[bailaviborita]

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art...m-in-naglandia

In 1928 Henry Ford set out to establish a carbon copy of an American town along with an industrialized rubber plantation deep in a Rhode Island-sized piece of Brazilian Amazonia. After upsetting the natives with American ways of doing things and failing to grow sufficient amounts of rubber trees, Ford’s son ended the experiment by capping the losses of “Fordlandia” at $20 million in 1945. Back in 1922, as if to explain this future debacle, the Washington Post had used the term “Fordism” to mean “Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations.” Today, we could use the term “Petraeusism” to mean “U.S military efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of U.S. military limitations.” Likewise, we could use the name “Naglandia” to describe Afghanistan, a place where, much like Ford had attempted to do in the Amazon, the U.S. has attempted to establish a “New America,” albeit with the modern and contradictory political correctness that comes with our current obsession with “absolute tolerance” and our culturally-biased interpretation of Galula’s population-centricity in counterinsurgent activities. As if in some kind of twisted Shakespearean comedic tragedy, the U.S. military, traditionally an organization filled with political conservatives and Peace Corps-doubting Thomas’s, has turned itself into an organization that believes there is a Thomas Jefferson inside every Afghan and the solution to jump-starting an economy is to throw money at it. If only our losses could be capped in another seven years at the similar $240 million (inflation-adjusted figure) of Ford’s Amazon experiment.