from Afghanistan just yet.

Your time = progress is missing a lot of support. I'd counter with progress = progress. Could take a week or 20 years. I don't think 20 years is too bright on our part. At some point you should cut your losses. By your model, the US would still be in Vietnam since we were never going to invade the North.

The list of the causes for the American failure in Vietnam is extremely long. Not invading the North is only one of them.

We've got a better partnership with the Vietnamese as a unified country than we ever did with the South alone and we started building that partnership not too long after the South fell. Yay pragmatism!

You may want to elaborate on that part.

[Condottiere 40K]

There are unique factors involved in each country.

Vietnam was a liberation struggle, Afghanistan devolved into a tribal and an ideological one with a lot of vested outside interests stirring the pot.

[I WUB PUGS]

And Iraq had a sectarian split that had been festering under Saddam and only intensified under US occupation as the Sunnis and Shias separated and formed homogeneous cities/provinces/neighborhoods beholden to local militias. A Shia kleptocrat at the top of the pyramid didn't help much more than having a Sunni one.

[hellheaven1987]

OP's observation does not fit on Philippine though.

[I WUB PUGS]

The US made guarantees as early as 1973 under Nixon. Under Ford and Carter we made even more progress towards "normalization" of relations. However things were complicated by our focus on China which also started under Nixon. You may not be aware of this, but the People's Republic of China was an ally of the US during the Cold War and we would come to each others aid against the Soviets in the event that either was attacked. However, Hanoi was an ally of Moscow, not Beijing. Vietnam fought a war with the PRC and we didn't much like their moves in the rest of Southeast Asia, but all along the road, despite the hiccups, we sought normalization of relations.

The biggest sticking points early on were Vietnam seeking reparations and the US getting all of its MIAs/POWs back which proved to be a problem for a number of reasons. IIRC we got them all back during Reagan's time in office. The Cold War complicated things for sure, but once that ended, Vietnam was one of the first nations we started investing in. To this day its pretty easy for a US business to go over there and do business. Pretty good market and the potential for growth is a big draw.

So anyway, look it up. Nixon and Kissinger saw no reason to keep Vietnam an enemy. Black and white isn't real and friend or foe is only temporary.

And whoa, gotta take a step back from that whole "should've invaded the North line". Romania might not be here if that was the case. Moscow drew a pretty serious line in the sand there. Getting the world blown up over Vietnam sounds pretty dumb. Thank god for Tricky Dick and the magnificent Jew.






Edit: And again, what do you mean we should have spent more time on Iraq. By my count, we invaded, and we never left, we just withdrew our boots. We never pulled our diplomatic or economic missions. That's what you're pushing for with your Romania example. I don't recall NATO troops occupying Bucharest, just bureaucrats.

[Dromikaites]

The big part missing from Iraq and Afghanistan is what the EU is doing in the new member states: financing the rebuilding of those countries. Not aid, but co-financing.

What is the difference? When a country receives aid, money fall from the sky. When a country gets into a EU-like co-funding program, the country needs to contribute to the financing of the project. That forces the governments to be more careful at least with that part of taxpayers' money. And to do some long-term planning and stick to it no matter who comes out of the next round of elections.

For instance, Afghanistan needs a lot of low-tech stuff like sewage pipes and water taps.

One bad way to build Afghanistan's sewage system would be to have say a German company build it, bringing everything from Germany and maybe hiring some local unskilled workers to dig the ditches.

An EU-style way of doing it would be to force the Afghan government to co-finance some local construction companies, some local pipe factories, etc. They would still buy stuff from Germany, but instead of buying the ready-made pipes they would buy the machine tools needed to manufacture pipes locally. The Afghan construction company would gather probably the majority of civil engineers Afghanistan currently has and they might be assisted by a German engineer as consultant, etc. At some point in the future some of those engineers would leave and form their own construction companies, etc.

That approach not only gets the job done but it builds the local capacities on the horizontal. And yeah, the pipe factories and the civil engineer companies would probably be owned by the local warlords or politicians.

That is still better than having those guys with the only options to enrich themselves through straight out grafting or growing poppies.

