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The International Peace- and State-Building Intervention in Afghanistan: Distilling Lessons to Be Learned

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2025

Benjamin Zyla
Benjamin Zyla*
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada (benjamin.zyla@uottawa.ca)
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Abstract

The essay examines the lessons from the international intervention in Afghanistan, highlighting the failures of externally imposed state building, including neglect of local governance structures and prioritizing donor interests over Afghan ownership. The international peace- and state-building intervention in Afghanistan, which spanned two decades, culminated in the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021, leading to the Taliban’s swift resurgence. This event has sparked a critical examination of the strategies employed by NATO and allied nations during their engagement in Afghanistan. This essay aims to distill seven key lessons from this intervention, emphasizing the need for future peacebuilders to adapt their approaches to better align with local contexts and realities. The analysis highlights the failures of liberal peacebuilding, the importance of local ownership, the necessity of effective and legitimate institutions, and the detrimental impact of corruption. Furthermore, it underscores the significance of coherence among international actors and the need for a nuanced understanding of regional dynamics. By reflecting on these lessons, the essay seeks to provide actionable insights for future international interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states.

Keywords

peacebuildingstate buildingNATOAfghanistaninterventionlessons learnedsecurity-development nexus

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Type
Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , Spring 2025 , pp. 3 - 25
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

After U.S. troops began withdrawing from Afghanistan on September 11, 2021, following the Taliban taking over its first provincial capital on August 6, 2021 (and Kabul falling ten days after that), the Taliban launched a military offensive to take back control of the country. Only a few days later, nearly all administrative districts and provinces were back under its control. Over the course of these events, President Ashraf Ghani and other key government officials had fled the country, and Western interveners hastily set up air bridges to evacuate their citizens and government officials (such as diplomats and aid workers) from the capital, Kabul.Footnote 1 This coup by the Taliban marked the end of NATO’s twenty-year engagement in Afghanistan (2001–2021). Afterward, several analysts and commentatorsFootnote 2 called for a systematic review of NATO members’ peacebuilding missions in AfghanistanFootnote 3 to study the mistakes and errors and to identify lessons that future peacebuilders could learn from this experience. It was thus hardly surprising that in 2021, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, an independent organization that regularly brings together some 250 parliamentarians from NATO member states, was among the first organizations to officially endorse this call for a strategic, operational, and tactical-level review of the entirety of the peacebuilding missions in Afghanistan, thus reiterating a similar request made by NATO foreign ministers a few months prior.Footnote 4

Collectively, NATO member states, apart from the United States, have made very little progress since this call for a systematic review was voiced. Already in 2008, the U.S. Congress had created the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction to provide independent and objective oversight of U.S. Afghanistan projects by conducting audits of and investigations into the $147.23 billion that the United States had thus far appropriated for Afghanistan relief and reconstruction since 2002 (and counting). As part of these investigations, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR) has published thirty-five reports identifying lessons to be learned for the U.S. government.

Other NATO allies are far behind with their reviews. In Germany, for example, the Bundestag established a parliamentary study commission in the summer of 2022 that is tasked with drawing lessons from Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan for the country’s future foreign and security policy, and providing recommendations for how to optimize its networked approach (or comprehensive approach) in future peacebuilding missions. However, the final report that will be drafted by the parliamentarians is not expected until the end of 2026. Aside from this political commission, there is no independent organization in Germany like SIGAR in the United States that systematically evaluates Germany’s Afghanistan engagement. The situation is not very different in other NATO member states—let alone for NATO as an organization—and if a review process is ongoing, it is slow.

It seems now that NATO’s Afghanistan mission is complete, and the member states want to turn the page and forget about their experiences in the country. However, it is too early for that, I argue. Above all, this lack of reflection violates a plethora of monitoring and evaluation principles that NATO member states themselves have codified in international agreements, such as the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, necessitating that international peace builders regularly monitor and evaluate their practices and activities, and systematically assess them for effectiveness.Footnote 5 Such systematic evaluation, I argue, promises to distill a number of significant recommendations from peace builders’ experiences in Afghanistan and to prescribe different behaviors for future peace builders operating in fragile and conflict-affected states.

