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Warlords, Intervention, and State Consolidation:A Typology of Political Orders in Weak and FailedStates

Romain Malejacq

To cite this article: Romain Malejacq (2016) Warlords, Intervention, and State Consolidation:A Typology of Political Orders in Weak and Failed States, Security Studies, 25:1, 85-110, DOI:10.1080/09636412.2016.1134191

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Security Studies, 25:85–110, 2016Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0963-6412 print / 1556-1852 onlineDOI: 10.1080/09636412.2016.1134191

Warlords, Intervention, and StateConsolidation:

A Typology of Political Orders in Weak andFailed States

ROMAIN MALEJACQ

Despite efforts to bolster failed states over the past two decades,many states in the international system still exhibit endemic weak-ness. External intervention often leads to political instability andin most cases fails to foster state consolidation, instead empower-ing and creating ties with the ones it aims to weaken. Using thecase of Afghanistan, I develop a typology of political orders that ex-plains variation in degrees of state consolidation and provides thebasis for more systematic comparative analysis. I demonstrate theresilience of a political logic according to which non-state armedactors (warlords) “shape-shift” and constantly reinvent themselvesto adapt to changing political environments. This article, based onextensive field research in Afghanistan, shows why failed states areunlikely to consolidate and exhibit Western-style state building, asa result of intervention or otherwise.

Failed states became a major foreign policy concern at the end of the ColdWar when the collapse of central institutions paved the way for the rule ofbrutal and greedy warlords in Liberia and Somalia.1 Since 9/11, state failurehas increasingly been regarded as a direct threat to international security andAmerican national interests, of which the rise of the Islamic State is only the

Romain Malejacq is an assistant professor at the Centre for International Conflict Analysisand Management (CICAM), Radboud University Nijmegen, Institute for Management Research.

1 Jeffrey Herbst, “Responding to State Failure in Africa,” International Security 21, no. 3 (Winter1996/97): 120–44; Pierre Englebert and Denis M. Tull, “Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa: FlawedIdeas About Failed States,” International Security 32, no. 4 (Spring 2008): 106.

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latest manifestation.2 While policymakers have developed ambitious state-building agendas in places as varied as Nicaragua, Angola, and Timor Leste,with the hope that the reestablishment of functioning statehood would fostersustainable and durable peace, recent attempts to build strong, legitimate,and democratic states have proven illusory.3 International actors seem inca-pable of stabilizing failed states and establishing political order in places likeIraq, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where alternativeforms of governance persist.

In Afghanistan, the events of 2 February 2008 perfectly demonstrated thisexercise of authority in parallel to that of the state. That night, General AbdulRashid Dostum, one of the country’s most powerful warlords, was reportedto be drunk on the roof of his Kabul mansion, a weapon in one hand anda bottle in the other, as police besieged his palace on the account that hismen had beaten and kidnapped one of his former allies. The next morning,the police withdrew after the Turkish minister of foreign affairs allegedlythreatened President Hamid Karzai with the removal of all Turkish forcesfrom Afghanistan and an end to all aid projects in the event of Dostum’sarrest.4 The general was not brought to justice but was exiled to Ankaraafter the Turkish government and Karzai struck a deal that many at the timebelieved was the death knell for Dostum’s political career. A few monthslater, however, Karzai allowed the gruff and burly Uzbek leader to return toAfghanistan, in defiance of the international community and in exchange forhis support in the 2009 presidential election.5

Scholars offer a variety of explanations to account for the failure of exter-nal intervention to consolidate weak, war-torn, or collapsed states, includingcommitment problems, moral hazards, security dilemmas, spoilers, inade-quate values, and lack of resources.6 Yet, most conceive of state formation asa bargaining process between the center and competing power holders and

2 For state failure, see Robert I. Rotberg, “Failed States in a World of Terror,” Foreign Affairs 81, no.4 (July/August 2002): 127–40.

3 The results of these missions have been mitigated at best. See Christoph Zuercher, “Is More Better?Evaluating External-Led State Building after 1989,” CDDRL Working Paper 54, Center on Democracy,Development, and the Rule of Law, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University,Stanford, CA, April 2006.

