Rescuing Afghan Women in a Failed State - How to Stabilize Afghanistan's Deteriorating Internal Situation

Over the past decades, the consensus has settled that the greatest threats to international security come disproportionately from poorly governed states in developing countries. Not only do they form the centre of contemporary development challenges, but they are also said to enable a variety of transnational threats, such as humanitarian disasters, energy insecurity, or terrorism. This view has become most pronounced in advanced market democracies, particularly the United States, where it has acquired the status of conventional wisdom. The issue of ‘fragility’ and the ‘failure’ of states, confronted with war, violence, and poverty, is immediately presented as a major international political challenge that must be overcome as soon as possible. It is often those states that take on this task, which at earlier times in history contributed to the state fragility of so-called Third World countries, through colonisation, globalisation, and other self-serving interventions. Afghanistan, once a progressive country on the path to modernisation despite many traditional conservative Islamic attitudes, became the scene of bloody power struggles of the bipolar world. The West instrumentalised the Mujahideen and the Taliban, groups with radical Islamist leanings, to contain communism. The very groups that were to be fought in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. As direct answer, two missions were launched. The US-led counterterrorism and the NATO-led reconstruction mission in Afghanistan. However, (re)constructing state institutions without considering the socio-political cohesion of society is the paradox of the initiated nation-building rhetoric. This paper identifies the impossibility of considering state-building as a process separate from the formation of a sense of community, a national identity with which all groups can identify, at least to some extent. For twenty years, the US and its partners have been at work in Afghanistan, without any breakthroughs. In academia, the nation-building campaign is postulated as a failure. But is this really true? This question will be investigated and researched based on qualitatively analysed interviews. One frequently discussed topic is the women’s rights situation in Afghanistan, which has radically deteriorated under the Taliban. In several interviews with Afghan women, their situation during the occupation will therefore be examined, with the aim of answering the question posed above and filtering possible positive outcomes from the Western mission. Moreover, the failure of nation-building will also be analysed in essence by examining mistakes in its conception. For this purpose, complementary interviews were conducted with political officials who were directly involved in the implementation of the campaign. To get to this point, the paper therefore begins by trying to set the concepts of state, nation, national identity, state failure and nation/state-building straight and explain them comprehensively. The reconstruction mission in Afghanistan was strategically aimless, haphazardly overfunded, and above all, sheerly neo-colonialist in design. In the end, those who were affected by the reconstruction were hardly involved in the process. Instead, the US controlled the Afghan government, determined policy decisions, and led to corruption, mismanagement, and fragmentation of the country. Afghanistan joins a long list of failed foreign-attempted nation-building missions and it seems that the West, especially the US, has still not learned any instructive lessons from past mistakes.