World War I was a major transition point for the US in many ways which included the shift from a country with almost $4billion in debt to the one with over the same amount in credit to many European and Latin American countries. I am not surprised by the direction of the US foreign policy in terms of economic expansion in the post WWI era. I see it more as a natural consequence of that shift. What is important to observe and analyze is the impact that such policies had on the US image at the international level. Obviously money lending and foreign loans aimed at regional or international economic recovery can mean no harm to the sovereignty of other countries or to their national interest for that matter, but the fact that such practices, both at home and abroad were viewed as negative and tagged as imperialist expansion indicates towards the negativities it had caused. Such impact can be crucial and in some cases can go quite out of control when private sector is involved. The obvious fact of the matter is that in democratic countries and systems, while the people can hold their governments accountable, they cannot exercise that level of accountability towards the private sector. This inability takes an extreme shape when the private sector in a country has the backing of multi-national corporations, whose power and range of influence may at times surpass that of the government. One way of looking at such an expansion at the cost of affecting national foreign policy could be the conspiratorial view of the situation which suggest towards intentional space provision for the private sector to expand by the government. However, whether intentional or unintentional, as I said, the impact was enormous enough to show its signs even now, in particular in terms of the damage that it caused to the image of the US as a nation that stood for peace and democracy.
I cannot escape drawing parallels as I naturally end up linking present to the past. One such parallel to this problem is the issue of numerous private American security companies operating in Afghanistan. There is no doubt in the positive role that the international security forces are playing in Afghanistan in terms of providing security to the people at large and to the Afghan president in person, but the operations of private security companies has now become a security threat, a process which was initially sanctioned by the Afghan government and its international counterparts. The difference between the operations of ISAF and private security companies is the degree and extent of accountability that could be exercised against and upon them. The short term effect of these companies is that the Afghan National Army remains to be weak and inadequate mainly because nobody wants to join it, when there are so many private companies who pay two or three times more, the long term impact being the damage to the common cause of building Afghan Army and Police to facilitate planned withdrawal of international forces.
If foreign policy makers in the US are concerned about the US image worldwide, what should matter to them is how a majority of population thinks about the US image and not a minority who are luckily exposed to the positive sides of such interventions as well, and as far as the image issue is concerned, for many Afghans, these private security companies are “Americans” unleashed on them with thirst for more power and more financial gains, which I think is not fair, especially because, if not the government, at least the American people deserve a better image than this. But for as long as foreign policy formulation continues the same pattern, in the eye of common people of other countries like Afghanistan, a more deserving image can be far from happening.