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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 9, No. 2
Publication Date: February 25, 2022
DOI:10.14738/assrj.92.11754. Betz, F. (2022). Political Theory of Nation-Building: Case of the Failed State of Afganistan in 2021: Part 1. Advances in Social Sciences
Research Journal, 9(2). 103-132.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Political Theory of Nation-Building: Case of the Failed State of
Afganistan in 2021: Part 1
Frederick Betz
Institute for Global Models
ABSTRACT
Why is it important to get social science methodology correct? It is important
because invalid social science theory may be used to formulate governmental
policies which are wrong – incompetent and even harmful. A modern (and tragic)
example of invalid social theory with bad policy is the case of America’s 20-year
effort in ‘nation-building’ by occupying Afghanistan. In 2021, the policy ended
dramatically with the rapid fall of the Afghan government and the triumph again of
the Taliban. Afghanistan was a failed state, after a history of a series of invasions.
In this research, we analyze the theory of nation-building, which can be verified by
this historical event. The cross-disciplinary social science theory of nation-building
is that it should be a two-directional process: with both up-and-down perspectives
on building a nation from a state. This theory was analyzed empirically in a
previous paper by the author, to explain the failure of nation-building in Lebanon.
(Betz, 2020) Here we analyze use the theory of nation-building to explain a
historical case of policy failure in Afghanistan. This theory of two strategic
directions of nation-building, top-down and bottom-up, are validated in the
histories of two different societies. Social science theory verified in two or more
societal histories is likely to be generalizable to any modern society.
Key Words: National Building, Political Economy, Grounding Theory, History and Social
Science, Policy and Social Theory, Social Science Methodology, Research Methods,
Philosophy of Science, Historiography
INTRODUCTION
The nation-building theory examined here posits that successful nation building requires both
top-down and bottom-up political processes. And failure to implement both has resulted in
failed states in different societies.
In this research, we use the methodology of cross-disciplinary perceptual space analysis of
events in the history of a society to provide empirical evidence for the validity of a cross- disciplinary social science theory. The advantage of developing social science theory grounded
in the history of a society is that such theory is generalizable to other societies -- provided the
principal observational factors are comparable in both societies.
In a previous paper, we analyzed the history of Lebanon to provide empirical evidence for the
validity of a theory of nation-building, which consists of two dichotomies: ‘top-down or bottom- up strategies’ and ‘national-leadership or coalition-leadership’. Here we use the same theory to
analyze the historic event of the retaking of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2021
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HISTORIC EVENT: TALIBAN RETAKES AFGHANISTAN
In 2003, using airpower, the American military defeated the earlier Taliban takeover of
Afghanistan. At the time, the reasoning of the American government was that the Taliban were
harboring an al-Qaeda terrorist group. This group had just launched attacks against America,
crashing four hijacked American airlines – two into the twin towers of New York, one into the
Pentagon, and a fourth into the ground in Pennsylvania (when the high-jackers were foiled by
passengers from reaching an intended target). The Saudi citizen Osama bin Laden had been
mastermind of the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. The American military was searching for him
after he had fled to Afghanistan and allied his al-Qaeda group with the Taliban, The Taliban
refused to have bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan. Next American airpower destroyed
Taliban forces in Afghanistan and chased bin Laden into Pakistan. Pakistan sheltered bin Laden.
But then instead of extracting bin Laden from Pakistan, the U.S. government secretly turned its
attention to invading Iraq. Yet still in Afghanistan, the U.S. government continued to support a
new central Afghan government in Kabul. America supported it for the next twenty years, to
prevent the Taliban from retaking Afghanistan. But finally in 2020, the American government
agreed with the Taliban to withdraw from Afghanistan.
And in the summer of 2021, the Taliban quickly re-conquered Afghanistan, as the American
government withdrew all its troops from Afghanistan. That summer on August 2, 2021, Jon
Boone wrote: “There is less than a minute to go before Afghanistan’s most-watched news
broadcast goes live. A digital clock in the gloomy control room of Tolo News’ Kabul
headquarters counts down the seconds as a team of young journalists go about their final tasks.
Twenty years ago, television was banned and women were forced to wear burkas when they
left their homes to run errands supervised by male relatives. Tonight’s news will be watched
by about 10 million of Afghanistan’s 39 million people. . . Then the news began. From behind
an outsize desk, Zaki begins delivering a crushing series of headlines on that day in the
beginning of August:
‘Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand, has almost fallen to the Taliban, the movement of militant
mullahs who fell from power in 2001.
‘Ismail Khan, one of the geriatric civil-war-era ‘warlords’ that were supposed to have been
consigned to history, is leading the defense of Herat, the great Silk Road city besieged by the
Taliban.
‘Ashraf Ghani, the president, has addressed an emergency meeting of parliament calling for
national unity at a moment of “critical danger’”.
