INTERNATIONAL STATE BUILDING IN AFGHANISTAN: ACCOUNTING FOR ITS FAILURE

Abstract [English]

State-building is a historically-rooted endogenous process of transforming state-society relations, whereas international state-building is an exogenous project of the leading powers and international institutions designed to address the issue of state fragility or state collapse in the broader context of combating global terrorism since the 9/11 terror attack. Following the 2001 US invasion and overthrow of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan underwent the externally-shaped state-building process, which twenty years later yielded precious little save a structurally fragile rentier state with limited capacity to fend off itself in the face of the resurgent Taliban .Eventually, the internationally-backed Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021, weeks before the full withdrawal of the US troops. This article aims to identify the structural, operational, cultural and regional factors and explain how the interplay of these factors accounts for the utter failure of the international state-building project in Afghanistan.