State-building in Afghanistan: What Went Wrong?

The Moynihan Institute’s Practice of Global Politics series presents Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant Wania Yad from the University of Delaware.

State-building interventions to construct or restore state institutions and practices in places destroyed during decades of internal conflict is a common occurrence in today’s international system. Such interventions are often externally driven and internationally supported to build a democratic government in a post-conflict society.

A prominent example occurred in Afghanistan, where, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda, the United States began a military campaign that soon turned into a state-building project. This project, which lasted twenty years and cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, failed: the U.S.-backed government collapsed and was replaced by the theocratic Taliban regime.

Conventional wisdom says that the U.S.-backed republic fell because Afghanistan was ungovernable and would always be a lost cause for the outside world—a graveyard of empires. While such views are widespread and at times understandable, policy choices made by the United States and its partners in Afghanistan created a legitimacy crisis, the sources of which were multiple and interwoven.

To examine this crisis further, this talk will address questions such as: What policy choices did the United States, its partners, and Afghan government make over the past twenty years that led to this failure?

Upon receiving the U.S. Embassy scholarship for women, Wania Yad completed an undergraduate degree at the American University of Afghanistan, majoring in political science and public administration with a minor in law studies. After graduating in 2016, she worked for the following two years as a data analyst with the National Security Council of Afghanistan. She began a master’s degree in international relations at New York University as a Fulbright scholar in 2018.

She is currently a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant at University of Delaware, in the Political Science and International Relations Department. Her research focuses on social networks and state-building in Afghanistan. She also specializes in U.S. foreign policy in South Asia and the Middle East. She has taught classes on global migration and human rights and global politics.