‘Captured policemen and soldiers have been gruesomely executed despite Taliban claims they
would treat prisoners humanely’.” (Boone, 2021)
Then on August 14, 2021, Derek Hawkins wrote: “After two decades of fighting in Afghanistan,
the Taliban is on the verge of seizing power again. The fundamentalist force that seeks to install
Islamic law has blitzed across the country, overrunning one city after another and is closing in
on Kabul as the United States has been withdrawing troops this summer. Few places outside
the imperiled Afghan capital remain under the control of the Western-backed government,
which is pleading for the international community to help fend off a complete takeover.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians are fleeing, setting off a humanitarian crisis . . . “ (Hawkins,
2021)
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Betz, F. (2022). Political Theory of Nation-Building: Case of the Failed State of Afganistan in 2021: Part 1. Advances in Social Sciences Research
Journal, 9(2). 103-132.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.92.11754
The Taliban overran most of Afghanistan and entered the capital Kabul, all without major
fighting. Next on August 15, 2021, Amy Kazmin wrote: “Afghanistan Taliban forces pour into
Kabul after president flees. . . The 20-year US military project comes to chaotic end as Taliban
fighters take control of the Afghanistan presidential palace after the president Ashraf Ghani fled
the country. . . . Facing virtually no armed resistance, Taliban fighters poured into the capital on
Sunday and sought to establish control, while US and other foreign governments scrambled to
evacuate their citizens and Afghan allies. (Kazmin, 2021a)
The American retreat was rapid and chaotic, evacuating Americans and Afghans who had
worked for American. Amy Kazmin also wrote: “Tumultuous scenes were reported at Kabul
airport, as panicked city residents sought flights out, while the US embassy warned of a
deteriorating security situation. . . . The Taliban’s entry into Kabul was the culmination of a
dramatic week-long lightning offensive in which the Islamist fighters seized control over most
of the country, often facing little armed resistance . . . . The US on Sunday increased its
deployment to 6,000 troops to support the evacuation of diplomats, allied personnel and
thousands of Afghans at risk of retribution for working with the US. Ned Price, the US state
department spokesperson, said all embassy staff had been evacuated to the airport, which was
secured by the American military. . .” (Kazmin, 2021a)
The hasty evacuation in the last week of August left thousands of Afghans, seeking to flee the
Taliban, were stranded at the airport. Amy Kazmin wrote: “Many Afghans expressed fury at the
US focus on evacuating its own citizens, leaving the local population at the mercy of the Taliban
and its extremist ideology. ‘I wish I could go to Kabul now and scream outside the US embassy,
‘We are also human beings like you and we also have the right to live and enjoy freedom’, said
a young woman in Herat, which fell to the Taliban a few days ago. She added that the Islamist
fighters had already begun searching people’s homes for alcohol or weapons. ‘How could the
Americans hand us over to the Taliban?’ she said. The northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a
traditional stronghold of fierce anti-Taliban resistance, fell to the insurgent group late on
Saturday night after days of heavy fighting. Political figures in the region fled, including anti- Taliban leaders Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ata Mohammad Noor, who sought refuge in
neighboring Uzbekistan . . . Analysts said that the abrupt pace of the US drawdown, including
abandoning the main US military facility at Bagram air base virtually overnight, had severely
damaged morale among the Afghan forces, undermining their will to fight. “ (Kazmin, 2021a)
The U.S. government, then under President Joe Biden had not anticipated the swift fall of the
Afghan government. On August 17, 2021, Katrina Manson wrote: “The Biden administration
has thus far admitted to making a wrong-headed judgment in one area alone: its analysis of
Afghan military weaknesses. “The Afghan security forces . . . proved incapable of defending the
country. And that did happen more rapidly than we anticipated,” . . .US intelligence and military
leaders warned Biden, both publicly and in private, the Taliban could take over the country. At
the same time, Biden was pursuing Trump-era talks with the Taliban to try to secure a peace- sharing deal in Kabul. Yet a report this year from the US intelligence community stressed the
Taliban was confident of victory and that the prospect for any peace deal was low. “The Taliban
is likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan government will struggle to hold the
Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support,” it said. Five days after the report was made
public, Biden in April announced he was pulling US forces out of Afghanistan, starting on May
1..” (Manson, 2021)
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Why had the American occupation of Afghanistan failed in its goal to create a strong democratic
Afghanistan, capable of defeating the Taliban? And why had the Afghanistan government
collapsed so rapidly in less than a year -- after the agreement between the U.S. government and
the Taliban for the Americans to leave Afghanistan? What ‘policy theory’ of the Americans was
proved ‘false’ – false in underlying the ‘practice’ of a twenty-year political/military endeavor?
And it was dramatically shown as ‘false’ in an unexpected, sudden, and swift collapse of the Afghan
Army and Government in that summer of 2021! (And we will continue our examination of the
events leading to this hasty exodus; but first we review the literature on nation-building.)
