TITLE:
Why Did State-Building Policy Fail in Afghanistan?
AUTHORS:
Enrique Baltar Rodríguez
KEYWORDS:
Afghanistan, War on Terror, State-Building, Legitimacy, Local Ownership, Geopolitics
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Political Science,
Vol.13 No.1,
January
31,
2023
ABSTRACT: Afghan state collapse in August 2021 once again put
discussion about state-building strategies in post-conflict scenarios. This
article explores fundamental causes of state-building failure in Afghanistan
and proposes an explanation based, for one side, on policy inability to
generate internal legitimacy and local ownership necessary for State
consolidation and sustainability born from military intervention in 2001; and
for the other, in how war on terror interest vitiated Afghan transition course
by subordinating democratic governance and economic reconstruction goals to
security considerations. In this sense, article focuses its attention on three
fundamental issues that ultimately doomed 20-year effort of state-building to
failure: the way in which new state foundations were distorted to turn it into
a neo-patrimonial pseudo-democracy, dependent and corrupt, and controlled it by
an old and new warlords elite; the absence of a national reconstruction
effective strategy for helping Afghan people to
rebuild a country devastated by years of war, that would allow socializing peace benefits and strengthen central government authority in a traditionally
fragmented and centrifugal society; and lastly, the geopolitical environment
also generated by war on terror, which was not contribute to peace and
stability in Afghanistan and increased state-building shortcomings and failure
chances.