Norms are commonly defined as rules or expectations.Footnote 6 They can be prescriptive, in encouraging what is viewed as positive behavior; they can be proscriptive, in discouraging what is viewed as negative behavior; or the term can be used to refer to patterns of social behavior.Footnote 7 Informed by this understanding of norms, this essay pursues several goals that will contribute to the systematic evaluation of the Afghanistan peacebuilding interventions. My first aim is to identify lessons to be learned from the practical and intellectual failures of international peacebuilding policies and practices in Afghanistan at both the strategic and operational levels. In so doing, I converge mainstream problem-solving analysis focused on policymaking with the more critical analysis of peacebuilding (and statebuilding) that questions the processes driving interventions as well as the very act of intervention itself.Footnote 8 This critical peacebuilding scholarship reminds us that peacebuilding interventions do not originate exclusively from pure humanitarian concerns; they are also embedded and manifested in cultural, social, economic, and political (power) structures of the intervening state(s).Footnote 9

Second, the priority of international peacebuilders after their failure in Afghanistan is to restore their legitimacy.Footnote 10 This, I argue, requires radical global reforms for future peacebuilding interventions. This essay is an attempt to contribute to sketching out this future. Furthermore, I demonstrate that substantial change is necessary to delink peacebuilding from past and failed policies, as well as from the dominant political interests of certain interveners (especially the United States) to avoid peacebuilding pushbacks, especially by local populations.Footnote 11

Finally, taking local agency seriously in peacebuilding means international structural reform. I use the peacebuilding mission in Afghanistan as a case study to identify several structural problems that were impeding the operations and other issue areas in need of organizational reform.

In the first section, I explain the methodology used to derive the seven lessons outlined in third section. In the second section, I quickly revisit the main phases of the Afghanistan intervention between 2001 and 2021 to provide a succinct historical context of peacebuilder actions.Footnote 12 In the third section, I distill seven lessons to be learned from the Afghanistan intervention.

On Methodology

Over the past five years, Laura Grant, Tattiana Currey, and I have assessed the effectiveness of 136 peacebuilding projectsFootnote 13 by NATO members, worth several billion dollars,Footnote 14 based on open-source primary documents published by leading peacebuilding entities. These include, for example, countries (especially, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and international organizations, such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the UN.Footnote 15 Effectiveness was measured qualitatively against the stated goals or mandates of each project/program. This rich dataset was then triangulated with fifty-two select expert interviews conducted with senior policymakers in the respective national capitals and the organizations’ headquarters. Instead of applying a particular theory to the data or testing a hypothesis using a deductive approach, I used an inductive approach to code and subsequently analyze the data and the interview transcripts. While my earlier findings were published elsewhere,Footnote 16 in this essay I develop the most important lessons (to be) learned from NATO members’ peacebuilding mission in Afghanistan based on my earlier data and analysis, which logically is the next step after an operation is finished and is certainly in line with international monitoring and evaluation principles. The descriptive language that I use to provide a convergence and synthesis of the errors that were made is most suitable for deriving the lessons to be learned. The problem-solving mode that underlines this essay is adequate, especially for building bridges between the policy and scholarly audiences that I intend to reach. In other words, this essay does not offer new theories, concepts, or data to be analyzed; instead, based on earlier data analysis it develops lessons to be learned in future interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states.

One limitation of this methodology is the exclusiveness of the Afghanistan case study. One could argue that this produces several limitations with regard to the generalizability of the case study. I disagree. Aside from the obvious space constraints in this essay limiting a thorough examination of other cases, the Afghanistan intervention lasted for more than twenty years and was characterized by different phases (see the next section on historical background) and thus (changing) contexts, such as the role and mandates of international peacebuilders and the form of aid provided to Afghans. Moreover, it was an extensive intervention that involved not only NATO member states but also international organizations (such as the World Bank and European Union). All of this provides very “rich” temporal and comparative research material to justify this single case study; perhaps even mini–case studies within the larger case of Afghanistan.

One other limitation is that this essay relies exclusively on data from Western countries and not those from Afghans or the government of Afghanistan. This critique is partially appropriate but unavoidable given the composition of the research team and its language capabilities. I attempted to mitigate this imperfection somewhat by relying on discussions published in English, French, and German.

Brief Historical Background

One can loosely identify three phases of NATO’s Afghanistan mission, starting with the “stability and reconstruction phase” (2001–2005). For the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5 on September 12, 2001, after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on September 11. In addition to showing their solidarity with the United States and condemning the attacks, most allies made troop contributions to the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom, the counterterrorism mission undertaken to remove the TalibanFootnote 17 from power. The Taliban’s removal left a significant governance vacuum in the country that was addressed at the first international donor conference, held in Bonn, Germany, on December 5, 2001. The conference brought together Afghan representatives from different ethnic tribes (except the Taliban) and international donors to discuss how to rebuild the country and government institutions. Hamid Karzai was selected as (interim) president by an emergency loya jirga shortly after the Bonn conference and given a mandate to govern until it was safe to hold free elections.Footnote 18 Moreover, a constitutional committee was assembled to draft a constitution to establish executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government.Footnote 19 But it was not only a case of Western interveners telling Afghans how to set up their governance institutions. In 2002, at the Tokyo Conference on Afghanistan, international donors asked the new government in Kabul to develop its own vision and strategy for economic self-reliance, as well as to form regional cooperation with other countries in the neighborhood, offering it direct budgetary support to do so. All of this was meant to create a sense of local ownership among Afghans over the evolving peace process. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1386 establishing the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to maintain peace and security around the capital of Kabul.Footnote 20 NATO took command of ISAF on August 11, 2003, upon request from the Afghan government and the UNSC,Footnote 21 and subsequently extended its operations beyond Kabul.

