The Collapse of Afghanistan

There is a conventional wisdom that the Afghan republic fell because societal values were incompatible with democracy and the country was simply ungovernable. This article traces the state's collapse to the highly centralized political institutions imposed after the 2001 U.S. invasion. Instead of offering citizens an opportunity to oversee their government in a meaningful way, Kabul-centric institutions-holdovers from the country's authoritarian past-undermined citizen trust in government. The post-2001 system was incepted with huge amounts of foreign aid, which fostered corruption. Afghans were unwilling to fight for a government which did not treat them with dignity after twenty years.

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan ended on 15 August 2021. That afternoon, President Ashraf Ghani fled the capital city by helicopter to neighboring Uzbekistan. Just days earlier, he had sworn never to leave and said that he would die before abandoning his people. With Ghani gone, the Taliban offensive, which had captured dozens of provincial capitals in the preceding weeks, easily entered Kabul. Within hours, the insurgents sat comfortably at Ghani’s desk.

The rapid collapse was even more complete, with the added spectacle of tens of thousands desperate people seeking to flee the Taliban's harsh rule-and possible retribution-by racing to the airport in Kabul. The widely accepted explanation for why this American-supported republic fell is that the Afghan state and society were irredeemably corrupt, their values incompatible with democracy. In other words, Afghanistan was ungovernable, and it would always be a lost cause for the outside world—a graveyard of empires.

In April 2021, US president Joseph Biden announced that the United States would leave Afghanistan by 11 September 2021. It would end the long drawdown initiated by President Barack Obama, who in December 2009 announced a temporary military and civilian surge and promised to begin withdrawing troops in 2011. Despite the surge, security in the country went from bad to worse, while the Taliban movement felt its oats because it had been able to make territorial gains throughout the countryside. In hopes of brokering a negotiated end to the war, Obama launched informal negotiations with the Taliban as part of an effort to find a political solution to the quagmire. His successor, Donald Trump, proved dead set on a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his administration pursued formal negotiations with the Taliban, including in the February 2020 Doha Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan. The Taliban, in turn, had pledged not to let al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups use Afghanistan to project their forces against any country, including the United States, in return for the complete withdrawal of the NATO forces from the country.

Before the 31 August 2021 withdrawal deadline, the Afghan government had collapsed. Images from across the country of Afghan soldiers quickly surrendering to the Taliban led many foreign analysts to focus on the ability of the United States and its allies to build armies. Military analysts from Washington to the European capitals promptly started bewailing the "right-sizing" of the armies, harping on the centrality of logistics and the loss of integral U.S. air support. Such analyses completely missed what had just happened. And indeed, for none of the just-mentioned technical reasons did the breakdown of ANDSF occur; the cause was quintessentially political. No amount of technical assistance, no better-targeted logistical support, could have sustained this fighting force, because these soldiers believed they had nothing left to fight for.

The Afghan state collapsed due to a legitimacy crisis among the people. These sources of this legitimacy crisis were manifold and interwoven. First, the 2004 Constitution inculcated a system of governance that allowed for minimal opportunities for Afghan citizens to participate in or exercise meaningful oversight over their government. In consequence, the gap between the rhetoric of the U.S. intervention and the realities experienced by Afghan citizens grew larger with every passing year.

It also concentrated an international coalition focused on fighting an insurgency and consolidating power-missions distinct from and often at odds with democracy building. International donors desperate for quick fixes poured huge resources into Afghanistan with very little monitoring; instead of attempting to reform dysfunctional state institutions, they established parallel institutions, which, in their turn, have worsened the latter's lack of legitimacy.

Third, the intemperate rule of President Ashraf Ghani, 2014–21, accelerated state collapse. Ghani ruled through a tight, intimate circle and had only a thin base of support, micromanaging both the economy and the state, discriminated against ethnic minorities. Many had hoped the erudite president-he has a doctorate in anthropology, having studied at Colombia, and had worked for the World Bank-would rule as a technocrat. Yet his behavior proved much more authoritarian than democratic.