Cypherpunk failures

[jamesd at echeque.com]

    --
Someone wrote:
> Speaking of laws by Christmas, anyone want to give odds on
> the accuracy of Tim May's prediction on September 13:
>
>    Dark times are coming. I'll bet a complete ban on
>    strong, unescrowed crypto is passed in all European
>    countries, Russia, China, Japan, and the U.S. by, say,
>    December 15th.
>
> and
>
>    I'm betting, as I said in my last post, that strong
>    unescrowed crypto will be illegal by December 15th.
>
> Does anyone think this prediction will come true?

No, will not come true.

All wars are good for government and bad for freedom, but a
short victorious war against a far away regime is likely to
be less bad than most.  If we lost the war, and the war on
terror turned inward, against Americans, and became like the
war on drugs, then it would have come true.

As I write this, the Taliban appears to have entirely
collapsed, which will presumably soon result in the Northern
alliance killing Bin Laden, and probably his children,
relatives, associates, and everyone in his general vicinity.
Problem solved.  Perhaps they return to the good old afghan
tradition of the women folk slowly skinning the foreigners
alive.  This was women's work, since men lack the patience
and manual dexterity required.

However, a wise government can always snatch defeat from the
jaws of victory.  It seems we are going to do some nation
building, fresh from our great successes in building the
nations of Iran and Somalia.  Right now the Afghans are
chanting "death to Arabs" but if we stick around too long,
doubtless we will once again be hearing "death to Americans"

Of course, the problem with building nations is that soldiers
cannot build nations.  At best, soldiers kill bad guys and
break their toys.  For nation building something rather more
is required, starting with a consensus.  It would seem they
are fair bit short of consensus in Afghanistan, though I saw
on television that they are working very hard at it.

The Afghan economy is entirely dependent on trade and
smuggling, as it has been for the past two thousand years,
which is a bit odd for a land-locked country occupied by
xenophobic people.  When local warlords put up roadblocks to
collect tariffs every short distance, the economy collapses,
as it did before the Taliban took over.

The obvious solution is for the various tribes, warlords,
militias, and armed mosques to  agree on freedom of
trade and movement, and agree to leave each other alone apart
from enforcing that.  Needless to say, such a solution does
not seem to be on the cards, particularly if we "help" them
form a government with a bunch of UN troops from various
islamic tyrannies and one islamic democracy.

Afghanistan cannot survive economically if divided into
mutually hostile ethnic and religious enclaves, nor can it
survive politically if  one centralized unitary government is
imposed on this quarrelsome patchwork of very different
tribes, races, and religions.  It will be hard for Afghan
politicians to steer a path between these two catastrophes. 
For foreign politicians, it will be near impossible. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
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