LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
creating the opposite. Seemingly
innocuous decisions have inflamed tribal rivalries, reflecting
the harsh reality that, as one former development worker puts it,
“In these zero-sum societies, one
person’s gain is someone else’s
loss.” All politics is local, but all
local development is also political.
Joshua speaks with Andrew
Wilder, who spent several years
leading a team of researchers
through Afghanistan trying to
speak directly with Afghans and
tribal leaders to gauge their responses to development projects.
“The problem wasn’t the tactics,
it was that the entire nationbuilding strategy was ineffective,”
Joshua writes. And while the
failure is not discussed in polite
political society, it is, as Joshua
puts it, “like discovering, ten
years too late, that the West had
been