Today that I am writing this article is the fourth anniversary of the collapse of the former government of Afghanistan and the return of Taliban to power on 15 August 2021. After four years, yet significant political debates and academic literature navigate the causes and effects of the collapse within the mainstream discourse which avoids critical assessment of the root causes, sequences and dynamics that led to such a collapse. 

The collapse of the state in Afghanistan was not just a mistake and the consequence of defeat on the battlefield but rather was the result of 20 years of divertive and hypocritical policies that intentionally dismantled the so-called ‘state-building’ process while nurturing corruption, unaccountability, dependency and instability.

Since the early moments of the international intervention in 2001, the American-led strategy primarily privileged short-term and superficial reconstruction projects and a push-pull military conflict with insurgencies at the expense of sustainable development, ensuring the Afghan government could never be made so strong, stable and secure enough to stand on its foot and withstand a full-scale collapse in the long run.

Rather than investing in infrastructure, sustainable governance, industry or post-conflict economic growth, the U.S. heavily invested billions in an unfocused NGO-based aid system that seriously enriched its contractors, subcontractors, agencies and employees but brought little direct benefit, endurable occupation, stable infrastructure and long-standing prosperity to the ordinary people as well as to the public welfare sector.

Between 2001 and 2003, although there were some unrests in the southern provinces, the majority of other areas in Afghanistan were safe, insurgent-free and welcoming the new political, legal and military establishments under the international coalition (Secretary-General, 2002). Millions of people warmly welcomed the new developments in the country, participated in the first presidential and parliamentary elections at large.

The Afghan immigrants enthusiastically returned from Iran and Pakistan hoping to initiate a new life in their homeland. But this excitement and pleasure faded soon when they found that there is no sign of action seen for a sustainable peace, long-term investment and infrastructural development (López, 2024).

The uncertainty and distrust among the public surged when new the insurgency emerged and was suspiciously allowed to easily maneuver and destabilize certain parts of the south, extending their operations east, west and north. Soon, the majority of returnees including a considerable number of the locals due to lack of job, security, uncertainty and hope were forced to re-emigrate (Bjelica, 2004). This clearly shows that the people of Afghanistan foolheartedly welcomed the democratic process and supported the new changes willfully but their expectations from the new system eroded soon due to its malfunction, corruption and uncertainty. 

Concurrently, the military strategy of the U.S. and NATO oscillated between counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, never conclusively rendered to eliminate the Taliban forever but rather allowed the movement to cruise, revive and regroup, particularly inside Pakistan. Among other intentional steps to facilitate the state collapse was the U.S. unilateral negotiation with the Taliban leaders (designated by the U.S. as terrorists yet with millions of dollars for their heads), disdaining and sidelining a legitimate government-in-power that was directly formed and officially sponsored by the U.S. assistance (Rynning & Hilde, 2022). By witnessing this move which was covertly initiated long earlier, the majority of Afghan people viewed the U.S. policy as intentionally bringing the so-called ‘terrorists’ back to power. Their uncertainty, pessimism and suspicion in the early days of the first decade of intervention appeared to become true at the end of its second decade (Sepanta, 2017). On a post published about the U.S.-Taliban talks on the Facebook page of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in 2019 (which received thousands of comments), over 90% of commenters stated with tense anger that the U.S. had willfully decided a transition of power to the Taliban (the post was later modified or removed).

A critical misapplication of the U.S. and international intervention was the lack of investment in Afghanistan’s infrastructure, leaving the bulk of reconstruction and development plans to NGOs and private contractors which became profit-making ventures and not state-building institutions. The majority of these contracting institutions and companies were coming from the Western countries, mainly the U.S. and were linked to one or more foreign political figure such as senators, MPs and politicians.

According to a 2016 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report, over $110 billion in U.S. aid had gone into reconstruction, but a large section of the money had gone into short-term projects with no sustainable impact (Sopko, 2016). Instead of constructing new hospitals, schools, universities, companies, commercial hubs, industrial projects, manufacturing units and a thriving economy, the NGOs and contractors squandered up to 80% of the allocations on their administrative costs, salaries of foreign and national staffs and security, virtually returning most of the funding back to the Western banks and economies (Suhrke, 2011).

During the 20 years, no single significant building was constructed in the capital Kabul, even as an office of work rather than an urban development project; Instead, all contractors, subcontractors, international organizations, grantees and private aid beneficiaries rented private houses for their professional operations. This was not a simple neglect. It was a policy followed closely by the U.S. and international partners without a significant change from the beginning until the end in 2021. Use of rented private premises for the U.S. contractors and NGOs’ operations created an artificially fueled housing price bubble across the country reaping the rewards for warlords, the affluents and politically powerful elites but leaving the ordinary people to the brunt of spiraling life costs and an upper-class luxury (Cordesman, 2019). This approach ensured Afghanistan to remain always aid-dependent with no sustainable economy and infrastructures built, and with a new culture of rent-seeking and graft getting institutionalized in every level of government, rooted in the aid distribution policy. It also should be noted that the government of Afghanistan attempted at times to reduce the role of NGOs and increase its own share of external aids to focus on infrastructures but the foreign doners abstained.