LITERATURE REVIEW ON ‘NATION BUILDING’ AND ‘NATIONAL LEADERSHIP’
In the 18-19th centuries, the concept of’ ‘building-a-nation-over-and-above-a-state’ emerged in
the history of Europe. The impact of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s seizure of
government and subsequent military domination in Europe had impressed the European states
with the concept of a ‘nation’. The European states recognized the urgent need for modernizing
monarchical ‘states’ into patriotic ‘nations’.
Michael Provence wrote: “. . . the central feature of the nineteenth century (in Europe) was a re- negotiation and codification of the contract between the state and its subjects as citizens.”
(Provence, 2017) This was the central principle in the conceptual transformation of the idea of
the ‘state’ into that of a ‘nation’: (a) that the population of a nation were all expected to become
citizens and (b) their loyalty to the government was expected. But this expectation depended
on the citizens’ perceiving that the government was serving the people. Prior to the French
Revolution, this idea was articulated by the French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a
‘social contract’ between the government and the governed.
In 1800, the military weakness of the European states’ mercenary armies had been
demonstrated in their defeats by the patriotic-conscripted army of the French revolution, under
Napoleon. Michael Provence wrote: “In studying Prussian conscription, Ute Frevert identified
a series of common themes among the major states of post-Napoleonic Europe. All states
recognized the need for standing armies and all reluctantly embraced mass conscription. The
imperative to conscript soldiers forced monarchs and war ministers to slowly concede to
changes in the relation between state and subject. Through the middle decades of the
nineteenth century, state builders, as diverse as Napoleon, Muhammad Ali of Egypt, Friedrich
Wilhelm III of Prussia, and Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II, confronted the limit of mercenary
armies – made up of aristocratic and often uneducated officers and paid (but often unreliable)
professional soldiers and press-ganged (and often absent) recruits.” (Provence, 2017)
In Europe after the 18th century, the transformation of a ‘state’ into a ‘nation’
became an important political issue -- which now is called ‘nation building’.
About nation-building in the Middle East, John Hulman wrote: “Just before the start of the Iraq
War, I was asked by the Council on Foreign Relations to serve on a task force aimed at advising
the Bush administration on how to run Iraq after the fall of Saddam. It was soon after 9/11, and
the neoconservative program of imposing democracy at the point of a gun was in full swing.
Our mission was to devise a general blueprint for creating a stable country from scratch . . ..
This experience is what led me to bump squarely into the work of Lawrence of Arabia. One of
the points made incessantly by all the great and the good assembled for the Iraqi task force at
the meeting was that, if nation building was to have a chance of success, inserting Western
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Betz, F. (2022). Political Theory of Nation-Building: Case of the Failed State of Afganistan in 2021: Part 1. Advances in Social Sciences Research
Journal, 9(2). 103-132.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.92.11754
liberal democratic values into failed states like Iraq from outside sources was an absolute
prerequisite. The discussion focused on just how fast we could make this happen, avoiding any
mention of Iraq’s unique history, politics, culture, ethnology, sociology, economic status, or
religious orientation. What did these trifles matter compared with the Washington elite’s view
of how the world really ought to work?” (Hulman, 2009)
Hulman identified that in the U.S. government strategy after invading Iraq (and after defeating
the Taliban in Afghanistan) was an idealistic strategy of imposing an inclusive democracy from
the top-down of a new government in Iraq John Hulman defined a ‘top-down’ approach to
nation building (but one with which he disagreed). Hulman wrote: “Eventually, despite
knowing that it would only cost me, I rose to my feet and said my piece. Though I mangled the
exact quotation, I was close enough: “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better
the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not
to win it for them.” To help them—not to dictate to them, manage them, bully them, ignore
them, or lecture them—to help them help themselves. The quote was from T. E. Lawrence.”