4 Western diplomat 1, interview by Romain Malejacq, New York, 29 February 2012.5 Abdul Qader Dostum, General Dostum’s brother, interview by Romain Malejacq, Sheberghan,

Afghanistan, 12 February 2014.6 Alan J. Kuperman, “The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans,” In-

ternational Studies Quarterly 52, no. 1 (March 2008): 49–80; Robert W. Rauchhaus, “Principal-Agent Prob-lems in Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazards, Adverse Selection, and the Commitment Dilemma,”International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 4 (December 2009): 871–84; Barry R. Posen, “The Security Dilemmaand Ethnic Conflict,” Survival 35, no. 1 (March 1993): 27–47; Stephen J. Stedman, “Spoiler Problems inPeace Processes,” International Security 22, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 5–53; Roland Paris, At War’s End: BuildingPeace after Civil Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Severine Autesserre, Peace-land: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2014).

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Warlords, Intervention, and State Consolidation 87

fail to consider the role of international interactions in shaping patterns of po-litical order.7 I argue that the fragmentation of authority cannot be reducedto domestic politics and that even external attempts to consolidate statesoften lead to unanticipated outcomes. Intrusive international intervention,coupled with the domestic logic of authority where public administration isweak, inadvertently provides warlords with opportunities that allow them toshift their sources of power and reinvent themselves at the expense of statecentralization.8 The Dostum anecdote shows that state-building attempts toimpose a bureaucratic political order have to engage in a hybrid processof state formation and incorporate those seeking to evade it, which in turnbolster their authority in ways that prevent the emergence of a centralizedadministration.9

This has important implications, not only for research on state failureand emerging political orders but also for policymakers trying to provide sta-bility in failed and collapsed states. If the argument is correct, internationalefforts to consolidate states might in fact be futile, as political arrangementsbetween state and non-state actors always remain in flux.10 Conventional no-tions of historical and contemporary state building, which assume hierarchiesof authority and clear delineations of tasks, actually miss important elementsof the process. The persistence of alternative forms of governance pointsto the inconsistencies and limits of contemporary state-building and coun-terinsurgency strategies conceived as zero-sum situations in which either thestate or the rebels rule. It creates a dilemma that policymakers strugglingwith how to deal with the Islamic State and other militant groups seriouslyneed to acknowledge.

This work proceeds in four parts. The first section discusses the argu-ment in light of the existing literature on state failure, intervention, and statebuilding. The second section provides a typology of political orders in weakand failed states that explains variations in degrees of state consolidationand describes the nature of political authority in these states. This concep-tual typology allows me to uncover the process of power conversion through

7 A notable exception is Stathis N. Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, “International System and Technologiesof Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict,” American Political Science Review104, no. 3 (August 2010): 415–29.

8 For the purpose of this article, I adopt Christoph Zuercher’s approach to intrusiveness: “based noton the mandate, but on the level of de-facto intrusiveness in the political process of the country.” SeeZuercher, “Is More Better?” 8.

9 For similar arguments, see Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Michael Barnett and Christoph Zurcher, “The Peacebuilder’sContract: How External Statebuilding Reinforces Weak Statehood,” in The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Con-fronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations, ed. Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk (Hoboken:Routledge, 2008), 23–52; Michael Barnett, Songying Fang, and Christoph Zurcher, “Compromised Peace-building,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 3 (September 2014): 608–20.

10 For a similar argument, see Stephen D. Krasner and Thomas Risse, “External Actors, State-Building,and Service Provision in Areas of Limited Statehood: Introduction,” Governance 27, no. 4 (October 2014):545–67.

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which warlords “shape-shift” to adapt to structural changes and thus preventthe emergence of a strong centralized state. The third section considers therelevance of the theoretical framework in light of an in-depth case study andanalytic narrative of Afghanistan, the theory-generating case. The final sec-tion concludes with theoretical and policy implications in Afghanistan andbeyond.

STATE FAILURE, INTERVENTION, AND STATE BUILDING

For the purpose of this article I conceive of failed and collapsed states asstates that are “incapable of projecting power and asserting authority withintheir own borders, leaving their territories governmentally empty” and useboth terms interchangeably.11 These are states in which multiple social or-ganizations and armed groups violently compete for the control of the pop-ulation and offer governance alternatives that individuals and communitiesmight be able to choose from when developing their survival strategies andtrying to maximize their interests.12 In this perspective, weak states can beconsidered as “the halfway house between strength and failure.”13 They havethe ability to deliver some goods and services but fail to meet the Webe-rian criteria of rational-legal statehood that external state building aims toestablish.

