Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 IranT, Tehran, Shahid Beheshti University< Department of IR
2 Department of Global and Regional Politics, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
In October 2001, a United States-led coalition dismantled the Taliban's Islamic Emirate and set in motion one of the most expensive state-building projects of the post-Cold War era. Two decades and nearly one trillion dollars later, that same project collapsed faster than it had been built: over the summer of 2021 provincial capitals fell one after another, most of them without serious fighting, and on 15 August Kabul changed hands with almost no resistance. This article asks why the Taliban were able to return to power after twenty years, and argues that the answer lies not in a single triggering decision but in the persistence of state failure. Drawing on the Fund for Peace's conception of state failure and on the time-series data of the Fragile States Index, it treats failure across three clusters - social, political-security, and economic - as a necessary structural condition that generated the opportunity the Taliban exploited, and treats the February 2020 Doha Agreement, together with the accompanying withdrawal decision, as the proximate accelerator that converted this entrenched opportunity into an actual military outcome. This formulation is a deliberate one: because Afghanistan's fragility scores were critical throughout the period, failure alone cannot explain why collapse occurred in 2021 rather than in 2010 or 2014, and any explanation that stops at "the state had failed" is circular. The findings indicate that if failure persists under Emirate rule, the reproduction of instability and its spillover into the region are more probable than consolidation.
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