(Hulman, 2009)
T.E. Lawrence writings had provided Hulman with lessons of what should be a ‘bottom-up’
approach to nation-building. John Hulman wrote: “For all his brilliance as a soldier and a man
of action, it is Lawrence’ role as a thinker ahead of his time that is most valuable for the world
we live in. Lawrence’s forgotten philosophy (with an intellectual reach well beyond the
immediate specifics and place of the Arab Revolt and the time of the Great War) points to a very
different strategy of nation building from the top-down failures we see today. . . . In terms of
policy (and in opposition to the modern, top-down efforts of Paul Bremer in Iraq), Lawrence
stressed that the Middle Eastern rulers must have their own army and police force as soon as
proved practical, as a symbol to their people that there was indigenous control of the most basic
of a state’s functions: to guarantee the sovereignty of their nation. Only by thrusting the
demanding day-to-day realities of governing onto indigenous leaders with local legitimacy,
could genuine progress in nation building take place.” (Hulman, 2009)
John Hulman summarized the importance of a ‘bottom-up’ approach to nation-building: “As I
read the articles and learned more about Lawrence, it dawned on me that all the failed or
partially failed attempts at nation building in the post–Cold War era—in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia,
Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq—were intimately related. In every case they were based on the
same analytically flawed worldview (of top-down’ nation building’). . . . Tailoring a political
system to fit the local unit of politics (bottom-up nation-building), rather than imposing a one- size-fits-all over a centralized government on others (top-down nation-building), is a major
insight Lawrence has to teach the failed nation builders of today.” (Hulman, 2009)
Not only Hulman but many other researchers have been concerned with the theory of ‘nation- building’. And the term of ‘nation-building’ has evolved a growing academic literature -- all with
a common definition of constructing a ‘national identity using the power of the state.’ For
example, Andreas Wimmer wrote: “Why do some countries fall apart, often along their ethnic
fault lines, while others have held together over decades and centuries, despite governing an
equally diverse population? Why is it, in other words, that nation building succeeds in some
places while it fails in others? What happens when political integration fails is dramatically
demonstrated by the current tragedy in Syria”. (Wimmer, 2018)
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On the importance of the concept of ‘nation building’, in 2004, Francis Fukuyama wrote: “A lot
now rides on our ability not just to win wars but to help create self-sustaining democratic
political institutions and robust market-oriented economies, and not only in these two
countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) but throughout the Middle East. The fact is that the chief
threats to us and to world order come today from weak, collapsed, or failed states. Weak or
absent government institutions in developing countries form the thread linking terrorism,
refugees, AIDS, and global poverty. Before 9/11 the United States felt it could safely ignore
chaos in a far-off place like Afghanistan; but the intersection of religious terrorism and weapons
of mass destruction has meant that formerly peripheral areas are now of central concern.”
(Fukuyama, 2004)
Many of the contemporary researchers have seen ‘top-down’ nation-building by an occupying
foreign force as political failures. For example, Keith Darden and Harris Mylonas wrote:
“Contemporary occupying powers seeking to build states on foreign soil are faced with a
fundamental dilemma: How can they transfer coercive and organizational capacity to the local
population without such capabilities being used to undermine the occupiers’ efforts to establish
stable governance of the territory? Current thinking holds that the best way to manage the
transition is to do it quickly, either by recruiting indigenous army and police units as rapidly as
possible or by co-opting pre-existing groups of fighters to make them serve the state. If the
occupier can build roads, provide public services, and expand the army and the police, so the
thinking currently goes, he will achieve the necessary ‘buy-in’ from the local population that
will allow him to pack up his things and go home, leaving a stable new order in his stead. When
it comes to putting guns in the hands of the indigenous population, sooner is better. The
modern history of occupation and imperial rule provides more than a cautionary footnote to
this current wisdom on how to pursue state-building efforts on foreign soil. We suggest that
effective state-building requires effective nation-building. It rests on a successful effort to
create social cohesion, loyalty and legitimacy of rule.” (Darden and Mylonas, 2011)
Thus the theoretical issue about ‘nation-building’ focuses upon whether or not a nation should be
built from a state with an approach of: (1 )‘bottom-up’ or (2) ‘top-down’ or (3) both ‘bottom-up &
top-down’.
Also closely related to the ‘top-down and ‘bottom-up’ concepts in nation building is another
theoretical dichotomy --, that of ‘coalition-leadership’ and ‘national leadership’.
In a managerial literature on organizational leadership, there have been identified two
perspectives on how leadership often formulates strategy: a top-down strategy (big-picture)
and a bottom-up strategy (little-picture). (Betz, 2015) Next in the analysis of Lebanon’s history,
the author adapted this theory of corporate leadership into government leadership: as a ‘top- down national leadership’ and a ‘bottom-up coalition leadership’. (Betz, )
Figure 1 summarizes the differences in strategic thinking that each perspective facilitates in
when political leadership thinks about government policies: top-down or bottom-up.
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Betz, F. (2022). Political Theory of Nation-Building: Case of the Failed State of Afganistan in 2021: Part 1. Advances in Social Sciences Research
Journal, 9(2). 103-132.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.92.11754
Figure 1. Leadership Logic in Strategic Thinking for Government Policy Formulation.
In strategic thinking by a political leader, (1) a leader can view the state, as a whole, from a top- down perspective or (2) a leader can view the state from the bottom-up perspective of the
political faction to which the leader belongs.
In a representative democracy (a republic), this concept of ‘political factions’ (as influencing
government) has long been a part of political literature - particularly since the founding of the
republic in the United States.
Historically, several of the founders of the U.S. republic addressed the dangers and challenges
of political factions in a representative form of democracy. For example, Alexander Hamilton
wrote: “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a
minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of
interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of
the community.” (Hamilton et al, 2014)
U.S. GOVERNMENT STRATEGY IN 2001 FOR BUILDING AN AFGHAN NATION
Now we can analyze the nation-building strategy of the U.S. government when it defeated the
Taliban and established a new Afghan government in 2001, as shown in Figure 2.
