Answer : Thomas Friedman's
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman is the one who, while attributing the substance of the idea to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, came up with the cutesy notion of “The Pottery Barn Rule.” If you break it, you own it. In foreign policy terms, that means that if you defeat or destroy the political leadership of another country – Iraq or Afghanistan, for example – then you are duty-bound, however long it takes and however much it costs, to replace that leadership with another set of leaders and perhaps even a new form of government, preferably one which is considered responsible and representative by western standards. That’s what the U.S. did in Germany and Japan after World War II. That’s what we tried to do in Iraq after we removed the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. And that’s what we tried to do in Afghanistan after 9/11, for the next two decades.
But there is no Pottery Barn Rule. America is not required to invest hundreds of billions of dollars and place tens of thousands of our troops on the ground in a foreign country for a generation or more in order to reconstruct that country’s political order in a manner that we find acceptable. No. But we may need to take action to ensure that a country like Afghanistan is not used again, as it once was used by al Qaeda, as a planning ground and a launching pad for attacks on us.
The pottery store analogy was always misguided. It presented the historical situation as if it began with us over here breaking something of theirs over there. But that’s not what happened. We didn’t attack Kabul. They attacked New York and Washington, DC. Twenty years later, it’s not America’s job to “build back better” in Afghanistan. It’s the Afghanis’ job to rebuild their own political order, one which we like or dislike, but which does not threaten the United States of America.