Prosperity is their task, not ours. (Scan).(financial aid to developing nations)(Brief Article)

One of the new cliches of the post-Taliban age is that we must not "betray" Afghanistan by walking away after the enemy has been defeated. We should build up the nation's destroyed economy, it is said, with that ultimate cure-all: a Marshall Plan.

Indeed, we are already trying to reconstruct another largely Muslim territory the United States helped liberate--Kosovo. And we are holding out such a promise for Iraq, should it yield. How many other countries could qualify for rich development aid?

It's worth repeating that major social engineering is beyond our (or anyone's) capacity. One of the most important lessons of the failure of the Great Society social programs--launched in a much more favorable environment than that of any poor foreign nation today--is that deep-seated social and economic problems cannot be erased with easy money. Our social engineering capabilities are even more limited in the Third World. The so-called developing nations are already littered with the grand failures and tiny successes of our multi-billion-dollar efforts to help them jump from subsistence agrarian economies into modernity.

We have long been too optimistic, to the point of hubris, about our ability to bring other nations into a modern economic and political ...