To better facilitate the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan, in 2003 NATO introduced provincial reconstruction teams to operationalize the so-called comprehensive approach and join military and civilian specialists (such as economic development officers, diplomats, and NGOs) to help with the reconstruction of the country.Footnote 22 Henceforth, ISAF’s mandate was to promote and enhance security in the country, but also to facilitate humanitarian relief and implement development and reconstruction programs (with such goals as building schools, digging wells, and so forth). This was the beginning of ISAF’s “state-building phase” (2005–2009), during which international peacebuilders increasingly helped the Afghan government to functionally extend its authority beyond the capital of Kabul to the provinces.Footnote 23 Capacity-building tasks, such as building schools, conflict mediation, and implementing a far-reaching security sector reform, became the daily and primary focus of ISAF’s evolving stabilization and reconstruction mission.Footnote 24

In June 2008, the Paris Conference brought together sixty-seven countries that pledged $20 billion for development projects and programs to support Afghanistan. They also reaffirmed the importance of the so-called Afghanistan Compact, which served as the basis for Afghans to develop their own strategies for security, governance, economic growth, and poverty reduction.Footnote 25 Another international donor conference on Afghanistan was held in London on January 20, 2010. It sharpened the donors’ focus on the security-development nexus and started the process of gradually transferring security, governance, and economic development responsibilities back to Afghans. This marked the beginning of the “transition phase” (2010–2014). The transition process was completed when Afghan forces assumed full security responsibility at the end of 2014 and the ISAF combat mission was replaced by Resolute Support Mission (RSM), a NATO-led noncombat mission designed to provide training, advice, and assistance to the Afghan security forces. RSM terminated with the sudden withdrawal of all NATO forces from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.

Evaluating Lessons (to be) Learned from the Afghanistan Intervention

Understand the Neighborhood before You Intervene

Most Western governments involved in peacebuilding poorly understood the geopolitical neighborhood of Afghanistan. For starters, it shares a physical border with Pakistan, Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—each of which to varying degrees had a keen interest in the success or failure of the Afghan government.Footnote 26 Afghanistan, for example, enjoyed an amicable public relationship with Iran. The mullahs tacitly supported the Taliban in disrupting American interests and balancing “U.S. and allied (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) power in the region.”Footnote 27 In other words, Iran’s strategy was to uphold the conflict in Afghanistan to a certain level and thus prevent its foremost enemy (the United States) from permanently stationing American troops close to Iran. These important and varied relationships were rarely taken into account by peacebuilders.

Moreover and relatedly, international peacebuilders will not be successful or considered legitimate (and even might cause harm) if they lack an understanding of the populations whom they serve and the contexts in which they work.Footnote 28 Local knowledge is essential for the efficacy of interventions (the ability to pinpoint and comprehend local issues is crucial for formulating appropriate responses) and for mitigating unintended adverse outcomes, which may encompass detrimental effects on local populations and security threats to peacebuilding efforts. In this sense, local knowledge involves an understanding of local actors; histories; cultures; political economies; and normative, political, economic, military, and social dynamics.Footnote 29 Peacebuilders often lacked this understanding in the Afghanistan intervention, as this following example will show.

Imposed by the British in 1893 and initially time bound until 1993, the Durand Line arbitrarily divided the Pashtun population’s traditional territory geographically by including one part of it in Pakistan and the other part in Afghanistan. Today, Pashtuns represent roughly 42 percent of the Afghan population.Footnote 30 However, by effectively splitting the Pashtun’s territory between the countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the British created an artificial identity clash between Pashtuns’ set nationality (either being Pakistani or Afghan) and their ethnic belonging.Footnote 31 This has been a problem for international peacebuilders, because they did not understand the importance of the Pashtuns’ ethnic identity and their land claims as one of several drivers of the Afghan civil war, as well as the indirect role that Pakistan played in fueling this civil war as an active-yet-covert supporter of the Taliban insurgency.Footnote 32 This was a serious mistake, as was the nonexistence of a holistic NATO-wide Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.Footnote 33

