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Yes you can. There is a pretty big difference between forcing a country to change it's foreign policy (and in Germany's case roll back internal politics by 15 years) and changing pretty fundamental parts of 1400+ of years of culture.
Could America have changed Afghan culture in 20 years anyway? Sure, but that would probably have required heavy-handedness to the point of genocide, which i doubt Pakistan would have agreed to act as a staging ground for.
Consider how long it took for islam to really take hold in the middle east.
I'm not sure that Japan only got rolled back 15 years.
Why would inculcating some semblance of patriotism, such that the Afghan army doesn't immediately collapse, require genocide?
It's been discussed before, but Japan had been modernising rapidly since the Meiji era. They wanted what the Americans had. Not all of it, but enough of it, and the Americans were careful to leave enough of Japanese culture intact that they could spin it as reform with American aid rather than straightforward subjugation.
At a guess, because the area called 'Afghanistan' is made up of different tribal groups who hate each other, and are only prevented from doing anything about it by tyrants with sufficient ruthlessness and firepower. Making Afghans pretend to be a country requires you to act like a Taliban warlord; making them actually patriotic would require ethnic cleansing of all the groups except the ones you've decided to support.
I doubt it. Americans had control over the education system for 20 years, that's a whole generation, and we're not talking about implanting some galaxy-brained fourth-wave feminism, just basic nationalism that most other countries managed to move on to by similar means. Not to mention that you don't even need to do this to the entire country, you just need enough young men to hold the line against a bunch of angry goat herders.
If there was evidence that the US actually gave that an honest try, I might consider tribalism running in Afghan blood, but as it stands it looks like pure cope.
What's even "the education system" in a notoriously poor and fractured country? It's not like everyone was going to some full K12 thing paid for by the US.
The US could totally win over everyone in a large circle around Kabul and still end up losing the war.
When you've pushed 2 trillion dollars into it? It's whatever you want it to be.
"Money = outcomes" isn't even true in the American educational system. Not sure why it would be true in Afghanistan.
I think that fits better with my argument than yours. The reason money doesn't translate into results in America is because the elites are following terrible ideas. The reason why it didn't translate into result in Afghanistan is because the American elites in charge of it were following terrible ideas.
I thought you brought up Afghanistan's poverty to point out some material limit to what they could to, my point was that with the amount of resources that the US actually pulled there, there were no such material limits.
Nations may just buy into absurd ideas. But a lot of the time the reasons bad ideas keep being implemented has to do with some underlying political reality that's much harder to change than one's mind.
This is clearly true in the US. I would expect it to be worse in Afghanistan because it's a much worse country with a never-ending insurgency (fighting this was what had the unlimited budget, not educating Afghans).
The US may be able to power through bad ideas caused by granting too much power to self-interested group like teacher's unions. Enforcing nationalism via the awful Afghan education system has bigger obstacles and building a fully modern one across the entire country (when part of the problem was control and legitimacy throughout the entire country) has bigger ones.
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