Existing scholarship on state failure and warlordism investigates causalmechanisms that lead to the collapse of state institutions and thus providesvaluable insights on the prospects for external state building. Most of thesestudies look at warlords either as a cause or as a function of state failure.Some adopt a normative stance and equate state failure with a number ofsymptoms that need to be diagnosed and cured, a recipe for intervention.14 In

11 Collapsed states are usually considered “a rare and extreme version of a failed state.” See Rotberg,“Failed States in a World of Terror,” 133. Jennifer Milliken and Keith Krause however make a distinctionbetween “the institutional dimension of state collapse” and “the functional dimension of state failure.”See Milliken and Krause, “State Failure, State Collapse, and State Reconstruction: Concepts, Lessons andStrategies,” Development and Change 33, no. 5 (November 2002): 753. For a critique of the conceptof “failed state,” see Michael J. Mazarr, “The Rise and Fall of the Failed-State Paradigm: Requiem for aDecade of Distraction,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 1 (January/February 2014): 113–21.

12 Sasha Lehznev, Crafting Peace: Strategies to Deal with Warlords in Collapsing States (Lanham:Lexington Books, 2005), 11–12, 29; Robert H. Bates, “State Failure,” Annual Review of Political Science11 (June 2008): 1–12.

13 Rotberg, “Failed States in a World of Terror,” 131.14 Keith Stanski, “‘So These Folks Are Aggressive’: An Orientalist Reading of ‘Afghan Warlords,”’

Security Dialogue 40, no. 1 (February 2009): 73–94. For examples of such approaches, see Robert I.Rotberg, “Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators,” in State Failure and StateWeakness In a Time of Terror, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press,2003), 1–26; T. P. Robinson, “Twenty-First Century Warlords: Diagnosis and Treatment?” Defence Studies1, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 121–45; Alice Hills, “Warlords, Militia and Conflict in Contemporary Africa: ARe-Examination of Terms,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 35–51.

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this view warlords are defined as “spoilers” and treated as foes of state powerengaged in a zero-sum competition for the right to control and influencepeople.15 Kimberly Marten, for example, argues that “warlords maintain theirauthority by preventing the emergence of a functioning state.”16 Overall thesestudies lack the fine-grained analysis of warlords’ strategies and historicaltrajectories needed to understand how they transform their power basesand shape state-building processes to their advantage. Most tend to ignorethe complexity of the relationships between warlords and states and theevolution of political authority over time (in particular once external statebuilding takes place) and regard state formation as a homogenizing processthat asserts what is historically a very narrow conception of how dominantpolitical authority should be organized.17

The growing literature on intervention and state building provides anumber of generalizations to explain why international intervention fails tofoster state consolidation. For some, this is a mere collective action problem:recruitment, coordination, accountability, exit, and principal-agent problemsimpede international efforts to bring order to collapsed states.18 Along thesedebates on who is best positioned (and most legitimate) to conduct andfinance peace operations and on how to coordinate the different actorsinvolved (including domestic ones), critical scholarship on state buildingidentifies a variety of flaws in the practices of the international community.19

Among these, an emphasis has been put on organizational and policy failuresto explain the contrasted record of peace missions, in particular as the con-ditions that interveners face in collapsed states make “mission creep” towardstate building almost inevitable.20 While some offer suggestions on how toovercome these issues (such as neo-trusteeship and shared sovereignty),21

15 Stedman, “Spoiler Problems”; David E. Cunningham, “Veto Players and Civil War Duration,” Amer-ican Journal of Political Science 50, no. 4 (October 2006): 875–92; Jesse Driscoll, “Commitment Problemsor Bidding Wars? Rebel Fragmentation as Peace Building,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 1 (Febru-ary 2012): 118–49.

16 Kimberly Marten, “Warlordism in Comparative Perspective,” International Security 31, no. 3 (Win-ter 2006/07): 41.

17 For the Afghanistan case notable exceptions are Giustozzi, Empires of Mud; Barnett R. Rubin, TheFragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System, 2nd ed. (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Another exception is William Reno, Warlord Politics and AfricanStates (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

18 James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States,” Interna-tional Security 28, no. 4 (Spring 2004): 5–43; Roland Paris, “Understanding the ‘Coordination Problem’in Postwar Statebuilding,” in The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of PostwarPeace Operations, ed. Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk (New York: Routledge, 2008), 53–78; Kuperman,“The Moral Hazard”; Rauchhaus, “Principal–Agent Problems.”

