I don’t think the language barrier or anything was an issue. We entered Japan and helped rebuild it and now we have some of the best relations in the world.
Re-building Afghanistan was more like building Afghanistan. We weren’t fixing a collapsed patio like in Japan — we had to build a whole housing tract, and at no point did we or anyone in the world have that amount of money.
Yes. We did not try to radically transform Japanese society down to the level of the family. Same in Germany. Both of those countries also had a fairly cohesive sense of nationhood without massive ethnic divisions. We just had to deprogram the hyper-aggressive militarism, but the rest we could pretty much leave alone.
Your point about rebuilding Afghanistan really being building Afghanistan is very true. I remember hearing a soldier in Afghanistan talking about how surprised he was at the number of people he met in Afghanistan that had never even heard of Afghanistan.
This isn't true. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, there was an Afghan state that was able to motivate enough of the population to believe in it and fight for it in order to largely defeat the Mujahideen.
Were it not for external support for the Mujahideen, it is almost certain that an Afghan state would have succeeded in achieving some form of monopoly on violence.
The idea that nation-states were something alien to Afghanistan that we had to force on them just isn't true.
Re-building Afghanistan was more like building Afghanistan. We weren’t fixing a collapsed patio like in Japan — we had to build a whole housing tract, and at no point did we or anyone in the world have that amount of money.