McPheet.com

Back to Afghanistan. As you may recall, I
recommended in October that the US
should invade Afghanistan and occupy the country for several decades in
order to firmly plant the seeds of democracy in that troubled country. From
the information available at the time, it looked like the U.S. was going to
have to do the hard work of toppling the Taliban and rooting out al-Qaida in
the Afghan caves. In fact, almost all the ground troops involved in those
activities have been Afghans of the Northern Alliance or of the various
Pashtun tribes. This had the effect of keeping Americans out of harm’s way,
but at the cost of forfeiting much of our legitimacy in keeping troops in
Afghanistan to ensure a satisfactory future for the country over the
long-term. Instead, a U.N. mediation team has put together an agreement
among the various Afghan factions for a temporary coalition government.

(By the way, can anyone give me an example of one of these U.N.-backed
interim governments that have successfully made the transition to a stable
democracy, or even to a stable government? I can’t recall any of these
United Nations nation-building experiments that has worked at all.)

Admittedly, my vision of a slow U.S.-guided transition to a free,
democratic Afghanistan was and is optimistic.  The Afghan people tend
to rally together to throw off foreign occupation (the Soviets failed there,
as did the British a hundred years earlier). But, ultimately, the U.S.
toppled the semi-stable Taliban regime, so we have a responsibility to help
put into place a new stable government for the country.

There’s much lamenting, in this last week of the year, about 2001 being
an annus horribilis. (New Latin for "horrible year," a phrase coined
by Queen Elizabeth to describe the state of the British monarchy in 1992.
Her sons Charles and Andrew got divorced, she agreed to pay income taxes for
the first time, and Windsor Castle was seriously damaged by fire.) In some
ways, it’s true. The country has slipped into recession, and we’ll never
forget September 11.

In my own life 2001 was a tough year, at least professionally. In
January, my new boss observed that I didn’t really like my job and that I
wasn’t doing it very well. Over the next three months, I came to agree with
him, and in the succeeding three months I couldn’t find anything within
Microsoft that I thought would be any better. So, in August I left a great
paycheck and great benefits behind. I started a business, perhaps
haphazardly, and it’s gone nowhere. Finally, in November, I took a job that
paid little more than minimum wage, just to have some money coming in.

And yet… it’s hard for me to look back at things and say, "Gee, it was
so horrible." Over the past ten years, since I started listening to personal
development materials, I’ve become so much less inclined to see bad things
going on around me, and I’m a much happier person. (In fact, people
sometimes ask me what it is I’m so happy about.) Now, the challenge for me
is to find ways to apply what I’ve learned to getting more of what I want
out of life.

So, as my New Year’s Resolution, I plan on making some reports in this
column about what I’ve learned and what I’m doing.