Liberal Peacebuilding Does Not Work

Liberal peacebuilding became the international community’s passepartout in response to the surge of internal conflicts in the post–Cold War era, reflecting a multidimensional approach of managing conflict in fragile states by addressing social, economic, and institutional concerns. In that sense, peacebuilding became a liberal governance project that entails not only managing instability between states “but seeking to build peace within and between states on the basis of liberal democracy and market economies.”Footnote 34 Specifically, liberal peacebuilding is rooted in the assumption that “the surest foundation for peace, both within and between states, is marked by democracy, that is, a liberal democratic polity and a market oriented economy.”Footnote 35 The idea is that democracy and a free market economy allow citizens to effectively communicate and settle their differences peacefully, and that this is the strongest basis for development and governance.Footnote 36 As Michael Barnett and colleagues note, this approach to peacebuilding is characterized by “the desire to produce a particular kind of state, a liberal, democratic state, organized around markets, the rule of law, and democracy.”Footnote 37 Thus, peacebuilding in the postconflict context implies a form of liberal state building, initiated by international actors such as the United Nations, international financial institutions, states, and nongovernmental organizations. As a result, liberal peacebuilding “has been turned into a system of governance rather than a process of reconciliation.”Footnote 38 It also prescribes various top-down, elite-led liberal remedies, including demobilization and security sector reform, the construction of democratic institutions of governance, the opening of markets, judicial reform, and the establishment of processes of transitional justice. Last, the liberal peacebuilding model is informed by a Weberian state model, which follows a rational-legal chain of authority, hierarchy, and a clear ministerial division of labor.Footnote 39 Mirroring this ideal type of a governance model, Afghanistan’s interim state authority established by the international donor conference in Bonn in 2001 was functionally divided into executive, judiciary, and legislative branches of government,Footnote 40 with the conference assuming this arrangement would quasi-automatically translate into an effective Afghan bureaucracy. But there were several problems with this liberal peacebuilding governance model in Afghanistan.

First, this externally imposed statebuilding model failed to match the local context and specifically Afghanistan’s traditional (tribal) institutions of governance.Footnote 41 Historically, Afghan institutions have been decentralizedFootnote 42 due to the central government’s historical inability to effectively deliver public goods for all Afghans.Footnote 43 In the past, tribal councils provided a source of formal local representation and legitimacy.Footnote 44 They included several lower levels and sources of political authority—a quasi “polycentric political system”Footnote 45 composed of community local village representatives (maliks), consensus-based councils (shuras or jirgas), and religious arbiters (mullahs)Footnote 46 that exerted power and implemented government decisions at the local level. However, international peacebuilders poorly understood this polycentric system and instead concentrated on strengthening the capacities of the Afghan central government, which is particularly problematic for creating an indigenous and stable Afghan social contract,Footnote 47 one of the several objectives of international peacebuilders. Put another way, peacebuilders arrived with a preset model of how the state in Afghanistan should be organized and governed. This preset model undermined Afghan’s indigenous and stable internal legitimacy, leaving local Afghan government officials with minimum endogenous authority to govern the country (lack of local ownership), contributing to their perceived illegitimacy.Footnote 48

Second, the peacebuilders’ imposed centralization of government authority meant that the Afghan government was well represented (and effective) in providing public goods and services in Afghanistan’s major cities (such as Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Kandahar). However, it lacked the power to reach rural communities, where 75 percent of Afghans live.Footnote 49 This further alienated the federal government’s legitimacy in the eyes of Afghans living in these rural areas who make up the majority of the population.

Third, international peacebuilding enterprises have forgotten to make important-yet-overlooked distinctions between external state building and nation building. “State building” is a functional exercise to enhance capacity and institutions and, ideally, to help provide legitimacy for the state. Essentially, this approach is equivalent to providing technical assistance to the Afghan government and its bureaucracy to deliver public goods to Afghans. “Nation building,” on the other hand, is a process that aims to construct a national collective identity.Footnote 50 It is thus an inherently endogenous (social) process that draws, for example, on local traditions, culture, institutions, and customs,Footnote 51 redefining them as national characteristics to support the nation’s claim to sovereignty. It requires extensive local input and agency.Footnote 52 This process could only have been successfully led by Afghans and not imposed externally by peacebuilders.Footnote 53

Finally, we know from earlier research that peacebuilding is most successful if a formal peace agreement has been signed by parties to the conflict.Footnote 54 A peace agreement is an important political and legal instrument that regulates, for example, sources of state power and how they are to be exercised.Footnote 55 It also shapes the social and political rules of the country. However, no one sought to develop such a peace agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government, evidenced by the fact that the Taliban were not even invited to the Bonn conference for negotiations on the future of the country.

Support Local Peacebuilding

First, a robust literature shows us that top-down liberal approaches to fixing fragile states are not only unrealistic but also not conducive to pragmatic, local-based governance solutions.Footnote 56 This was the case in Afghanistan, showing that complex, generalizable plans by international peacebuilders and the pursuit of liberal reform agendas such as democratization, market liberalization, and the building of liberal institutions—the hallmarks of liberal peacebuildingFootnote 57—amount to unrealizable social engineering.Footnote 58 These reform agendas did not solve Afghanistan’s state fragility.Footnote 59 To the contrary, they tended to aggravate the civil warFootnote 60 in Afghanistan by undermining the sociopolitical cohesion of the country and thus its social contractFootnote 61 and legitimacy.Footnote 62 Moreover, the liberal agenda’s fast-tracking democratization processes, through holding elections and drafting a constitution,Footnote 63 only produced an output for peacebuilders; they did not restore Afghanistan’s social contract.Footnote 64 In short, an externally assisted peacebuilding passepartout (or role model) does not work, because each state is distinct in its governance settings, political cultures, local dynamics, and social contract. As noted, for international peacebuilders to effectively respond to local needs, above all, local knowledge is requiredFootnote 65 to avoid detaching the state from society.