[I WUB PUGS]

You are aware that if 100% of the GDP was taxed by the Afghan government that they still couldn't pay for even their Police and Army.

What you are proposing isn't even a possibility in the most fanciful of plans. There can be no co-financing or domestic industry because Afghanistan has more in common with the Australian Outback in Mad Max than it does any EU project in the former BLOC.

And I'm simply baffled that you think Afghanistan has the educated persons available in the country to perform the roles you are suggesting of them.

[Dromikaites]

And I'm simply baffled that you think Afghanistan has the educated persons available in the country to perform the roles you are suggesting of them.

Let's say I am not a complete stranger when it comes to nowadays Afghanistan.

Beside, did you know that in 1948, when the communists took power in Romania, 82% of the Romanian population was both rural and illiterate?

In just 20 years Romania had a diversified industry, producing everything from mainframe computers to cars and airplanes. 20 years. By 1974 the rural population had fallen below 50% (it is still large, at 43% today)

How did the commies manage all that in just 20 years?

Exactly the way I suggested to go ahead with building Afghanistan's sewage.

They gathered all the engineers Romania still had, and who had not emigrated after 1945 (not that many left) and they concentrated them into a handful of companies, while in the same time tasking them to double as professors in the Technical Universities.

They also got technical Soviet advisers to help training the new batches of engineers. Young peasants learned first to read and write and then the math-skilled ones were pressed into studying engineering.

In addition to that the most important things the commies did was to set up 5 year plans Soviet style, so the whole process can be coordinated, and they negotiated with the industrialized communist countries (Democrat Republic of Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union) that instead of exporting raw materials, Romania should export processed stuff (e.g. instead of exporting wood pulp, to export paper). The East Germans would provide the paper factory at turnkey and would train the Romanians to operate it, and in return Romania would deliver the factory's worth in paper. the Soviets would provide the fertilizer plant and the Romanians would deliver fertilizers, etc.

One can imagine how tricky it was to operate a state-of-the-art paper factory with ex-farm boys freshly alphabetized and with those early "engineers" who had a 2-year crash course for something which in Romania takes 5 years to study.

Nevertheless it did work within 20 years.

The EU-style development programs operate along the same strategic guidelines followed by the commies: the governments receiving funding are required to develop sectorial strategies, within those sectorial strategies there are multi-annual programs, those programs consist in buying Western equipment and training for the local companies, etc.

It is good for the Western taxpayers because they get jobs providing the equipment the Eastern Europe needs and it is great for the East Europeans because they get everything through co-financing, that is at a fraction of the cost.

Now back to Afghanistan, those 10 civil engineers still alive there are quite likely better than the 1951 typical Romanian "farmboy-engineer", etc.

One only needs to collect all the educated Afghans in a few companies, institute a multi-year strategy, etc. A 31 million population makes a larger internal market than Romania had in 1948 (18 million).

Is paying wages a problem? That issue existed also in the 1950s Romania. How was that solved back then? "The brigadiers". "The brigadiers" were "volunteers" who worked for food instead of pay. Many of them might have actually been real volunteers given the level of poverty at the end of WW2.

All it is needed is to have a system for collecting and distributing food. That is if one absolutely wants to avoid the more logical way of providing the needed funds and closely supervising they are not embezzled or grafted. In this respect the EU has a huge amount of accumulated know-how on how to keep the politicians hands off the EU money. No amount of Afghan skill can defeat an EU auditor.

So if one can drag a 82% illiterate rural population into a decently industrialized economy in just 20 years, we know that at least in one case it was possible. And it has been done before with "tools" much more blunt and with less capital than what the EU has today.

[I WUB PUGS]

And this misses the giant elephant in the room which is...............the security concerns that despite billions of dollars and thousands of lives hasn't improved at all. Its just whack-a-mole.

The US led mission built schools, funded industry, medicine, irrigation, sewage, everything. Hasn't made a difference.