19 Englebert and Tull, “Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa.”20 Severine Autesserre, “Hobbes and the Congo: Frames, Local Violence, and International Interven-

tion,” International Organization 63, no. 2 (April 2009): 249–80; Autesserre, Peaceland; Mats Berdal,“Building Peace After War,” Adelphi Papers 49, no. 407 (July 2009): 11–28.

21 Fearon and Laitin, “Neotrusteeship”; David A. Lake and Christopher J. Fariss, “Why InternationalTrusteeship Fails: The Politics of External Authority in Areas of Limited Statehood,” Governance 27,

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the only consensus seems to be that “even intrusive missions seem poorlyequipped to induce change” in state-building processes.22

For critics of the liberal peace agenda, externally-led state building isdoomed to fail because it inevitably promotes Western values that cannot beexported and uncritically applied to other countries and cultures.23 Scholarswho embrace this view believe that there is no “one size fits all” state build-ing and that foreigners will always lack the legitimacy to promote ambitiousand encompassing social engineering projects. Some assert that the values ofthe “liberal peace” model (electoral democracy and economic liberalism) arenot only foreign but also disruptive for they unleash ruthless economic andpolitical competition between opportunistic actors operating in particularlyvulnerable environments. Roland Paris argues against “rushed peacebuild-ing” and in favor of institutionalization before liberalization; Michael Barnettdevelops an alternative concept of “republican peacebuilding” based on de-liberation, constitutionalism, and representation.24 Overall, a consensus hasemerged on the necessity not only to build institutions but institutions thatare better adapted to non-Western societies.

These different approaches are important in pointing out the limits andpitfalls of external state building. The framework developed in this articledoes not aim to offer a single alternative to these explanations but ratherprovides additional explanatory power as to why states like Afghanistan failto consolidate in spite of extensive international efforts. My theory shouldbe most useful in cases where reconstruction is a “highly intrusive attempt atsocial engineering.”25 It identifies the trajectories of state and non-state actorsand explains how shifting resources result in different patterns of political

no. 4 (October 2014): 569–87; Stephen D. Krasner, “Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsedand Failing States,” International Security 29, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 85–120; Aila M. Matanock, “GovernanceDelegation Agreements: Shared Sovereignty as a Substitute for Limited Statehood,” Governance 27, no. 4(October 2014): 589–612.

22 Zuercher, “Is More Better?” 23. On the challenges and difficulties of external state building, also seeSimon Chesterman, Michael Ignatieff, and Ramesh Thakur, eds., Making States Work: From State Failureto Statebuilding (New York: United Nations University Press, 2005); Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart,Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2009); Charles T. Call and Vanessa Wyeth, eds., Building States to Build Peace (Boulder, CO: LynneRienner, 2008).

23 Roland Paris, “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism,” International Security22, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 54–89; Paris, “International Peacebuilding and the ‘Mission Civilisatrice,”’ Reviewof International Studies 28, no. 4 (October 2002): 637–56; Oliver P. Richmond, “The Problem of Peace:Understanding the ‘Liberal Peace,”’ Conflict, Security & Development 6, no. 3 (October 2006): 291–314.On Afghanistan, see, for example, Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, “Liberal Peace and the Dialogue of the Deafin Afghanistan,” in Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives (New York:Routledge, 2011), 206–20; Tadjbakhsh and Michael Schoiswohl, “Playing with Fire? The InternationalCommunity’s Democratization Experiment in Afghanistan,” International Peacekeeping 15, no. 2 (April2008): 252–67.

24 Paris, At War’s End; Michael Barnett, “Building a Republican Peace: Stabilizing States after War,”International Security 30, no. 4 (Spring 2006): 87–112.

