I suspect that Henry Kissinger never actually asked for Europe's telephone number. But one of the lessons I learnt in three and a half years working with the United States on its great Afghan project was the difficulty in finding America's telephone number.

Worrying whether a particular country's constitution is fit for purpose can seem a pointless activity. In the end, these problems are self-correcting: if a constitution doesn't do its job, if it doesn't strike the right balance between the interests of the governed and the need for good governance, then it collapses. The process may take decades, centuries even, but in the end countries get the constitutions they think they need - or deserve.

All this seems especially true of the country with what many still see as the greatest constitution of them all - the United States. For more than two centuries the US Constitution has regulated the affairs of a great continental democracy, steering it through good times and some pretty bad times. For many Americans, the Constitution is an almost sacred text. Asking them whether the fundamentals of their Constitution are still right for their country seems not only pointless - it smacks of heresy.

Or so I thought, until I arrived in Kabul in 2007. My primary role was to work alongside the US to stabilise Afghanistan. Then I saw the difficulties the great American Republic had in prosecuting the quasi-imperial expedition it had taken on in Afghanistan.

What I saw brought back to mind a letter I had sent to the Foreign Office in 1991, at the end of a four-year tour as the British Embassy official covering American domestic politics. In it, I had set out my worries about the ways in which the Constitution of the United States, and the political practices which flowed from it, seemed to obstruct rather than encourage the better governance of the world's greatest republic. I focused then on domestic issues, and the way in which the elaborate system of politico-legal checks made hard choices even harder - notably anything to do with raising revenue (those were the days of George H. W. Bush's invitation to read his lips: "No New Taxes"). I wrote of the excessive influence of money and therefore lobbies in deciding the allocation of resources. I described the cult of proud amateurism in the federal government, in the higher levels of which political loyalty was usually at least as important as administrative competence.

Some two decades on, it was the overseas consequences of that constitution that came to worry me, as Ambassador in Kabul, and later as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Perhaps the most obvious difficulty was in generating what I call strategic stamina. Stabilising a country in the state Afghanistan was in when the American-led coalition precipitated regime change in the autumn of 2001 takes decades, not years. But a political system in which most elected representatives are running for office most of the time finds it almost impossible to give such projects the sustained attention - and resources - our forebears knew they needed. Taking over somebody else's country, securing it on their behalf, and then establishing local authorities able and willing to take over, takes more time, money and patience than the American republic has in the early 21st century.

The distribution of power between the executive and the legislative branches of government, and within the executive branch, also seemed to create more problems than it solved. In so many respects, the Constitution is an 18th century solution to an 18th century problem - an over-mighty Georgian monarch. The result - the shackling of the chief executive through a series of legislative controls - means that the executive can hardly spend a cent without the prior consent of the legislature.

Worse, and perhaps more corrosive, the legislators have a big say in how that money is spent, thus exposing those running almost continually for re-election to huge outside pressures from lobbies of one kind or another. Within the executive branch, the hundreds of posts filled by political appointment mean that few if any senior federal officials spend more than four years in a job. Those chosen for such posts may be well-qualified professionals, but too often an 18th century system of patronage is used to reward political loyalty. Moreover, competition between the great departments of government seems almost ingrained in the system, as each senior appointee seeks to fill the key jobs in his gift with his own clientele. A weak and weakening presidency has great difficulty in corralling strong barons.

Such divisions of the spoils of government, in terms of jobs or cash, may be necessary for ensuring the buy-in of political constituencies scattered across a continent. But they do not necessarily make for good government.

All these defects may be an acceptable price to pay for functioning democracy on a giant scale, when that democracy's job is to allocate ever-increasing resources. But, as we have seen in the repeated gridlock over the federal budget, they may only accentuate the difficulties of slicing up a shrinking cake.

I have no easy answer to these questions. A fundamental re-balancing of America's constitution is clearly not in prospect. But I cannot help observing that, while Europe's problem may be that it does not have a working constitution, America's may be that it has a constitution that works too well.

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