So we grab up the 10 civil engineers. Cool. Its a gigantic country that will take decades (which time is nothing to you apparently) to get on its feet while they simultaneously shuttle these handful around while training new engineers. All the while the country still has an insurgency in every corner. Fantasy.

Are you not familiar with the term - ROI?

And you avoided my point about how Afghanistan even taxed at 100% would still fall short of the budget requirements to JUST pay the Police and Army. You would still have to have external aid funding 100% of these ventures...............just like they are now, so no, Afghanistan and Romania cannot be similar unless hey "they'll just work for food" which is a load of crap.

The Afghans still see it as "why work for X when I can just grow poppy and barely work at all". Even the cash crop replacement programs have fallen flat on their face despite being in place for over a decade. Its poppy or nothing.

So if one can drag a 82% illiterate rural population into a decently industrialized economy in just 20 years, we know that at least in one case it was possible. And it has been done before with "tools" much more blunt and with less capital than what the EU has today.

BTW this is a massive strawman. I never disputed that nation building was impossible. Clearly it isn't with the industrializations and retoolings we've seen over the last 150 years. Whether its the leaps done by Japan over 100 years ago or the 1990s Chinese boom or the emergence of Poland and Vietnam as economic mini-powers. Not disputing it at all. What I am disputing is that you can expect Afghanistan to respond to the same measures imposed in Romania. You are now citing what the Commies did. Good, I already did that citing all the infrastructure that they built that still stands in Afghanistan today. That was a monumental achievement. Unlike Romania in the post-Cold War era, Afghanistan doesn't have the lure of capital and the examples of success. It has been in a near constant state of war for almost 40 years. Unlike Romania where the Commies built schools and industry and all the other stuff that the Capitalists were able to lean back on, there is practically nothing in Afghanistan since the Soviets blew up half of it and the Taliban managed to run 45% of it into the ground so you've got a sliver of infrastructure left. Can't even power Kabul on a consistent basis. Yes, the largest city and capital that has practically no sewage system and rolling blackouts. This, after more than a decade of direct aid and investment.

The Afghans are idle. Leave them be.

[Love Mountain]

Despite Pugs' negative response I can completely see what you mean Drom. If you want to grow a healthy and friendly country, you need to commit time and resources to do it. You can't apply a band-aid and then go home. You have to stay and enforce "Democracy" for a minimum of two decades. Is it profitable? Probably not at first, but eventually it will pay itself off in the long terms both financially and politically.

[I WUB PUGS]

There needs to be markers of improvement. If there aren't any then you are just confusing persistence for insanity.

Suky, we've well passed the point where any potential return from Afghanistan at least financially would not meet its investment for potentially hundreds of years and that's before we factor in inflation. Do they not have the term "money pit" outside of the us?

And honestly, I take gross exception to this notion that we put a band-aid on Iraq and Afghanistan. Spent more money than the EU would ever dream of spending on even 10 potential EU candidates and lost thousands of lives and shattered 10's of thousands more.

Band-aid my ass.

[Condottiere 40K]

Poppy production is probably a bigger national security concern for Russia and Iran than America.

[I WUB PUGS]

It is. Let them deal with it. Even if we strip mined all of Afghanistan and enslaved the Afghans we'd never recover the nearly $200B we've spent.

Oh and I'm just using some numbers from Daily Beast that are 2013 raw numbers. Some studies and fringe-ish web sources are saying its at or near $1T. This doesn't include the long-term costs for our armed forces and veterans.

[Dromikaites]

Humm, let's see?

Did anybody bother to dust-off the "protected villages"/"strategic hamlets" concept? It failed in Vietnam because it was implemented in a sloppy way, cutting corners and speeding things up in the quest for quick results. If planning on the other hand works with a 20 years horizon (4 5-years-plans) then maybe the "protected villages" can be implemented.

I took part in a conference discussing both security and the poppy crops. The Romanian officers, many of them in their early 60s, had a rather good grasp at how things were done before 1989. They were too young to have witnessed the '50s as adults, but they had to learn about that period extensively as part of their "political education" classes.

Contrary to what the name might suggest, those "political education" classes were not about "the merits of socialism" (well, some where) but about "how to build socialism". As in "how to organize things in order to induce large-scale social and economic transformations".

