Abstract
After twenty years of US support to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the 2021 Taliban takeover of the capital city, Kabul, and official launch of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, to replace it, has led to a number of debates as to what exactly happened over the past twenty years in that country. Why have the powerful American army and NATO coalition failed to eliminate the Taliban? Why have the Afghan army and the Afghan nation not resolutely fought against their return? This chapter analyzes the nation-building efforts of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan over the past twenty years and sheds light on the deep governance flaws that have undermined the central state during that period, and now, under Taliban rule.
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Notes
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The Doha Agreement, p. 2. Available at https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Agreement-For-Bringing-Peace-to-Afghanistan-02.29.20.pdf.
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Ibid., p. 1117.
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- 45.
One could easily compare the flaws of the Bonn Agreement to those of the 1988 Geneva Accords that, while securing the retreat of Soviet troops and the return of Afghan refugees, excluded the Mujahedeen opposition from negotiations.
- 46.
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- 48.
The “Afghanistan National Development Strategy” and the 2004 Constitution emphasized rights and service delivery.
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Adam Baczko, “Legal Rule and Tribal Politics: The US Army and the Taliban in Afghanistan (2001–13)”, Development and Change 47, no. 6: 1412–1433; Gilles Dorronsoro, Le Gouvernement Transnational de l’Afghanistan: Une Si Prévisible Défaite, Paris, Khatala, 2021.
- 51.
Olivier Roy, “De la stabilité de l’État en Afghanistan”. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 5–6 (2004): 1183–2020, pp. 1200–1201.
- 52.
The American anthropologist Thomas Barfield summarized this point in a personal anecdote related to a field trip pursued in 1971 in Northern Afghanistan: “People, often, when they would talk about government, were not talking about it as an idea or an institution, but as a place. They would say: ‘You have been to the government?’, meaning the compound were the police was, and as soon as the pave road ended, government ended. (…) What the people did have was their own form of self-governance (…). However they were not pure anarchists, because they thought the government’s responsibility was to prevent fighting between different villages (…), banditry on the road (…) and if problems were too difficult to solve for local communities, then it was okay for the government to do it” (See Thomas Barfield, “Anthropology in Afghan Studies”, Serious Science, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kmjgjmxG-E&t=91s, 1:50–2:43).
- 53.
Thomas J. Barfield. Afghanistan: A cultural and political history, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 220, 223.
- 54.
Said Yaqub Ibrahimi, “Afghanistan’s Political Development Dilemma: The Centralist State Versus a Centrifugal Society”, Journal of South Asian Development 14, no. 1 (2019): 40–61. Warlord co-optation will be enhanced from 2009.
- 55.
William Maley, “State-building in Afghanistan: Challenges and pathologies”. Central Asian Survey 32, no. 3 (2013): 255–270, pp. 260–261.
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Murtazashvili, “Afghanistan: A Vicious Cycle of State Failure”, p. 165.
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Francesc Vendrell (2012). “What went wrong after Bonn”. www.mei.edu/publications/what-went-wrong-after-bonn.
- 58.
Murtazashvili, “Afghanistan: A Vicious Cycle of State Failure”.
- 59.
Antonio Giustozzi, “The Ethnicisation of an Afghan Faction: Junbish-I-Milli From its Origins to the Presidential Election”, Crisis States Research Center (2005); Ibrahimi, “Afghanistan’s Political Development Dilemma”, p. 56.
- 60.
Gilles Dorronsoro, Le Gouvernement Transnational de l’Afghanistan.
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Murtazashvili, “Afghanistan: A Vicious Cycle of State Failure”, p. 163.
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Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. ‘Moving Forward? Assessing Public Administration Reform in Afghanistan’, Briefing Paper, Kabul, AREU, Sept. 2016, p. 18; Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. ‘Civil Service Reform in Afghanistan: Roles and Functions of the Civil Service Sector’, Issue paper, Kabul, AREU, Aug. 2016, p. 50.
- 63.
On the “despotic power” vs “infrastructural power” nexus, see Michael Mann, “The autonomous power of the state: its origins, mechanisms and results”, European Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (1984): 185–213.
- 64.
Articles 6 and 4 of the 2004 Afghan Constitution, respectively. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Afghanistan_2004.pdf?lang=en.