Second, in Afghanistan, international peacebuilders have learned that local legitimacy, agency, and ownershipFootnote 66 are sustained by mixing top-down and bottom-up approaches.Footnote 67 This hybridity enables and encourages the interplay of international and local peace efforts,Footnote 68 embracing local actors as “co-creators of knowledge and action”—offering microlevel and indigenous perspectives—for context-specific solutions. It implies an approach that reflects the interests, identities, and needs of all state and nonstate actors.Footnote 69 The premise essentially is that the state is only one among many peacebuilding actors. Accordingly, indigenous societal institutions must be recognized as decisive players in postconflict governance processes and be encouraged to implement their own logic and rules alongside state actors and structures.Footnote 70 Oliver Richmond adds that engaging with the local indicates the importance of “legitimacy, custom, culture, identity, reconciliation, and local politics or power structures . . . [and] the more we know about them . . . the more we understand ‘our’ limitations.”Footnote 71 This counsels that in the future international peacebuilders should act more like moderatorsFootnote 72—that is, in helping implement local rather than top-down peacebuilding agendasFootnote 73 and in fostering local governance institutions.Footnote 74

Third, security and development must be considered and practiced jointly, not separately or in sequence.Footnote 75 In Afghanistan, peacebuilders had a tendency to prioritize security over development, assuming that the latter would flow automatically from the provision of the former. In the future, peacebuilders are advised to move beyond the “soldiers first” to a “soldier-diplomat” modelFootnote 76 that prepares them for culturally sensitive, normatively neutral, and equitable engagements with diverse local partners. Training in diplomatic skills such as mediation, negotiation, conflict management, deescalation, and interactive problem solving will be necessary in this regard,Footnote 77 as these tools enable normatively neutral collaboration between international and local actors to shape both the means and the ends of peace operations. As suggested by the critical peacebuilding literature, this includes strengthening transitional local and social justice mechanismsFootnote 78 and local civil society organizations, and facilitating the resolution of local identity and self-determination claims. Their resolution would significantly strengthen the local social contract and legitimacy.

A Local Social Contract Is Key

The Afghanistan intervention shows that there are three key ingredients in a functioning social contract; namely, state capacity, effectiveness, and legitimacy.Footnote 79 “Capacity” refers to the ability of the state to deliver and manage essential public goods, such as by enforcing the law, protecting citizens, resolving internal conflict, managing resources, and facilitating economic development.Footnote 80 “Effectiveness” indicates that ideally these resources are available to the populace,Footnote 81 and should be available in an effective and efficient manner. In that sense, the goal is to create a “strong” state and to move away from being a “welfare” state that almost exclusively relies on external donors.Footnote 82 Last, “legitimacy” is a term that refers to whether state actions are perceived by the population as “just” or “reasonable” in terms of prevailing societal norms.Footnote 83 Authority is delegated to the state by its population, which understands the tradeoff of relinquishing degrees of control in return for the state providing essential public goods and servicesFootnote 84 and ensuring a functioning economy.Footnote 85

The social contract is a dynamic negotiation between the roles and responsibilities of the state and society (more specifically, its citizens). When a state is incapable of meeting the expectations of its citizens or fails to manage changes in expectations, there is a strong likelihood of a breakdown of the social contract.Footnote 86 In other words, a breakdown occurs because “a major communal group or groups no longer have sufficient incentives to accept the government’s authority,”Footnote 87 because those groups feel unrepresented,Footnote 88 or when the government is unable to govern effectively.Footnote 89 In Afghanistan, warlords and drug dealers partially replaced the state by providing an alternative source of economic revenue and security.Footnote 90 Furthermore, an unqualified, ineffective, and centralized Afghan civil service failed to provide citizens with essential goods and services effectively and impartially. It thus fueled endemic corruption at all levels of government (among politicians and bureaucrats), eliminating the slightest political progress on the road toward creating effective institutions for the country and a functioning social contract. During their twenty-year presence in Afghanistan, international peacebuilders were never able to eliminate this endemic political corruption at all levels of government or to introduce reforms to eliminate it.Footnote 91

Representative Institutions Are a Must

Representation is not only about who obtains power and how they are perceived and held accountable by the electorate but also about how individuals and ethnicities are represented in the institutions, specifically at the local levels of government, as it can increase legitimacy. In particular, the latter two were problematic in Afghanistan. For example, Afghan government officials who have left government positions have been found to be involved in drug production, corruption, warlordism, predation, political intimidation, land grabbing, and ethnic war fighting.Footnote 92 Even worse, after the ousting of the Taliban regime, ex-warlords turned to politics in the 2005 parliamentary election, with the explicit support of international peacebuilders.Footnote 93 In addition, from the point of view of reconciliation and transitional justice and building trust in state institutions, appointing former warlords to higher political offices (as cabinet ministers and deputy ministers, for instance) is highly problematic because it provides them with political legitimacy and rewards them for their past (mis)behaviors. Likewise, their appointments to positions of authority have not only empowered but also vindicated them politically, again to the detriment of state institutions and the Afghan social contract.