Another in-built failure was the U.S. war strategy which treated the Taliban as containable insurgency and not as an existential enemy of the Afghan state. Contrary to possessing the capabilities of hitting Taliban safe heavens in Pakistan, as the SEAL Team Six raid on bin Laden in 2011 testifies, the U.S. refrained from taking retribution on Taliban leaders and instead let them easily revive, re accumulate and resupply (Coll, 2018). Subsequent release of de-classified documents documented the U.S. could have seized or taken out Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar in the early 2000s but knowingly let them silently slip into Pakistan (Rashid, 2008). This reflected tints of suspicion that the U.S. held the Taliban as future leverage and not merely enemy to be defeated in one’s full extent. The Obama era surge of 2009-2010 merely repositioned the Taliban temporarily but failed to cut their chain of commands, as Pakistan’s ISI kept providing safe corridors in the country, while Pakistan was also receiving billions of aids from the U.S. at the same time (Jones, 2020). Up to the year 2020, the U.S. directly transacted with the Taliban in Doha, irrespective of the group still remaining labeled terrorists on the blacklist, without the involvement of the Afghan government in the main talks (Khalilzad, 2021). This not merely sanctified the Taliban but demoralized the Afghan forces fighting them and raised their suspicion to the extent that their government is actually being collapsed by the U.S.

The U.S. policy also destabilized Afghanistan by enabling a class of corrupt elites who held power by virtue of Western patronage but not popular mandate. Most of Afghanistan’s senior officials, ministers and governors were appointed based on their Western education or connection and not on the basis of merit or loyalty to Afghanistan (Chayes, 2015). U.S.-friendly individuals such as former-President Ashraf Ghani and those close to him were accused of squandering billions of aid dollars, most of which were directly or indirectly channeled and rendered by U.S.-friendly contractors (SIGAR, 2021).

Investigations determined that the USAID projects were contracted to shell companies with official connections, institutionalizing a kleptocratic dynamic system where aid dollars enriched a pro U.S. minority elite and the local warlords on the backs of the rest of Afghans (Whitlock, 2021). Contrary to the Soviet policy in the 1980s with minimum financial and administrative corruption left, the U.S. embraced this level of corruption and graft taking policy because the Afghan elites were useful submissive collaborators in the short-term interest of Washington, even though the graft leached public faith in the local government in the long run, given that a long-run government has not been part of the policy. This pessimism was promoted by the U.S. funding outflow after the Taliban takeover.

While the U.S. openly stated that its mission in Afghanistan has ended by withdrawal, the level of cash transfer into the country even doubled. Afghanistan was receiving 40-80 million US dollars per week and this was much more than what was receiving before the collapse. Employees working with Afghanistan’s Central Bank stated anonymously in early 2022 that they had never seen such huge transfer of US dollars in cash during their entire recruitment period (Arman, 2022). Although officially stated that the funds target humanitarian assistance, the evidence shows that the majority of them gone directly or indirectly to the Taliban and have enriched their resources and strengthened their rule. Not only the Afghan sources acknowledged, but even the U.S. officials and law makers attested such a funding during a testimonial meeting (House Republican Lawmakers, 2025).

In short, the fall of Afghanistan in 2021 was not a surprise failure or mistake, as reflected by the mainstream discourse, but an inevitable consequence of two decades of the U.S. inconspicuous policies that prioritized expediency over sustainability, construction over interaction and short-term projects over long-term and infrastructural partnership. This will not necessarily ignore the impact of social, cultural and ethnic conflicts but emphasizes on the key role of international intervention in changing the internal dynamics of conflict through long-term development projects. Outsourcing the governance to NGOs and contractors as informal channels of corruption, refusing to decisively eliminate the insurgency when it was accessible, negotiating with the militants at the cost of sidelining the government of Afghanistan and propping up a network of corrupt elite, ensured that the U.S. has decided the Afghan state remains weak, illegitimate and vulnerable. Billions of dollars spent on reconstruction projects did not establish a working economy, infrastructure, endurable governance and sustainable institutions so that Afghanistan could continue to rely on its foot instead of continued foreign aid. 

Amin Arman is a researcher in exile and a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity, and Society, Department of Culture and Society at Linköping University in Sweden. He was teaching law in Afghanistan before the collapse of the former government in 2021.

Sources

Arman, A.M. (2022). Online Interview with a Former Employee of Central Bank of Afghanistan. The interview was conducted in Feb 2022 on anonymity basis.

Berenguer López, F. J. (2024). The US and NATO strategies in Afghanistan. In The failure of a pseudo-democratic state in Afghanistan: Misunderstandings and challenges (pp. 129-149). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Chayes, S. (2015). Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security. W.W. Norton & Company.

Coll, S. (2018). Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Penguin Press.

Cordesman, A. H. (2019). The Afghan War: The War in Afghanistan in 2019. Center for Strategic and International Studies.

House Republican Lawmakers. (2025). We Let This Money Go to Terrorists: Tim Burchett Unveils No Tax Dollars for Terrorists. Video retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX4ZSns1yFs

Jones, S. G. (2020). A Persistent Threat: The Evolution of al Qaeda and Other Salafi Jihadists. RAND Corporation.

Khalilzad, Z. (2021). The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey Through a Turbulent World. St. Martin’s Press.

Rashid, A. (2008). Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Viking.

Sepanta. Rangin. Dadfar. (2017). Siasat-e-Afghanistan; Rewaiate-e-az Daron (Afghanistan’s Politics; An Internal Narrative) (1st ed., Vol. 2). Amiri Publications.

Sopko, J. F. (2016). Corruption in Conflict: Lessons from the US Experience in Afghanistan.

Suhrke, A. (2011). When More is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan. Columbia University Press.

Sullivan, P. (2023). Auditing Failure: The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, 2012-2021.

Whitlock, C. (2021). The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War. Simon & Schuster.

Source: Global Research

Photo: American airmen board a C-17 at Al Udeid Air Base during the withdrawal, 27 April 2021.

'We Let This Money Go To Terrorists!': Tim Burchett Unveils No Tax Dollars For Terrorists Act (Forbes Breaking News, 02.25.2025)