Afghanistan: State Failure, Terrorism, and Insurgency in Context — Part 1

Afghanistan is one of the world’s most war-torn and impoverished nations and has been beset by invasion, violence, and internal upheaval since its creation, having never been a homogeneous ethnic nation, instead existing as a collection of disparate groups divided along ethnic, linguistic, religious, and racial lines and forced together by the vagaries of geopolitics. A landlocked and mountainous country, it has suffered from chronic instability and conflict throughout its history, so much so that its current economy and infrastructure are in ruins.1 By September 11, 2001, Afghanistan was arguably one of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies and was also facing a significant crisis of governance. Afghanistan was ranked at the lowest end of the scale in global measures of human welfare and illicit activities, such as the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Failed States Index. Today, Afghanistan’s population is characterised by deep and multifaceted cleavages, being divided along ethnic, linguistic, sectarian, tribal, and racial lines which make unity an extremely unlikely process. As well as that, the religious framework within Afghanistan is based on a syncretic blend of various interpretations of Islamic doctrine combined with local customs, which mean that there is no one unifying religious element that ties all citizens together.