Building on my earlier discussion of local peacebuilding, the lesson for international peacebuilders to learn here is that state institutions must be designed jointly with the local populations (and not just the local political elites) to effectively manage local conflict dynamics,Footnote 94 including the local social, economic, and political pressures that favor the emergence of conflict.Footnote 95 Effective local institution building would respect the demands of the local populationFootnote 96 and thus overcome structural weaknesses (for example, endemic corruption). Second, for institutions to be representative, pervasive grievances and demands, especially those of ethnic groups, must be addressed. Once again, this necessitates deep knowledge of the historical, geographical, and cultural relationships between Afghanistan’s ethnicities, as well as the us vs. them element, and majority vs. minority dynamics in its society.

Be Coherent

Peacebuilding interventions are comprehensive, multiactor endeavors with functions and implications across numerous policy spheres, including security and development. Thus, they require proficient coordination and coherence to be efficient, effective, and sustainable.Footnote 97 Very few of these actions were practiced by international peacebuilders in Afghanistan. Their sheer numbers (including most Western states as well as several supra-/international organizations such as the European Union, NATO, the UN, World Bank, and others) resulted in the prioritization of numerous different (political) interests, agendas, and strategies, lacking unity and strategic coordination and thus operational coherence.Footnote 98 A strategic framework that logically links actors and their capabilities is of the utmost necessity for ensuring international peacebuilding coherence.

Moreover, policy and mandate coherence must exist between all actors, particularly between international actors, regional actors, and local actors.Footnote 99 This must start with the design phase of an intervention and extend to funding, goal setting, operations, and monitoring.Footnote 100 As Cedric de Coning reminds us, all actors need to adapt and learn to collaborate on strategic planning.Footnote 101

Finally, peacebuilders need to overcome their interinstitutional rivalries and intrabureaucratic stove-piping practices (such as different ministries not coordinating country efforts), and instead cultivate a culture of vertical and horizontal cooperation between different ministries as well as across international actors.Footnote 102

Use Aid Wisely and Align It

Peacebuilders’ foreign aid had negative effects on Afghanistan’s state developmentFootnote 103 for several reasons. First, Western peacebuilders made their aid conditional, reasoning that their governments are accountable to their own taxpayers and not to Afghans. Thus, peacebuilders’ interests in helping the Afghan government or its people to prosper were not necessarily altruistic or selfless; they were driven by international peacebuilders’ domestic political priorities and desire to make political gains at home.Footnote 104 International peacebuilders thus violated one of the foremost principles codified in international agreements such as the Paris Declaration; namely, promoting local ownership of the peacebuilding process.Footnote 105 They failed to prioritize it when implementing their national roadmaps in Afghanistan.

Second, while ownership assigns obligations to both partners and donors, the principle of donor alignment relies largely on donors and their prioritized commitment to supporting partner countries’ development strategies, institutions, and procedures.Footnote 106 With much of the literature focusing on donor alignment through untying aid and making it unconditional,Footnote 107 a large responsibility of this principle required international donors to align their foreign aid with the development strategies of the Government of Afghanistan (GOA). Put another way, their foreign aid should have been channeled through the financial institutions of the GOA to help build local capacities, confidence, and thus legitimacy in the GOA, because they would be perceived to be responsible for managing those funds. However, in Afghanistan, aid effectiveness was simply a tool of peacebuilders, wielded when convenient, and made by and for peacebuilders.Footnote 108 More specifically, approximately 75 percent of the aid given to Afghanistan was managed by international institutions (especially the World Bank) and was neither passed through Afghan bank accounts nor managed by Afghans.Footnote 109 As noted, this practice undermined the internal capacity of the Afghan government, as well as the trust that needed to be built between the government and its citizens (Afghan social contract), thus inhibiting the ability of Afghans to develop local ownership, capacity, and accountability.Footnote 110 Moreover, Afghanistan’s heavy reliance, indeed dependence, on foreign aid to deliver some of the very basic public goods and services to its population made it a rentier state dependent on foreign aid.Footnote 111

Conclusion

The withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan, which transpired in a sudden and disorganized manner in May 2021, effectively terminated NATO’s mission in the country. International peacebuilders largely abandoned Afghanistan, leaving it to confront an array of challenges, including pervasive governmental corruption, stagnant economic growth, underdevelopment, and elevated levels of human insecurity.Footnote 112 Interest in systematically assessing their involvement in Afghanistan, not to mention extracting lessons from donor errors and shortcomings, remains surprisingly minimal among the peacebuilding stakeholders, despite their investment of billions of dollars in peacebuilding initiatives. Nonetheless, such a systematic evaluation is imperative, particularly because peacebuilders have made international commitments to comprehensive monitoring and evaluation principles, as articulated in the Paris Declaration, which obligates them to continuously monitor and evaluate their peacebuilding endeavors and to methodically assess their effectiveness.