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Betz, F. (2022). Political Theory of Nation-Building: Case of the Failed State of Afganistan in 2021: Part 1. Advances in Social Sciences Research
Journal, 9(2). 103-132.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.92.11754
Pashtun tribes against the Taliban and was rescued by the US after being hunted down by
Taliban fighters.” (Oliver, 2004)
But Karzai did not establish any meaningful bottom-up government structures in each province
– only a top-down central government. Peter Oliver wrote: “With ethnic balance as the primary
criterion (in the central government) . . . the Northern Alliance (warlords) controlled more than
half of the 30 ministries, including the powerful defense, foreign and interior portfolios. The
delegation of Rome-based exiles loyal to the former king received at least eight ministries,
including the finance, education and reconstruction posts. Two women were named to posts,
Sima Samar, one of five deputy premiers as minister of women's affairs, and Suhaila Seddiqi as
health minister. . . This interim authority will govern Afghanistan for six months until the former
king convenes a traditional tribal council, or loya jirga.” (Oliver, 2004)
The role of U.S. and NATO military forces in Afghanistan was to provide security and to build a
national Afghan Army -- capable of preventing the Taliban from retaking Afghanistan. Peter
Oliver wrote: “Under the framework of the deal, delegates have asked for the deployment of an
international security force to Kabul and other parts of the country, and agreed to steps to
integrate Afghan fighters into a future national army, and the creation of a supreme court. It
includes language saying the Afghan people have the right ‘to determine their own political
future in accordance with the principles of Islam, democracy, pluralism and social
justice’."(Oliver, 2004)
The defeated Taliban were excluded from participating in the deal. The warlords of the
Northern Alliance were satisfied with the deal. Mark Oliver wrote: “Are people happy with the
deal? The mood appears to be one of happy compromise and relief and there were jubilant
cheers at the small signing ceremony. ‘Maybe it's not perfect,’ said the ex-king's grandson,
Mostapha Zahir, ‘Under the circumstances it is something honourable, something good. I think
the future of Afghanistan looks very bright.’ However, the UN envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar
Brahimi, acknowledged that the delegations represented only part of Afghan society and urged
the new interim leadership to integrate all of the country's ethnic and religious groups - as well
as women. This reflects the anxiety that despite the excitement at the deal, Afghanistan's
political and ethnic fragmentation will hamper efforts of a cohesive response to the massive
challenges ahead in turning it into a modern nation. And any optimism is obviously tempered
by the fact that an enemy force still occupies one of the country's major cities, in Kandahar.”
(Oliver, 2001)
Thus in the modern history of Afghanistan, the U.S. had ejected the Taliban and established a
central government in Kabul. But the U.S. had no clear strategy for reconstructing tribal and
clan loyalties in the other Afghan cities and surrounding country-sides – no bottom-up nation- building for restructuring Afghan local society.
HISTORIC EVENT (CONTINUED): COLLAPSE OF THE AFGHAN NATIONAL ARMY IN 2020-
21
Now let us examine why the centerpiece of the U.S. top-down policy, the Afghan Army, failed --
so quickly and completely. On August 15, 2021, Susannah George wrote: “Building
Afghanistan’s national security forces was one of the most ambitious and expensive aspects of
two decades of U.S.-led war. It resulted in failure. The United States spent billions of dollars
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training and equipping police, soldiers and special forces. Despite years of warnings from U.S.
and Afghan officials, successive U.S. administrations pledged that the Afghan military was
capable of defending the country. President Biden said the Afghan military was ‘as well- equipped as any army in the world’ just a month before its collapse. Today (15 August 2021),
not a single unit of the country’s security forces remains intact.” (George, 2021)
The swift collapse of the Afghan army in the summer of 2021 caught the American government
by surprise. But the conditions leading to the collapse had been going on for several years
before. Susannah George wrote: “A sophisticated Taliban campaign aimed at securing
surrender deals lay at the heart of the Afghan military’s collapse, but layers of corruption, waste
and logistical failures left the country’s security forces so underequipped and with such
battered morale that it enabled the militants’ success.” (George, 2021)
The collapse was dramatic, Susannah George wrote: “The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s
military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into the Afghan capital Sunday (August 15, 2021)
despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals
brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s
lowest-ranking officials. The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by
Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for
government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a U.S. official.
Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to
provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by
government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police,
special operations troops and other soldiers. During the past week, more than a dozen
provincial capitals fell to Taliban forces with little or no resistance. Early Sunday morning, the
government-held city of Jalalabad surrendered to the militants without a shot fired, and
security forces in the districts ringing Kabul simply melted away. Within hours, Taliban forces
reached the Afghan capital’s four main entrances unopposed. The Taliban entered Kabul on
Aug. 15. The Pentagon said up to 6,000 U.S. troops will deploy to the airport to evacuate U.S.
