Afghanistan's confused intervention

The United States-led intervention in Afghanistan has gone through several iterations. What started out as a military operation in response to the September 11 attacks, quickly morphed into a large United Nationsmandated state-building undertaking which included large-scale programmes in the field of disarmament and security-sector reform, rule of law, counter-narcotics, civil service reform, human rights, gender mainstreaming, anticorruption and institution-building. The stated focus on state-building and liberal peace was, however, undercut by the ongoing ‘war on terror’ and its reliance on non-state auxiliary forces, while the enormity of the challenge led to a dizzying array of actors and programmes, often with widely diverging agendas. Donors were driven by different kinds of motivations and often sought to recreate the Afghan state in their own image.

Initially, it seemed, many state builders believed that ‘all good things [would] come together’ by themselves and that an analysis of crosspurposes or unintended consequences was unnecessary. Over the years, however, it became painfully clear that, rather than building a stable state which could replace the power politics and violence of the past, the intervention was creating new patterns of impunity and providing new opportunities to be corrupt or violent. The immensely expensive reform programmes did little to address or prevent this, as they were often overly technical and were routinely co-opted, circumvented, exploited or merely humoured (either because their designs were impractical or because, if implemented, they would have re-ordered the distribution of power, prestige and resources).

The expansion of the International Stabilisation Assistance Force (ISAF) beyond Kabul and the increased civil–military co-operation (defence, development, diplomacy), which many donor nations then employed, led to a greater appreciation of how the different strands of intervention may be affecting one another. The ISAF expansion also meant that several nations, which until then had not played an active role in the military counterterrorism operations, were suddenly dragged into an armed conflict to an extent that they had not expected. As the insurgency grew in strength, the dysfunction of Afghanistan's state and the mistakes made by international military were increasingly viewed as problematic.