I once heard a senior European official remark that the trouble with democracy was that George W. Bush was its cheerleader. He had a point. Iraq had recently descended into bloody chaos. As long as the then US president was proselytiser-in-chief, democracy was a pretty tough sell.
Western values have been out of fashion ever since. First came the post-Iraq realisation that it is not that easy to impose them at the point of a cruise missile. Then it dawned on neoconservatives and liberal internationalists that there is more to all this than a ballot box.
There are small matters such as the rule of law, an independent judiciary and robust institutions. All these have to fit the cultural circumstances. The lesson from Afghanistan is that the west lacks the stomach for nation-building.