A Long Line of Would-Be Saviors

The simple story of a crusading leader who will transform a nation rarely works out that way.

The United States once championed the Afghan leader Hamid Karzai as the democratic successor to the Taliban’s oppressive regime. But Washington was disappointed to find that Mr. Karzai, rather than rising above the problems of corruption and cronyism that had beset Afghanistan, established an inner circle that embodied them.

“If you hold up a leader as a paragon of virtue, you may aid in consolidating their power, which can have all kinds of unintended consequences,” Ms. Saunders said.

In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame was hailed as his country’s savior when he took office, with Western support, after the 1994 genocide. But despite successes in reducing poverty, he has proved to be an authoritarian leader. Opposition politicians often end up in prison, in exile or dead. Human Rights Watch has documented widespread military detention and torture.

And it was easy to support the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement when it was a rebel group fighting Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Sudanese leader currently under indictment for genocide in Darfur. But after the group’s officers and allies took power in the newly independent South Sudan, they helped plunge the country into civil war.

It is not only Western leaders who make such misjudgments. In the 1960s and ’70s, activists worldwide cheered the rise of African independence leaders like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, many of whom later hardened into dictators.

There are exceptions, such as Nelson Mandela, the first post-apartheid president of South Africa. But the Mandelas are so uncommon, and their successes rely on so many factors clicking into place, that they are still marveled over as wondrous mysteries, including among frustrated activists in Myanmar.