- 65.
Sharan, “The Dynamics of Elite Networks and Patron–Client Relations in Afghanistan”, pp. 1121–1124; Ibrahimi, “Afghanistan’s Political Development Dilemma”, p. 57.
- 66.
See Dorronsoro, 2010, pp. 299–303; Marsden, 2008.
- 67.
While Al-Qaeda’s presence infringed on Afghans’ sovereignty ideal and constituted the primary cause of the 2001 military intervention, many Taliban sympathizers thus turned against Al-Qaeda foreign fighters soon after the intervention.
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William Maley, “Interpreting the Taliban”, in Maley (Ed.), Fondamentalism Reborn?
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Dorronsoro, “The Taliban’s Winning Strategy in Afghanistan”.
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Sharan, “The Dynamics of Elite Networks and Patron–Client Relations in Afghanistan”, p. 1124.
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On Afghan Highways, Even the Taliban Fear the Taliban’s Toll Collectors”, New York Times, November 1, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-bribery.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage.
- 76.
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- 77.
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- 79.
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Oxford, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1994 (1939).
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See Thomas Barfield, “Culture and Custom in Nation-Building: Law in Afghanistan”, Maine Law Review 60, no. 2 (2008): 347–373.
- 82.
Suhail Shaheen is the political spokesperson of the Taliban delegation in Doha, Qatar, and was the Taliban official who replied to our written questions in early December 2022. Though we do not quote him, his contribution was critically analyzed, and helped us to complete this book with a more comprehensive understanding of the Afghan national situation, past and present.
- 83.
In State in Society: Studying how States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 16–19; Joel S. Migdal differentiates the “image” of the state (i.e. that of a “coherent, controlling organization in a territory, which is a representation of the people bounded by that territory”) and its “actual practices” to grasp the evolution of—and the modalities of—the nature of state–society relations.
- 84.
Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, “Afghanistan: A Vicious Cycle of State Failure”.
- 85.
Dorronsoro Gilles, Le Gouvernement Transnational de l’Afghanistan, Paris, Karthala, 2021.
- 86.
The emails from the Doha Taliban Office that we received on these points confirmed overall what the journalistic literature has so far described. However, the Taliban spokesperson did not address the gender discriminations and fears at all, although they have been described by the press. See e.g., Christina Goldbaum and Najim Raim, “A Week Into Taliban Rule, One City’s Glimpse of What the Future May Hold”. The New York Times, 17 August 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-kunduz.html. See also “Edāme-ye kār-e shardār-e kābul va sarparast-e vezārat-e sehat-e hokumat-e Pishin” [Resuming of the work of the municipality of Kabul and Interim minister of the Ministry of Health of the previous government], TOLO news, 16 August 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm0hWfThb6g.
- 87.
Zia Rul-Rehman & Emily Schmall, The Taliban Have Staffing Issues. They Are Looking for Help in Pakistan. The New York Times, 13 January 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/world/taliban-members.html.
- 88.
Goldbaum & Raim, “A Week Into Taliban Rule, One City’s Glimpse of What the Future May Hold”.
- 89.
United Nations Report, “One Year in Review. Afghanistan since August 2021”, 5 October 2022. https://www.undp.org/afghanistan/publications/one-year-review-afghanistan-august-2021.
- 90.
UNDP, “Ten Years of Afghan Economic Growth, reversed in just 12 months”, 5 October 2022. https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129287.
- 91.
Georges Lefeuvre, “Afghanistan 2022, le coup de pied de l’âne des vaincus et l’impasse des vainqueurs”, [“Afghanistan 2022, the donkey’s kick of the defeated and the deadlock of the winners”], RIS—La revue internationale et stratégique 125, no. 1 (2022): 19–29.
- 92.
Stimson Center [https://www.stimson.org/], “Afghanistan Under the Taliban and its Regional Impact”, 13 October 2022. https://www.stimson.org/event/trip-findings-afghanistan-under-the-taliban-and-its-regional-impact/.
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Beaud, G., Dagorn, RE. (2023). Afghanistan Since 2001: US Geostrategic Ambitions, a Failed State, and the Return of the Taliban. In: Lambert, L.A., Elayah, M. (eds) The Post-American Middle East. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29912-4_2
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