Understanding Afghanistan - History and focus of the last two centuries until the rise of the Taliban in 2021

The United States' entrance in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban marks the fourth time in the country's 160-year history that a foreign power has deployed troops. However, although the British invaded in the nineteenth century with the intention of replacing existing governments and the Soviets invaded in the twentieth century to protect the regimes they backed, the US attacked Afghanistan at a time when the state structure had failed to function. It would have to establish a new state in order to restore the country's stability. Historically, this was accomplished by establishing a client political class in Kabul that would consolidate power via the use of foreign money and weaponry. However, after a quarter-century of combat, such a tactic was no longer sustainable. In Kabul, there was no political elite capable of seizing power and convincing others to accept its authority.

The international world rushed to restore Afghanistan's highly centralised government, which Abdur Rahman had imposed; the government's legitimacy was to be determined by elections rather than dynastic right. The model's shortcomings in terms of leadership, functioning, and legitimacy were evident shortly after Hamid Karzai became the presidency. To be effective, the leader of a centralised state needed to eliminate those who were motivated to undermine or subordinate state authority. Karzai was seen as meek and feeble. Rather of erecting a state, Karzai embraced a patrimonial form of governance in which the state's posts and resources were dispersed on a personal basis in order to purchase the support of existing power holders or to pit them against one another. These approaches facilitated maladministration and corruption, which crippled previous Afghan administrations and became worse over time. When the Afghan government shown its unable to offer the degree of security and economic progress anticipated by the populace, it was obliged to depend even more heavily on foreign donors to survive. This just emphasised Karzai's frailty and jeopardised his legitimacy.

In 2001, after the Taliban's demise, the international community tried to restore peace and security to Afghanistan. As the nation neared the conclusion of its first decade in the new century, this ambition fell well short of being realised. Afghanistan was either on the edge of collapse as a failed state or was remarkably stable in light of the difficulties it faced. International troops and foreign assistance had brought an end to the civil war. Thousands of refugees have returned from exile in Iran and Pakistan in record time. A political process for drafting and ratifying a constitution proceeded smoothly, enabling for the first time in Afghan history, the popular choice of a national leader, Hamid Karzai.
The country's military and financial resources were severely insufficient to guarantee security and raise one of the world's lowest levels of life.

Despite Mullah Omar's optimistic forecasts, the invasion failed to spark a countrywide uprising against the Americans and their supporters. Rather than condemning the presence of foreign troops, the overwhelming majority of Afghans viewed them with caution, seeing them as a means out of the civil war chaos that had ravaged the country since 1992. Afghans were also ready to assist in the country's reconstruction, and up to three million refugees would come home by mid-2003.
There was a surprising amount of public support for the US operation in Afghanistan, particularly among non-Pashtuns.

By 2001, the Taliban leadership had come close to establishing entire control of the nation, but only by bolstering its ranks with Pakistanis, Arabs, and other foreign soldiers. Afghans hated foreign meddling in their affairs, notably Pakistan's assertion that Afghanistan had become the country's fifth province.
Because they came from a faraway place that did not border Afghanistan, Americans had an edge in Afghan eyes. Because these governments saw Afghanistan as a country that might be annexed to those they already dominated, Afghans have always seen the most significant challenges to their sovereignty as emanating from adjacent countries (czarist Russia/Soviet Union in the north and British Raj/Pakistan in the southeast). More distant nations, like as Germany and the US, were thought to have no territorial aspirations in the country, making them safer friends. [...]