Um, how is this NOT nation-building? Sure it might look different from traditional nation-building efforts that we’ve seen in the past – and thankfully the US is not trying to turn Afghanistan into a western-modeled nation state – but this is still pretty clearly an effort by the US government to deeply embed itself in the country’s economic development, governance, infrastructure and security efforts. And if building capacity in government ministries isn’t nation building then clearly we have very different definitions of what nation building represents.

Um, for all the reasons I detailed? I’ll agree with Michael that we evidently have two different definitions of nation building. As such, I don’t really know what we can discuss. Michael’s definition is too binary for me to accept as a genuine case. (“NOT nation building might look something like a narrowly-focused counter-terrorism operation in Afghanistan.”) We used to have a grandiose and ill-defined commitment to shaping Afghan society that George Bush analogized to the Marshall Plan. Now we have the sponsorship of the security and agricultural sectors, and all of that geared toward the delivery of short-term results. Even taking Michael’s “nothin’ but counterterrorism” negative-definition of nation-building, he has to concede that we have much less nation-building than we used to have. We’re finally out of Central Asian Valhalla territory. Ask a feminist.

Now, maybe we’re not out of it as much as Michael would like. There we have the heart of our disagreement. But there’s something between nation-building and counterterrorism. And whether Michael recognizes it or not, it’s called counterinsurgency.