Now Comes the Harder Part

In his latest Washington Post column about Joe Biden’s first 100 days, David Ignatius makes one significant observation:

President Biden’s first 100 days in foreign policy have been more about undoing than doing — fixing the messes he inherited but not yet building a new strategy. Meanwhile, a restless world is testing Biden, pushing at the margins, and it won’t wait long for answers.

or, said another way, the Biden presidency began with undoing. Now comes the harder part.

He cites some interesting statistics:

I’ve been worried that we will leave behind a country that will implode under a Taliban onslaught, requiring “cold hearts and strong stomachs” as a desperate population pleads for help. But Saad Mohseni, the head of Moby Group, the biggest media company in the country, told me Tuesday that this scenario is unnecessarily bleak. Afghanistan won’t simply collapse back into the dark ages of Taliban rule.

“The Americans don’t realize they’ve transformed a whole nation,” Mohseni argues. He rattles off some statistics: The population is now 50 percent urban; 80 percent of the people watch television; 70 percent have a mobile phone; the literacy rate has gone from 10 percent in 2001 to more than 50 percent today. If Afghanistan gets through the first bloody months after America’s departure, the Taliban will have to make concessions, he contends. That’s the bet we should make, with money and training and other support.

I have one word for him: Iran. Iran’s literacy rate at the time of the Iranian Revolution was about what Afghanistan’s is now and its population was largely urban. Somehow a relatively small number of zealots managed to overthrow an existing government a heckuva lot more stable than the Kabul government and have ruled the country for 40 years.

And one observation: it’s not hard to increase the literacy rate from a baseline in which girls aren’t being educated at all.