25 Zuercher, “Is More Better?” 8.

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order. As such, it should still offer valuable insights into cases of state failurein the absence of international intervention. It shows that warlords need notbe corrosive challengers to the state and may exercise a type of authoritythat is more durable and flexible in the broader context of instability andviolence like Afghanistan and Somalia.26

POLITICAL ORDER IN WEAK AND FAILED STATES

Paul Staniland defines political order as “the structure and distribution of au-thority between armed organizations: who rules, where, and through whatunderstandings” and develops a typology based on the distribution of terri-torial control and the level of cooperation between insurgents and states.27

In this section I build an alternative typology of political orders in weak andfailed states, which allows me to trace the trajectories of a specific categoryof actors (warlords) whose “goals of inclusion, patronage, and local auton-omy... do not map onto conventional goals of insurgent groups” and whoserelationships with the state remain largely under-researched.28

I argue that the nature of political authority can be mapped accordingto the relative internal and external political resources of the state and thenon-state armed actors (warlords). These are placed on a continuum (fromlow to high) and broadly defined as any means at the disposal of a politicalactor, that, when activated, push back his constraints, open up his possibili-ties, increase his autonomy, and facilitate the development of his strategies.29

These internal and external resources are not always substitutable for eachother but have different values in different contexts. They include but arenot limited to “money, information, food, the threat of force, jobs, friend-ship, social standing, the right to make laws, votes, and a great variety ofother things,” in particular access to international patronage networks andprotection from third parties.30

Although the state is represented as a single actor in the typology, itis not conceived of as a neutral and monolithic entity.31 State elites controltheir own resources and, as Karzai’s attitude toward Dostum shows, have the

26 See for example, Ken Menkhaus, “Governance without Government in Somalia: Spoilers, StateBuilding, and the Politics of Coping,” International Security 31, no. 3 (Winter 2006/07): 74–106.

27 Paul Staniland, “States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no.2 (June 2012): 243–64. For a typology of warfare based on technologies of rebellion, see Kalyvas andBalcells, “International System and Technologies of Rebellion.”

28 Paul Staniland, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 2014), 139.

29 Jean-Patrice Lacam, “Le politicien investisseur: Un modele d’interprtation de la gestion desressources politiques,” Revue Francaise de Science Politique 38, no. 1 (1988): 23–47.

30 Robert A. Dahl, Modern Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 35.31 Joel S. Migdal and Klaus Schlichte, “Rethinking the State,” in The Dynamics of States: The Formation

and Crises of State Domination, ed. Klaus Schlichte (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 1–40.

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FIGURE 1 A Typology of Political Orders in Weak and Failed States

ability to exert agency in the system, in particular in their attempt to manageperipheral warlords. Weak states however lack the ability to extract sufficientresources through taxation. For the most part, their resources (in particularthe financial and military ones) will therefore be a function of internationalsupport. A state that benefits from a massive influx of foreign aid can thus beunderstood as possessing “high resources,” even though it lacks indigenousand sustainable forms of revenue generation. It should also be noted thatthe strength of states is not directly a function of their level of resourcesbut reflects their ability to “control their territory and deliver a high order ofpolitical goods to their citizens.”32

I follow an explanatory typology methodology, which I use as a com-plement to deductive approaches to uncover causal relationships.33 The dif-ferent categories (outcomes) are derived inductively from observations fromthe theory-generating case, Afghanistan, which I analyze below. The multi-ple combinations of warlord and state resources are simplified in four suchcombinations that produce four ideal types: fragmented authority, regionalauthority, parallel authority, and consolidating authority, which can in somecases overlap or coexist in different parts of a same state, thus turning thenational territory into a “political patchwork.”34 These four outcomes are sys-tematically defined and described below, together with the political logics atwork (Figure 1).

Outcomes

The fragmentation of political authority is the result of low warlord resourcescombined with low state resources (bottom left cell), a situation of state fail-ure that comes directly out of the competing failed political projects of states

32 Rotberg, “Failed States in a World of Terror,” 132.33 Colin Elman, “Explanatory Typologies in Qualitative Studies of International Politics,” International

Organization 59, no. 2 (April 2005): 293–326; Jason Lyall, “Process Tracing, Causal Inference, and CivilWar,” in Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool, ed. Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey Checkel(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 186–208.