personnel. The pace of the military collapse has stunned many American officials and other
foreign observers, forcing the U.S. government to dramatically accelerate efforts to remove
personnel from its embassy in Kabul.” (George, 2021)
An earlier agreement in 2020 was reached between the Taliban and the U.S. Government. And
this meeting in Qatar enabled the Taliban to begin its capture of Afghanistan. Susannah George
wrote: “The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the February 2020 agreement
reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group and the United States calling for a full
American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no
longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew
receptive to the Taliban’s approaches. . . . The Doha agreement, designed to bring an end to the
war in Afghanistan, instead left many Afghan forces demoralized, bringing into stark relief the
corrupt impulses of many Afghan officials and their tenuous loyalty to the country’s central
government. Some police officers complained that they had not been paid in six months or
more. ‘They saw that document as the end,’ the officer said, referring to the majority of Afghans
aligned with the government. ‘The day the deal was signed we saw the change. Everyone was
just looking out for himself.’ . . The negotiated surrenders to the Taliban slowly gained pace in
the months following the Doha deal, according to a U.S. official and an Afghan officer. Then, after
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Betz, F. (2022). Political Theory of Nation-Building: Case of the Failed State of Afganistan in 2021: Part 1. Advances in Social Sciences Research
Journal, 9(2). 103-132.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.92.11754
was they were all trying to train a Western army instead of figuring out the strengths of the
Afghans as a fighting people and then building on that.” (Whitlock, 2021a)
Evidence of the failure of U.S. policy kept appearing over the years and under three U.S.
administrations. Craig Whitlock wrote: “As the years passed, it became apparent that the
strategy was failing. Yet U.S. military commanders kept insisting in public that everything was
going according to plan. In November 2012, Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. told lawmakers
that he had grown “optimistic” about the war because the Afghan army and police had improved
so much. “When I look at the Afghan national security forces and where they were in 2008,
when I first observed them, and where they are today in 2012, it’s a dramatic improvement.” In
September 2013, Mark A. Milley, then an Army lieutenant general and deputy commander of
U.S. forces in Afghanistan, gave reporters another upbeat assessment. “I am much more
optimistic about the outcome here, as long as the Afghan security forces continue to do what
they’ve been doing,” he said. “If they continue to do that next year and the year after and so on,
then I think things will turn out okay in Afghanistan,” he added..” (Whitlock, 2021a)
All through the two decades of U.S. occupation, there was massive corruption in the officer corp
of the Afghan Army, and it had prevented the building of an effective Afghan military force.
Susannah George wrote: “As the war had intensified, many of Afghanistan’s police on the front
line were entering their sixth month without pay, a widespread problem that took a toll on
government forces’ morale and made them vulnerable to Taliban offers. At a small outpost
south of Kandahar city, Noor Ahmad Zhargi was on guard duty. The Eid holiday marking the
end of Ramadan was approaching and even if he was granted leave, he said he wouldn’t go
home. ‘I would be too ashamed to look at my children with empty hands,’ he said. When he
joined Afghanistan’s police force, all he was given was a gun — no training or documentation.
‘Next month, if the government doesn’t pay me, maybe I should just sell this to the Taliban,’ he
said holding the rifle. He said he had heard the Taliban was paying around $2,000 for Afghan
government weapons like his, a price much higher than the market rate. He insisted he would
never join the Taliban but dodged a question about whether he would surrender. In 2019, cities
began to fall to the Taliban. “Two months later, Zhargi’s post had fallen to the Taliban, along
with nearly every other district in Kandahar, except for the provincial capital. (George, 2021)
Without U.S. air support in the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021, the Afghan army fell apart.
Susannah George wrote: “This is not what we were trained to do,” said Lt. Abdul Hamid
Barakzai of the Afghan commandos, referring to the drives between outposts where Taliban
fighters often placed snipers or roadside bombs. He said the commandos were given the task
because they were one of the few units with heavily armored vehicles. As one team arrived at
a small mazelike base to drop off bread and energy drinks, a Taliban sniper round ricocheted
off the side of a heavily armored vehicle, sending shrapnel into the stomach of one of the
soldiers. He quickly wrapped a scarf around the wound and brushed it off. “They shoot at us
like this every day,” one of the other men said. The Taliban snipers were also proving deadly.
At one base, the guard on duty stepped outside to take a phone call and was shot and killed
instantly. At another, a policeman returning from patrol was shot through the heart.” (George,
2021)
The Taliban takeover of Kunduz province occurred in July 2021 just before Kabul would fall in
August 2021. Susannah George wrote: “By late July, the Taliban was closing in on nearly all the
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Journal, 9(2). 103-132.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.92.11754
Not only in this village but in many other villages in Afghanistan had suffered from U.S.
airstrikes. The airstrikes were meant to kill Taliban but also caused many civilian casualties
(collateral damage) as Taliban housed themselves in villages, during the two decades from
2001 to 2021.
