> If "US training" is such a big deal, what the hell happened in Afghanistan? I’m not sure who is claiming that US training has substantial influence on e.g.

> If "US training" is such a big deal, what the hell happened in Afghanistan? I’m not sure who is claiming that US training has substantial influence on e.g. the FAMa; the French are (correctly) viewed as the imperialist bogeyman. Hopefully illusions about the Russians will wear off shortly, although given how long it took for public sentiment against France to have any effect I am not optimistic. > When it comes to problems in the developing world, I think we neglect to highlight Islam's role. Some generalisation is inevitable but this is really so general as to be useless, and makes no attempt to engage with the situation in the states in question. > It supplants local cultures and religions and Muslim-dominated countries tend to be caught in a stalemate between popular Islamist regimes and military dictatorship. Egypt is a prime example. Pakistan is looking more and more like a failed state. It’s not like commentators ignore clearly identifiable problems relating to Islam in the region. One major commonality is the presence of Islamist insurgencies, and that’s hardly neglected by domain experts, local newspapers, or area studies journals. If you were to flesh out this claim more and provide more specifics, you will almost certainly find that commentators do not in fact neglect the factor you identify. Moreover it’s not like there’s an enormous explanatory lacuna demanding Islam as the explicans. Is it surprising that countries with (several of) a long history of coups, poorly developed constitutional and institutional norms, extreme poverty, rampant violence, poorly developed civilian bureaucracies, and quiescent courts would experience coups? I hardly think so. Islam is not exactly a pre-requisite here. The countries in question are often governed by régimes other than military dictatorships and populist Islamist régimes. Consider that Sankara was a Burkinabé—or, moving beyond those countries with recent military coups to Nigeria, Buhari or Jonathan. The previous governments in Mali, Gabon and Burkina Faso were not exactly particularly Islamist. They hardly distinguished themselves as particularly populist, and certainly weren’t ‘popular’. I’m not sure who in Egyptian history you’d classify as a non-military populist Islamist dictatorship apart from Morsi who was in power for a very brief period. Egypt’s situation seems to require an analytic specificity beyond generalisations about the ‘developing world’. As for Pakistan, it’s far from clear that it looks more like a failed state than previously. The economy is not in a particularly disastrous state (especially compared to e.g. Sri Lanka), Khan barely trampled on the constitution compared to Musharraf (since he didn’t have the chance), and the all-Pakistan services seem to function (insofar as that is the right word) in broadly the same fashion today as they did ten years ago.