34 Peter Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (New York:Clarendon Press, 1999), 220.

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and warlords. In a situation in which political resources are relatively evenlydistributed, that is, when no warlord is more powerful than the others inrelative terms, no single actor manages to impose his own rule over largeswaths of territory. In the absence of a state that has the necessary resourcesto expand its territorial control beyond the capital city, political authoritytends to splinter into kaleidoscopic forms of local control. Warlords do nothave the capacity to defeat the others and accumulate political resources.They co-exist, each of them only in control of a small area, and typicallyengage in “symmetric, non-conventional wars.”35 This is the situation mostof Somalia has experienced in the past twenty years.36 Fragmented authoritycan result from a sharp and sudden crisis in resources in a consolidating andhence vulnerable state (from bottom right to bottom left cell). State eliteswho are suddenly deprived of important state resources can no longer “in-duce influential groups—military officers or regional elites, for example—toremain politically faithful,” and the state eventually collapses leading to thefragmentation of political authority.37 This outcome may also result from thefragmentation of regionalized warlord polities (from upper left to bottom leftcell), for example, through a seeding process in which the strongest warlordcoalition splits.38 Generally speaking, a sharp decline in warlord resourcesevens the field for a multitude of contenders seeking new opportunities.This is typically the case when external powers attempt to weaken the mostpowerful warlords and in so doing upset the current political equilibrium,create a relative power vacuum, and thus facilitate the emergence of smallerwarlords.

Regional warlord polities, in which political authority is concentrated inthe hands of a few warlords, result from the combination of high warlordresources with low state resources (upper left cell). Warlords, in this config-uration, are proto-state builders. They behave like states, act as the principalsuppliers of governance, goods, and services to people in the areas theycontrol, and eventually start building embryonic state infrastructures.39 Giventhe structure of the contemporary international system, norms of sovereigntygenerally prevent warlords from challenging existing borders and creating

35 Stathis Kalyvas, “The Changing Character of Civil Wars, 1800–2009,” in The Changing Characterof War, ed. Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 202–19.

36 For a recent analysis of Somalia’s past and present “hybrid governance arrangements,” see K.Menkhaus, “State Failure, State-Building, and Prospects for a ‘Functional Failed State’ in Somalia,” ANNALSof the American Academy of Political and Social Science 656, no. 1 (November 2014): 154–72.

37 Bates, “State Failure.” Also see William Reno, Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

38 Fotini Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).39 Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review

87, no. 3 (September 1993): 567–76; Douglas C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast,Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Zachariah C. Mampilly, Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governanceand Civilian Life during War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

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new states that would receive international recognition, a phenomenon per-fectly illustrated by the cases of Somaliland and Puntland, Somalia, wherecentral state capacity fades to the point where empirical sovereignty be-comes disconnected from international recognition.40 Regional authority canresult from a sharp decrease in state capacity where existing warlords havemanaged to keep most of their resources by resisting the state’s effort toweaken their authority (from upper right to upper left cell). In this scenariothe decrease in state resources (usually the result of an exogenous shock)re-empowers the warlords who then retake control of their former polities.This outcome may also emerge from the consolidation of fragmented au-thority through an influx of resources (from bottom left to upper left cell).Warlords who are powerful in relative terms use their resources (economic,military, symbolic, etc.) to progressively concentrate power in the territoriesunder their control.41 They co-opt or defeat relatively weaker warlords, ex-pand their control beyond their power bases and rule over entire swaths ofterritory. In some extreme cases they even eventually replace and becomethe state, either nominally (by seizing the capital city) or empirically (byexpanding their territorial control to the entire country) and hence benefitfrom significant additional resources.42

The combination of high warlord resources and high state resources(upper right cell) results in parallel authority. The state tries to impose itsrule on the whole territory, that is, to expand its empirical sovereignty, butits authority is constantly challenged and renegotiated by existing warlordswho accumulate and convert resources to ensure their survival in a changingpolitical environment. This outcome typically results from a sharp increasein the state’s resources, either due to a massive injection of foreign capitalor to the extraction of newly discovered natural resources (from upper leftto upper right). The warlords who previously controlled large swaths of

40 Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, “Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and theJuridical in Statehood,” World Politics 35, no. 1 (October 1982): 1–24; Boaz Atzili, “When Good FencesMake Bad Neighbors: Fixed Borders, State Weakness, and International Conflict,” International Security31, no. 3 (Winter 2006/07): 139–73; Daniel L. Byman, “Divided They Stand: Lessons about Partition fromIraq and Lebanon,” Security Studies 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 1–29.

41 It should be noted that there is no consensus in the literature regarding the mechanisms connectingresource flows and armed group organizations. My theory is in line with Paul Staniland’s argument thatarmed groups need “strong preexisting ties [to] rapidly absorb and use large resource endowmentswithout losing discipline.” I adopt a broad definition of resources and argue that warlords need not onlyexternal, commercial, and monetizable resources but also social and symbolic ones to avoid “[falling]prey to military ineffectiveness and internal conflict.” See Staniland, “Organizing Insurgency: Networks,Resources, and Rebellion in South Asia,” International Security 37, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 174.

