State-building and state-formation in Afghanistan: what went wrong?

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the failure of the liberal state-building project in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. Following the US-led invasion in response to Al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, the international community undertook a two-decade long project to reconstruct Afghanistan as a democratic state aligned with the liberal international system. Despite vast investments in money and personnel, however, this project ended in failure with the Taliban’s swift return to power in August 2021. In this dissertation I ask why the state-building project failed and whether its failure was due to a flawed institutional design, the structural features of the country, or a combination of both. I argue that the mistakes typically highlighted by historical institutionalist accounts of Afghanistan’s state-building failures—poor institutional design, empowering warlords, and poorly conceived counterinsurgency tactics—did indeed matter but provide only a partial explanation. In contrast, I emphasize the degree to which these institutional mistakes must be understood in the context of pre-existing structural factors such as ethnic and tribal fragmentation and longstanding resistance to centralized authority. In short, while institutional factors mattered, they operated within a broader structural context that rendered any top-down liberal state-building project unlikely to succeed. I conclude that any meaningful future state-building attempts in Afghanistan will require not just institutional reform but a long-term societal transformation that reconciles historical patterns of decentralized governance with the obligations of modern statehood.