Fareed Zakaria hails Sam Huntington as greatest political scientist of his time
If there is one central, recurring mistake the United States makes when dealing with the rest of the world, it is to assume that creating political stability is easy. We overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and then cavalierly dismantled the entire structure of the Iraqi state, sure that we could simply set up a new one. We toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and were confident that with foreign aid, elections and American know-how, we would build a new, modern Afghan nation. After all, the governments we were helping to set up—democratic, secular and inclusive—were so much better than the ones that preceded them. We should have paid more attention to the words of a wise man who opened one of his pioneering studies by declaring that "the most important distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government."
Look around. So many of the world's problems—from terrorists in Waziristan to the devastating AIDS epidemic in Africa to piracy in Somalia—are caused or made worse by governments that are unable to exercise real authority over their lands or people. That was the central insight of Samuel P. Huntington, the greatest political scientist of the last half-century, who died on Christmas Eve.
Huntington is most famous for "The Clash of Civilizations," but his scholarly reputation properly rests on his earlier work. His analysis of political order had immediate, real-world applications. While studying the topic, he was asked by Lyndon Johnson's administration to assess the progress of the Vietnam War. After touring the place he argued, in 1967 and 1968, that America's strategy in South Vietnam was fatally flawed. The Johnson administration was trying to buy the people's support through aid and development. But money wasn't the key, in Huntington's view. The segments of South Vietnam's population that had resisted the Viet Cong's efforts had done so because they were secure within effective local communities structured around religious or ethnic ties. The United States, however, wanted to create a modern Vietnamese nation and so refused to reinforce these "backward" sources of authority. This 40-year-old analysis describes our dilemma in Afghanistan today....
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Look around. So many of the world's problems—from terrorists in Waziristan to the devastating AIDS epidemic in Africa to piracy in Somalia—are caused or made worse by governments that are unable to exercise real authority over their lands or people. That was the central insight of Samuel P. Huntington, the greatest political scientist of the last half-century, who died on Christmas Eve.
Huntington is most famous for "The Clash of Civilizations," but his scholarly reputation properly rests on his earlier work. His analysis of political order had immediate, real-world applications. While studying the topic, he was asked by Lyndon Johnson's administration to assess the progress of the Vietnam War. After touring the place he argued, in 1967 and 1968, that America's strategy in South Vietnam was fatally flawed. The Johnson administration was trying to buy the people's support through aid and development. But money wasn't the key, in Huntington's view. The segments of South Vietnam's population that had resisted the Viet Cong's efforts had done so because they were secure within effective local communities structured around religious or ethnic ties. The United States, however, wanted to create a modern Vietnamese nation and so refused to reinforce these "backward" sources of authority. This 40-year-old analysis describes our dilemma in Afghanistan today....