They Just Don't Deserve Us

Astoundingly enough, Britain's latest attempt to civilise Afghanistan has proved a rather costly flop, with aid money paying for corruption and human rights abuses despite being disbursed by the kind of people who considered Cressida Dick and Boris Johnson fit for high office. As a price worth paying for the Special Relationship, the UK threw money at American objectives, only for its minor disagreements with US strategy to be loftily ignored. Britain spent three and a half thousand million in aid over the two decades to 2020, of which some seventy per cent was spaffed after 2014; though this may merely be the result of some creative accounting whereby the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat accomplices redefined paramilitary counter-insurgency operations as humanitarian investments. Despite what one might imagine from their record at home, successive British administrations managed to achieve "an extreme form of state capture, which benefited a narrow group of ... political elites at the expense of the population at large" and where leaders saw government institutions as "fiefdoms for patronage, rather than mechanisms for promoting the public interest." What can possibly have gone wrong?