The top-down nation-building strategy had succeeded only in the capital city of Kabul, but not
in the countryside. Sudarsan Raghavan wrote: “In Kabul and other Afghan cities, the United
States will be remembered for enabling two decades of progress in women’s rights, an
independent media and other freedoms. But in the nation’s hinterlands, the main battlegrounds
of America’s longest war, many Afghans view the United States primarily through the prism of
conflict, brutality and death. (For example) in Wardak province, 25 miles southwest of the
capital, the U.S. military, the CIA and the ruthless Afghan militias they armed and trained fought
the Taliban for years. Trapped in the crossfire were villagers and farmers. Many became
casualties of U.S. counterterrorism operations, drone strikes and gun battles.” (Raghavan,
2021)
Life was terrible in the villages. Sudarsan Raghavan visited one of these villages, Sinzai: “A visit
to Sinzai and the surrounding Nerkh District offered a glimpse of life in a post-American rural
Afghanistan, home to nearly three-quarters of the population, where peace has emerged after
20 years of war. The visit offered clues to how the Taliban will govern the country and helped
explain how the militants were able to seize power across the nation so swiftly.. . To be certain,
the Taliban controlled the villagers through fear, intimidation and their own brand of
viciousness. But rural Afghan society is largely conservative, and residents mostly agreed with
the militants’ harsh interpretation of Islam. The villagers never got to see the other face of
America: its generosity. Hardly any of the billions of dollars in U.S. aid that poured into
Afghanistan reached Sinzai, less than two hours’ drive from Kabul. Reconstruction efforts
outside the capital were thwarted by insecurity, corruption and inefficiency, the U.S.
government’s own watchdog agency concluded. Homes in Sinzai and nearby villages still don’t
have electricity or running water. ‘The Americans left us nothing,” said Khan Mohammed, the
32-year-old owner of a shop outside an abandoned U.S. military compound in the district
center. ‘Only that empty base.’” (Raghavan, 2021)
Certainly, the American airstrikes were aimed at terrorists and yet often killed Afghan
villlagers. Sudarsan Raghavan wrote: “In April 2019, the family of Sher Mohammed was inside
their home in the village of Sarmarda, when Afghan forces raided the compound. When his son
refused to come out, Mohammed said, they called an airstrike on the house. His son, his son’s
wife, their three children and two other relatives were killed. The only survivor was his
granddaughter, now 11. Mohammed said his son occasionally communicated with the Taliban,
like almost every villager, but he was not a militant. The day after the strike, the Taliban sensed
an opportunity. The villagers were gathered, Mohammed said, and ordered to take the seven
corpses to the provincial capital, Maidan Shahr, to protest the strike. ‘Why this? Why this?’
some villagers chanted as they carried the bodies of the children, wrapped in white cloth, in
footage shown on the Kabul News network. A month later, in the predawn hours, airstrikes hit
the shops in Sinzai and killed villagers in different parts of the hamlet. Witnesses described
huge balls of flames and large plumes of dark smoke. By then, villagers said, they knew the
sounds of drones and U.S. bombers circling the sky. ‘It was the Americans,’ Haideri said. ‘No one
else had such modern airplanes and drones.’ The villagers went to the governor’s office to make
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a complaint and seek compensation for the damage to their shops. They never heard back, they
said, adding to their resentment. The villagers acknowledged that two of those killed were
members of the Taliban, but they said the 10 others were civilians. That made them angrier.”
(Raghavan, 2021)
After the Taliban take-over, the Afghan villages did experience new and major troubles -- but
without the killings from U.S. airstrikes. Sudarsan Raghavan wrote: “With the departure of U.S.
forces and the fall of President Ashraf Ghani’s government, there’s now a calm unlike any the
villagers have experienced in two decades. With the conflict ended and the Taliban in control,
the violence has stopped. ‘The major change is there is peace and security now, and the killings
of the people have stopped,’ Mohammed Omar, the village imam, said in front of a mosque
peppered with bullet holes. ‘You can move freely now anywhere. Death has disappeared.’ But
any sense of relief is tempered by new woes. The Taliban takeover triggered freezes in funds in
Afghanistan’s central bank and humanitarian aid; international charities have pulled out of the
district, and the economy is in free fall. ‘There are no airstrikes, no night raids, no bombings,”
said Haideri, tall and wiry with a black beard and wavy hair. “But the problem now is there is
no work and no money. People here are facing hunger.’” (Raghavan, 2021)
HISTORIC EVENT (CONTINUED): WHAT WAS ACCOMPLISHED IN AFGHANISTAN FROM
2001 TO 2021?
The benefits of the U.S. expensive support of the Afghan Government went only to the place of
the central government, Kabul. The Afghan villagers were alienated due to fighting in the
countryside, while the U. S. top-down nation-building strategy did succeed in improving life in
the government center of Kabul.
