The fall of Kabul to Taliban forces on 15 August marks the end of a long cycle of international politics.
The original justification for the Western military intervention in Afghanistan back in 2001 was state failure. It was said that the absence of centralised public authority and power in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan provided shelter for the al-Qaeda terror network, allowing it to take root and launch terrorist attacks against the US.
According to the US national security adviser of the time, Condoleeza Rice, the security problem of the 21st century was not strong, expansionist states aggressing against their neighbours. Rather, it was weak, failing ones, whose disorder and disarray spread across borders, and through regions. These failing states therefore necessitated external intervention.
The disintegration of the Afghan government and army over the past few weeks exposes the folly of such an approach. After two decades of a nation-building effort that has cost many thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars, the US has succeeded only in substituting one failed state for another. And so it is now the Taliban that very clearly commands more authority around Afghanistan rather than the Kabul government. The US wasn’t building an Afghan nation state – it was building a failed state.
It is too easy to blame the Afghans themselves for the Taliban’s victory, as President Biden sought to do in his address to the nation. Doubtless the corruption of the new Afghan elite played a significant part in weakening the institutions of the US-backed Kabul regime. But given it was the US that was driving this state-building project with so much treasure and blood, an explanation of the Afghan state’s collapse cannot stop at the borders of Afghanistan. If Afghanistan was indeed a de facto province of an American empire, then the explanation for the fall of that province must be rooted in the core of the empire, not in its periphery. As Condoleeza Rice herself suggested throughout the early 2000s, the political project of state-building was always larger than Afghanistan itself – and, in truth, it always coincided with a staggered cycle of imperial decline.
The origin of state-building
The state-building policies and structures that emerged at the end of the 1990s were prompted less by the emergence of al-Qaeda-style terrorism than a much earlier political failure.
This failure centred on Western powers’ use of economic ‘shock therapy’, sanctions regimes and cruise-missile diplomacy to flatten the political and social order of the old Eastern bloc and Third World during the 1980s and especially the early 1990s. As these already battered states and societies, from the former Yugolslavia to vast swathes of Africa, were shredded by the rapid introduction of market economies, or pulverised by UN coalitions and humanitarian interventions, it became clear that Western powers had destroyed one order, but had failed to replace it. They realised that new institutions of centralised control had to be re-established to replace the old political order. They realised that, to function effectively, the operation of the market and globalised capitalism required a whole infrastructure of civil society, public institutions, regulatory agencies, laws and security apparatuses. State-building thus emerged as a corrective to the destructive excesses of the 1980s and early 1990s.
However, destroying old orders proved easier than building new ones – as Afghanistan has shown.
Although the al-Qaeda terror network had its base in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, its alliance with the Taliban was not a natural one. The Taliban of the 1990s might have been as doctrinaire as al-Qaeda, but it was comprised of poor and rural Afghans, who were largely ignorant of the outside world – theirs was a revolt of the village against urban modernity and technology as much as anything else. Hence the Taliban banned mobile phones, cameras and televisions when it swept into Kabul in 1996. Contrast that with the leader of the al-Qaeda network, Osama bin Laden. He was very much a modern Islamist in that he saw Islam as a source of ideological renewal for a godless modern world. He courted journalistic interviews and fired off his videotaped pronouncements and recordings to Al Jazeera.