The way the Romanians involved in Afghanistan were discussing about the connection between addressing the agricultural issues and the security of the Afghan villages seemed to sound like Martian for most of the other participants outside the ex-Warsaw Pact. With one notable exception. The EU bureaucrats. Those guys seemed to be pretty much on the same wavelength.

But there is a glitch: the EU programs are focusing on rural development while the security programs are handled mainly by the US. That way many balls get dropped by one partner or the other.

I don't want to imply the EU would have done a much better job at security. What I can say though is for sure the EU bureaucrats and the ex-Warsaw Pact officers involved in Afghanistan seemed to be on the same page more than say, the EU military officers or the Americans were (civilians and military alike).

We might dislike the EU bureaucratic approach, but it might be more appropriate for certain tasks like rebuilding a country's economy while restructuring its political system in the same time.

As for the Afghan government not being able to collect enough taxes to pay for the army and the police, let alone everything else, that issue cannot be addressed by having the foreigners build stuff for the Afghans using imported materials. Even if that is done for free.

The way it can be addressed is by taking care of the very basics first. And the base of all economic activity is food. If a country can feed its population, everything else can be developed on top of food.

Case in point: right now there is a debate whether the value of the Afghan mineral resources is 3 trillion or 30 trillion USD.

Let's say it's 3 trillion "only". If the Afghan agriculture can produce enough food to feed both the peasants and the miners, it can be easily imagined a "Soviet Union in the '30s" scenario where the lack of capital is simply compensated by feeding the miners who pull out the minerals with pickaxes. I am deliberately exaggerating to create a more vivid picture.

Would that mineral be more "expensive" than one mined with modern equipment?!

It depends on how one calculates. There is an old accounting maxim that "price is a certainty while cost is just an opinion."

It might be that on paper the food equivalent needed to extract a kilo of gold is worth more than a kilo of gold. Except in the case where the Afghan food cannot actually be sold on the international market because of logistic impossibilities.

While we cannot actually judge the "true value" of the Afghan food production, as long as that covers the needs of the Afghan population, the Afghans can use that food to mine those 3 trillion USD out of their soil and cash in enough to pay the army, police, nurses, doctors, teachers, etc.

If the Afghans would mine those resources with shovels and pickaxes they might get the necessary funds in like 100 years. And here is where the West can step in: if everything is planned in an integrated way, from food to mining, then the West can provide the trucks and excavators needed to mine the resources reasonably fast, so the State Budget's needs are met and the Western trucks and excavators are paid for.

The twist? You cannot let the free market to take care of everything, because the free market might take a long time to sync the food production with the mining.

That is why for such early stages in industrializing a country plans work better. So we're back to the EU bureaucratic sectorial strategies and programs for implementing such strategies in practice, etc.

[I WUB PUGS]

Are you just going to post walls of text that divert away from your own OP?

Your OP focuses on outlaying a plan that's basically a rehash of how Romania became a semi-decent country after the fall of Communism. And you wish to apply this model to places like Syria, Iraq and Afganistan. I'm only taking exception to Afghanistan because its the one place I've been of the 3 and found myself appalled at the waste at all levels but even more appalled at how idle the Afghans are.

First you went off track by going back to BEFORE COMMUNISM to when Romania was rural and illiterate to draw a parallel with Afghanistan, but that's not your OP, your OP is about Romania after Communism using EU incentives to become what it is now. In order for Romania to get to the point that you're wishing to start from you need.........COMMUNISM to do all of the funding and manhandle the pieces into place which is directly counter to what you are suggesting in your OP. So what the ?

Secondly, you're still ignoring the security concerns almost completely, no, I'm gonna say you're ignoring them completely because outside of recognizing that they exist, you've not addressed them. The United States of America has spent or will spend directly or indirectly on Afghanistan estimates between 1 and 2 trillion dollars. Possibly more depending on Veterans costs in the future. As I stated, even if we did do something like impose communism or as I termed it - "enslaving the Afghans" and began strip mining with whatever equipment, we wouldn't see an ROI for potentially decades or longer.