On August 2nd of 2021 before the Taliban took control of Kabul, Jon Boone wrote: “I had come
to Kabul in early August to take stock of Afghanistan’s remarkable transformation since the US- led invasion 20 years ago. I had no inkling what was coming or how fast (e.g. the Taliban take- over of Kabul later that month). Nor did anyone else. The mood at dinner that night, on August
2, was far from despondent. Guests gathered in a garden not far from the Tolo studios included
a wealthy fuel trader, a major landowner, a politician, a senior official from the central bank and
a national cricket star. There was a feeling that, however bad things might get, the country had
been changed too much to be ruled once again by unworldly mullahs from the mud-baked
villages of southern Afghanistan. And yet within days, provinces and cities fell one after
another. The Afghan National Army melted away. On August 15, the Taliban reclaimed the
capital.” (Boone, 2021)
The capital city of Kabul had greatly prospered during the American occupation. Jon Boone
wrote: “Back in 2001, Kabul was a ruined husk with a population of about two million. Later, it
became home to four million. Entire streets disappeared since I first came to live here as the
FT’s Afghanistan correspondent in 2007. They were replaced by garish, high-rise blocks of flats
and shopping centres. . . . But Afghanistan’s economy had been struggling since 2014, the year
NATO ended its combat operations and handed responsibility to Afghan forces. It marked the
end of the fat years of manic US spending on foreign troops, contractors and development
projects.” (Boone, 2021)
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Betz, F. (2022). Political Theory of Nation-Building: Case of the Failed State of Afganistan in 2021: Part 1. Advances in Social Sciences Research
Journal, 9(2). 103-132.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.92.11754
This analysis of a historical event facilitates the abstraction of generalizable explanations out of
the descriptive complexity of the history.
Now we use this research technique to analyze the U.S. withdrawal event from Afghanistan, by
summarizing the key societal factors and explanations in the event, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Analysis of U.S. Forces Withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021
INDIVIDUALS – The individuals involved in the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from
Afghanistan began with a decision to withdraw made by the former U.S. President Donald
Trump in February 2020 – while U.S. officials negotiated with a Taliban official Abdul Ghani
Baradar. The next U.S. President Joe Biden honored the withdrawal agreement, withdrawing
all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by August 30, 2021.
SOCIETY – The societies involved were principally the USA nation, the Afghanistan state, and
the Pakistan nation. The Taliban are a political movement, not a society.
GROUP – The groups in the event were the Taliban, the Afghanistan Army and the U.S. military
forces, and Pakistan Intelligence Services.
PROCESS – The process was a negotiated agreement between the Taliban and the U.S.
government of America to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan within less than a year.
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REASON – The American government thought its nation-building efforts in its 20-year
occupation of Afghanistan was a failure. Karoun. Demirjian wrote: “In September 2021,
testifying to the U.S. Congress, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said:
‘that the U.S. would have gone to war again with Taliban if military had stayed beyond August
2021.’” (Demirjian, 2021)
ACTION – In 2021, the new U.S. president Biden honored the withdrawal agreement with the
Taliban and initiated a sudden withdrawal of all American forces in August of 2020. David
Zucchino wrote: “Back on December 31, 2014, with the war at a stalemate, Mr. Obama had
ended major combat operations on, and transitioned to training and assisting Afghan security
forces. Nearly three years later, President Donald J. Trump said that although his first instinct
had been to withdraw all troops, he would nonetheless continue to prosecute the war. He
stressed that any troop withdrawal would be based on combat conditions, not predetermined
timelines. But since 2018, the Trump administration also had been talking to the Taliban,
leading to the formal negotiations in 2020 (that excluded the Afghan government, led by
President Ashraf Ghani). . . After the deal was signed, the Taliban stopped attacking American
troops and refrained from major bombings in Afghan cities. The United States reduced air
support for government forces. . . And ahead of the planned withdrawal, the Taliban’s military
campaign had forced widespread surrenders and retreats by beleaguered Afghan government
forces. In many cases, the Afghan forces gave up without a fight. Military and police units in
Afghanistan had been hollowed out by desertions, low recruitment rates, poor morale and the
theft of pay and equipment by commanders. They have suffered high casualty rates, which
American commanders have said were not sustainable. The brutal campaign by the Taliban to
recapture Afghanistan gained ground early in 2021, and officers in rural outposts began to
surrender. It picked up steam almost immediately after American troops began to withdraw on
May 1 and on August 2, 2021, the Taliban swiftly captured Kabul, seizing control over the
country.” (Zucchine, 2021)
In addition to the principal factors identified in the analysis of the recent societal history of
Afghanistan, there were also important connective relations, explanations, important in
explaining the U.S. withdrawal event. These included the following:
IDEOLOGY – The political clash between the U.S. and Taliban was based upon two different
political ideologies of government for Afghanistan: a secular democracy versus a religious
theocracy.
STRATEGY – The U.S. government strategy for nation-building in Afghanistan was top-down,
focusing upon building a central government in Kabul.
POLICY – The U.S. government policy funded the central government, built a national army, and
used NATO military forces to attack Taliban militias in the countryside.
TECHNOLOGY – The military technology the U.S. used was airstrikes by drones to kill Taliban
targets in the villages.
OPERATIONS – U.S, military supported outposts in the countryside of Afghan army units with
supplies and airpower. Airpower delivered as drones striking houses in villages killed villagers