【Report】Why Afghanistan Failed? At the Crossroads of Counterterrorism, Stabilization and Statebuilding

Prof. Hiromi Nagata Fujishige (Aoyama Gakuin University)

On October 26, 2023, Prof. Hiromi Nagata Fujishige at Aoyama Gakuin University gave a lecture based on her ongoing research on state-building in Afghanistan.

Prof. Fujishige explained that the United States and its allies sought to build a resilient state after routing out the Taliban in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Despite nearly two decades of state-building in Afghanistan, however, the new Afghan state fell to the Taliban shortly after the U.S. military withdrew in August 2021. Prof. Fujishige saw this as puzzling.

She hypothesized that state-building failed in Afghanistan because the United States focused too much on security and stabilization through counterterrorism. This meant state-building was treated as secondary importance, and the coalition forces paid little attention to it. Furthermore, Prof. Fujishige emphasized that the military nature of state-building undermined the effort to build a resilient state by intimidating the locals. Aid workers, for instance, had to be protected by armed soldiers, which she suspects made Afghan locals feel threatened.

Additionally, Prof. Fujishige explained why the Taliban regained its strength shortly after the U.S. and allied forces ousted the group from power. The coalition forces excluded the majority ethnic group—Pashtuns—from the state-building effort, coopted illegitimate yet powerful local warlords to rout out the Taliban, and paid few satisfactory rewards to the warlords.

As a concluding remark to her presentation, she posed a counterfactual scenario where the United States and its allies focused on state-building in Afghanistan instead of counterterrorism and stabilization. Although she had yet to complete her research, she mentioned that it is likely that the state-building in Afghanistan would have failed anyway.

During the Q&A session, audience members asked many interesting questions, such as those regarding state-building, the definition of successful state-building, Prof. Fujishige’s methodology and motive for choosing the topic, and the legitimacy of the Taliban government.

Written by Daichi Morishige (PhD student at Ritsumeikan University)