Third - you can't get to point three without acknowledging point 2 and actually solving the security concern which in all likelihood ends up costing us 10's of thousands of lives and trillions more in spending. Basically a full scale occupation that we start over with and no one, not us, not the Afghans not even the Hawkiest of Hawks has any interest in doing another surge of even 5000 let along 500,000.

So basically what you're doing here is ridiculing what we've been doing or not doing for the last 13 years, except that isn't your OP. Your OP simply states that if we just stay a little longer (10-20 years) that it will shake out and Afghanistan will be a paradise.

Well I think you're full of and delusional to think that we can stay that long or would ever want to.

You know what advantage you've totally ignored so far the Romanians had? THE ROMANIANS WERE THE ONES THAT WANTED TO DO THE REFORMS IN THE 40s and 50s and the 90s. THE ROMANIAN COMMUNISTS WERE LEADING THE CHARGE TO URBANIZE THE COUNTRY. AND THE ROMANIAN CAPITALISTS WERE THE ONES LEADING THE CHARGE IN THE 90s. Romanians, thousands of them were on board and willing to pull their country up by their own boot straps.

You recognize this with your example. You think we just need to have some incentives to get the Afghans going. Well we've had all the incentives in the world for over a decade. We've bled for their security. It hasn't mattered.

And as for the tangent you've gone off on which has nothing to do with your OP........... well what we've done for the last 13 years, failure or whatever, doesn't much matter and staying won't help. Your criticisms don't amount to anything and as for your ideas of how to fix the country while ignoring the security concerns, well why don't you set to work on building us a time machine.

This doesn't even belong in the mudpit anymore. If you want to talk about what we've done wrong and what we should've done from the start (not your OP at all) then ask a mod to move it to the Academy. This isn't current. As for me. I've said my bit. Its Friday and I'm leaving in 16 minutes and I don't bother with TWC on the weekend since this is just mindless entertainment during working hours.

[Dromikaites]

@I WUB PUGS:

Point 1 in the OP says that it takes 20 years before a truly visible change can be noticed. In the 19th year it looks like 19 years have been totally wasted. So if the decision is made to "cut the losses" in the 19th year then indeed 19 years are lost. The key idea is exactly this: for a very long time the progress would be invisible.

Point 2 in the OP says "how long" is that "very long time". Around 20 years. The first post is about the apparent lack of real progress for a long time, this second point is about the duration of the lack of apparent progress.

Point 3 in the OP says there should be a comprehensive (as in "broad front"), coordinated (as in a "single master plan"), adequately funded and closely monitored intervention.

That is a very tall order because the close monitoring might seem to indicate all effort is in vain for the first 19 years and 11 months. Beside, what if the duration of the process is actually not 20 years but 22 and 3 months. Who could tell in advance anything else except the order of magnitude?!

The apparent lack of results coupled with the broad front and a very complex master plan would expose the authors of the plan to all sorts of criticism. The temptation to "cut the losses will be very high. Especially since nobody can actually tell if results would be visible after exactly 20 years. Or 21 years. Or maybe 22.

"Around 20 years" means the time needed to see meaningful change is not 50, nor 100 years, but for most of the democratic countries it might still mean 4-5 presidential terms or parliamentary terms.

Politicians love "showing results". Therefore having to wait "some 20 years but nothing more precise than that" before results are visible might not sit well with most of the politicians.

That is why supranational bureaucracies might be better suited for such tasks.

That is the takeaway of the OP in more words than initially stated.

The discussion which followed about the communist style industrialization (or EU style re-industrialization) and Afghanistan was caused by your arguments that "Afghanistan is different" (no, it isn't hence the communist roads built during the Soviet occupation), "security problems are unmanageable" (yes, if they aren't integrated in a wide-ranging master plan, if there are too many cooks boiling the same broth in parallel) and ultimately "the Afghans are lazy" (why didn't you start with that, it would have stopped the debate then and there. After all another universal truth is the Catholics and the blacks are also lazy).