From a pragmatic point of view, a stable, pro-west democracy would be very beneficial in a resource rich country such as Afghanistan, and could help stabilise the region, and my personal point of view is that the Afghan people deserve a stable democracy.
Oh, without doubt the Afghan people deserve a stable democracy. Unfortunately, there are some major impediments to that. First and foremost, their *cough* government is completely corrupt and totally ineffective. Karzai has lined the pockets of his friends, his family and himself with American aid money, and almost none of it is getting to the people who need it. His government has done absolutely nothing except make token shouts of outrage if a drone hitting an Taliban stronghold also kills the families of the terrorists when in reality, he's secretly trying to negotiate a deal with the Taliban to let them have the parts of Afghanistan they want so long as they leave him in power.
The Afghan police and army are infiltrated with Taliban, and those that aren't untrustworthy are usually stoned out of their minds. This, after 9 years of "training". Our military privately concedes that none of the Afghan military or police show even the slightest sign of ever being ready to step up and protect the country. They are nearly all uneducated and illiterate and, with the exception of those that are Taliban plants, run at the first sign of trouble.
If that isn't wasn't enough to overcome, Afghanistan is a tribal society. Tribal. Each tribe has its own set of laws, its own council of elders, and they don't give a fat flying fig what some yahoo they've never seen or heard or read about (since few areas have tv, radio or inhabitants able to read) in Kabul. They conduct their tribes as they have always done, except now they've got a bunch of armed foreigners trying to get their loyalty with a pretty please during the day while armed Taliban sweep in by night to chop the hands and/or heads off of anyone who'd been seen talking to NATO soldiers. Add to that the Wikileaks debaucle that had every Afghani who'd ever helped the US in a wild-eyed panic, and nobody is telling our soldiers anything about anything. Complete shut-down, complete stale-mate.
There's a reason the Russians went bankrupt trying to "tame" Afghanistan. We're on the same well-worn path. We cannot change by force a society that has not evolved to the point of being able to change itself. I mean, that's so obvious. We are trying to make them into little mini-USA yeah-democracy clones, when
they are a proud, tribal society that wants to live as their fathers lived, and their fathers before them.
The one thing we could have done for Afghanistan was to remove the Taliban permanently, but we lost that opportunity because of utterly stupid decisions in the Pentagon that didn't put enough boots on the ground to seal the deal in Tora Bora. Once we lost that, we effectively lost the Taliban and the war. As a fun side benefit, Taliban and Al Qaeda have now had nearly a decade to screw with Pakistan and boy, they are better at what they do than we are at what we do.
I'm incredibly proud of the NATO soldiers who have served in Afghanistan. They have helped build schools, infrastructure, roads. But they cannot build a nation. People must actually understand the concept of freedom and democracy, as did the Egyptians, then be willing to fight for them. We are trying to force them upon a country that is not cohesive enough, not educated enough, not world-aware enough to understand these concepts or to want to fight for them. Forcing other nations into accepting what
we, the west, believe they need or deserve when they do not want it and can't truly understand it results in massive wealth and corruption in the top 1%, confusion and fear in the rest of the country. It hasn't worked, and it can't work.
It's a bitter taste in my mouth, since I had such high hopes of freeing them from the Taliban's oppression. But we made too many mistakes early on, and the opportunity was squandered. It's over.