In this essay, I have argued that such a systematic evaluation would yield a number of key normative recommendations based on the experience of peacebuilders in Afghanistan, prescribing a distinct set of behaviors for future peacebuilders working in fragile and conflict-affected nations, which I call the lessons to be learned. Norms are commonly defined as rules or expectations:Footnote 113 they can be prescriptive, encouraging positive behavior; proscriptive, discouraging negative behavior; or refer to patterns of social behavior.Footnote 114

Against this backdrop, the aim of this essay has been to identify the lessons to be learned from the practical and intellectual failures of international peacebuilding policy and practice in Afghanistan at both the strategic and operational levels, based on earlier research on aid effectiveness in the country. The essay thus combines problem-solving analysis with a critical approach to peacebuilding, allowing us to question the driving forces behind the Afghanistan peacebuilding mission. As highlighted by scholars such as Michael PughFootnote 115 and Vivienne Jabri,Footnote 116 peacebuilding efforts are influenced by the cultural, social, economic, and political structures of the intervening states in addition to purely humanitarian concerns.Footnote 117 Peacebuilding, as Timothy Sisk argues, “involves a constant and perhaps unending search for an appropriate balance between an endogenous, locally driven process that is internally ‘owned’ by the recognized government—and, ostensibly, the ‘people’—and one in which international actors assertively and without excuse advance global norms.”Footnote 118 In sum, the lessons are that the “old” peacebuilding policy needs to be delinked from the failed policy and political interests of Western states, and more attention and effort must be given to empowering local ownership and the promotion of an indigenous social contract. Moreover, international peacebuilders must acknowledge that “perhaps what makes a state legitimate in the eyes of Westerners is not what makes a state legitimate in the eyes of Afghans,”Footnote 119 or in the eyes of other nationalities where peacebuilding is occurring.

Undoubtedly, more work needs to be done on evaluating Afghanistan peacebuilding interventions and fine-tuning these lessons (to be) learned. Three avenues for further research should be mentioned. One obvious future research task is to compare the lessons (to be) learned to those from other interventions in different geographical areas (such as in Bosnia, Iraq, and Mali) and across organizations (such as the EU, UN, and African Union). This would allow researchers not only to distill more holistic lessons (to be) learned but also to control for specific local contexts (such as political systems and geography), as well as varying institutional impediments. If international peacebuilding practices indeed turn out to be different in other peacebuilding contexts, it would be important to follow up on why this is the case to better understand causal chains.

The second avenue involves the obvious gap concerning the inclusion of local Afghan perspectives and assessments in the analysis. If as scholars we truly want to draw lessons about what did not work in Afghanistan, we must include the perspectives of the Afghan people to understand why they lost faith in their government and the international peacebuilding project in the country. However, this perspective requires a very different research design than the one I adopted in this essay, as well as language competencies in at least two of the commonly spoken languages in Afghanistan (Dari and Pashto). Bilingual researchers could fill this gap and thus contribute further to the lessons (to be) learned list. The local security situation is also a barrier to conducting interviews with Afghans.

Finally, critical peacebuilding scholars should be encouraged to explore how much of the peacebuilding intervention in Afghanistan (and other places) was co-opted into Western (especially U.S. interests) and hegemonic thinking after 9/11 and the preoccupation of fighting terrorists.Footnote 120 Answering this question would most likely require access to primary documents from the U.S. government that to this day remain classified. To be sure, such an analysis would also require a very different research design compared to the one I have adopted in this essay.

Footnotes

The author was a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in 2021 through Canada’s Mobilizing Insights in Defense and Security (MINDS) program where this essay was drafted. The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of any agency of the Canadian government or NATO.

References

Notes

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11 The critical peacebuilding literature (for example, Pugh, “Peacekeeping and Critical Theory”) highlights American hegemonic interests as critical in this regard.

12 To be sure, my purpose here is not to provide a full and comprehensive historiography of the mission but rather to sketch out the main historical events as a quick historical recap and context for the reader.

