Afghanistan Is Open For Business

Ann Marlowe in Opinion Journal:

The recent Yale graduate I was chatting with at a party here spoke Chinese and had lived in China, the seeming epicenter of all things capitalist. "Why did you decide to come to Afghanistan?" I asked. He stared at me. "This is the largest rebuilding and development effort in the history of the world. Who wouldn't want to be here?"

After decades of conflict and the crippling legacies of communism and fundamentalism, Afghanistan is finally open for business. The signs are everywhere, from Kabul's traffic jams to Mazar-i-Sharif's building boom; from the opening of a Coca-Cola bottling plant to the country's first private university, the American University of Afghanistan, offering programs in business administration and information technology....

Writers of a certain ideological stripe whine that because Afghanistan isn't Switzerland, it's yet another sign that the U.S. can't get anything right. But fortunes are being made here by those who think for themselves. And there are few countries where Americans are as welcome. A recent BBC poll reports that 72% of Afghans see American influence as positive, as opposed to just 25% of the French and 21% of Germans.

Ms. Marlowe (M.B.A. from Columbia) has led an interesting life.