13 We assessed effectiveness with regard to distinguishing between project “outputs,” “outcomes,” and “impacts.” In public discourse, these terms are often incorrectly used interchangeably. It is very easy, for example, for governments, international organizations, and humanitarian agencies to count how many schools or clinics they have built, and to list only the outputs. Outcomes, however, signify an assessment of the long-lasting effects that these development projects have had, as well as their long-term impact. For a more detailed discussion, see Grant, Laura and Zyla, Benjamin, Canada as Statebuilder? Development and Reconstruction Efforts in Afghanistan (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 This project was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), grant # 430-2015-00502.

15 The Canadian perspective was published in Grant and Zyla, Canada as Statebuilder?; the international perspective was delivered in Tatti Currey and Benjamin Zyla, “Linking Aid Effectiveness with Statebuilding Practice in Afghanistan: A Sub-Sector Analysis, 2001–2021” (conference presentation, European Consortium for Political Research, University College Dublin, August 12–15, 2024).

16 Grant and Zyla, Canada as Statebuilder?

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18 The loya jirga is the traditional grand assembly in Afghanistan, primarily used for making major political decisions. It brings together tribal elders, political leaders, and other key figures from across the country to discuss and resolve important national issues. The loya jirga is not a permanent institution but rather is convened on special occasions, such as amending or approving a new constitution (for example, the 2003 loya jirga that adopted Afghanistan’s current constitution); making decisions on matters of national sovereignty (such as approving treaties or agreements); and electing a leader in times of crisis (in the past, for example, some Afghan kings were chosen through a loya jirga).

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20 United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1386, S/RES/1386 (December 20, 2001).

21 The ISAF was a UNSC-mandated international force under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. The UNSC passed eighteen resolutions; namely, resolutions 1386, 1413, 1444, 1510, 1563, 1623, 1707, 1776, 1817, 1833, 1890, 1917, 1943, 2011, 2069, 2096, 2120, and 2145.

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23 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines “statebuilding” as “an endogenous process to enhance capacity, institutions, and legitimacy of the state driven by state-society relations” (OECD Development Assistance Committee [DAC], Statebuilding in Situations of Fragility: Initial Findings [Paris: OECD, 2011], p. 20). It is considered part of the broader peacebuilding approach.

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106 OECD, Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (Paris: OECD, 2005). www.oecd.org/en/publications/paris-declaration-on-aid-effectiveness_9789264098084-en.html; OECD, Accra Agenda for Action (Paris: OECD, 2008), www.oecd.org/en/publications/accra-agenda-for-action_9789264098107-en.html; and OECD, Supporting Statebuilding in Situations of Conflict and Fragility: Policy Guidance www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2011/02/supporting-statebuilding-in-situations-of-conflict-and-fragility_g1g125a0/9789264074989-en.pdf.

107 Burnside, Craig and Dollar, David, “Aid, Policies, and Growth,” American Economic Review 90, no. 4 (September 2000), pp. 847–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Collier, Paul and Dollar, David, “Development Effectiveness: What Have We Learnt?,” Economic Journal 114, no. 496 (June 2004), pp. F244–71 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

108 Grant and Zyla, Canada as Statebuilder?

109 John Sopko, “The 15 Year Experiment: An Update on the Afghanistan Reconstruction Effort” (Centre for International Policy Studies, University of Ottawa, April 5, 2017).

110 Traub, James, “Think Again: Failed States,” Foreign Policy 187, no. 4 (2011), pp. 51–54 Google Scholar; Narten, Jens, “Dilemmas of Promoting ‘Local Ownership’: The Case of Postwar Kosovo,” in Paris, Roland and Sisk, Timothy, eds., The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 252–84Google Scholar; and Jonathan Goodhand and Mark Sedra, “Bargains for Peace? Aid, Conditionalities and Reconstruction in Afghanistan” (Conflict Research Unit, Netherlands Institute of International Relations, August 2006).

111 Dodge, Toby, “Intervention and Dreams of Exogenous Statebuilding: The Application of Liberal Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Review of International Studies 39, no. 5 (December 2013), pp. 1189–1212 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Coburn, Noah and Larson, Anna, Derailing Democracy in Afghanistan: Elections in an Unstable Political Landscape (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

112 Suhrke, When More Is Less; and SIGAR, Stabilization.

113 Bicchieri, Grammar of Society.

114 Elster, Cement of Society; and Elster, “Norms.”

115 Pugh, “Peacekeeping and Critical Theory.”

116 Jabri, “War, Government, Politics.”

117 Bendaña, Alejandro, What Kind of Peace Is Being Built? Critical Assessments from the South (Manila: International South Group Network, 2003)Google Scholar.

118 Sisk, Statebuilding, p. 26.

119 Hanania, Richard, “The Failure of State Building in Afghanistan, Review of ‘The Rule of Law in Afghanistan: Missing in Action,’” Journal Jurisprudence 16 (December 2012), p. 585 Google Scholar.

120 See, for example, Ian Taylor, “Liberal Peace, Liberal Imperialism: A Gramscian Critique,” in Richmond, Palgrave Advances in Peacebuilding, pp. 154–74.