42 For seizing the capital, see Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System: The Pol-itics of State Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States:Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Recent efforts to sanction coups however show that this strategy has become more problematic. For ex-panding, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge: Blackwell,1990).

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territory become dormant and find other ways of exerting their authority.43

They reinvent themselves through a process of power conversion that Idescribe below. Others can remain (or become) insurgents and exert parallelforms of authority, as in today’s Afghanistan, where the state coexists withboth insurgents and dormant warlords. It is also theoretically possible toreach a situation of stalemated insurgency or open warfare between well-matched equals, such as a resource-rich warlord and a state that is strongenough to resist but too weak to defeat the insurgency. It is, however,expected that these unstable equilibriums will only be temporary, giventhat conventional warfare (which we are most likely to see with equallypowerful opponents) tends to result in shifts in the balance of power thatpush the situation back to parallel authority (through a relative increase instate resources) or regional authority (through a relative decrease in stateresources).44 Parallel authority may also result from an influx of warlordresources in a consolidating state (from bottom right to upper right cell).This is typically the case in Afghanistan, as the rising insecurity creates asituation of uncertainty in which both external forces and the populationturn to the strongest power holders (warlords) to provide stability, furtherstrengthening their power in the process.

State consolidation, the sort of order that international intervention seeksto build, results from a combination of low warlord resources and high stateresources (bottom right cell). When the state controls a plethora of resourcesand the warlords do not, there should be no impediments to the process ofstate consolidation. The state should have no difficulty in asserting territorialrule and extending its reach and domestic sovereignty, that is, engaging inthe process of state making and “mak[ing] warlordism in the frontiers a thingof the past.”45 This outcome is in line with the dominant understanding ofstate formation as a bargaining process between the center and compet-ing power holders that involves back-and-forth interactions between societalactors and the state along different modalities (patronage, co-optation, “bro-kered autonomy,” etc.).46 It should theoretically result from an increase instate resources providing the state with the capabilities to ultimately defeator co-opt a myriad of weak warlords (from lower left to lower right cell).A decrease in warlord resources should lead to the same outcome (from

43 Romain Malejacq, “Warlords and the Coalition in Afghanistan,” in Coalition Challenges inAfghanistan: The Politics of Alliance, ed. Gale A. Mattox and Stephen M. Grenier (Redwood City, CA:Stanford University Press, 2015): 31–44.

44 Kalyvas, “Changing Character of Civil Wars.”45 Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors, and State Building in Afghanistan (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1.46 Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States. For a good example of this kind of approach, see

Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1994). On the different modalities of state/society interactions, see, in particular, CharlesTilly, Trust and Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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upper right to lower right cell). Either scenario should theoretically fosterstate consolidation, yet, it is not empirically the case: the process describedabove does not take place in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan wherewarlords show a surprisingly high degree of resilience and transform thestate’s exercise of sovereignty to accommodate their interests.

Power Conversion and Shape-Shifting

According to the above typology, warlords who lack resources should fadeaway when confronted by a relatively strong consolidating state. Yet, whilewarlords might in some cases be financially poor (relative to the state), theyseem to always maintain enough social and symbolic resources to bolstertheir local legitimacy and control and thus remain valuable to outsiders. In-ternational actors in turn have a plethora of reasons to engage with themand offer them all kinds of support. In weak state environments, interna-tional actors often operate through proxy warfare and distribute patronageto those who have the ability to control populations and provide informationand stability at the substate level.47 In the context of external state-buildingmissions, international efforts to impose a bureaucratic political order some-times have to incorporate those seeking to evade it and foreign intervenershave little motive or opportunity to isolate them.

Warlords in turn take advantage of their peculiar position in the localsociopolitical landscape to exert agency in the international system and max-imize their interest. As providers of alternative systems of governance whochallenge conventional notions of the state as the ultimate arbiter of a socialcontract that links them to the state (at least in its Weberian form) and donot necessarily accept the state in its current borders—and yet participatein shaping the state formation process—warlords de facto enter the interna-tional arena. They conduct their own kind of diplomacy, not only throughcontracting business deals in Dubai and elsewhere or by being involved incross-border trade activities (legal and illegal) but also in ways that are conse-quential to both foreign states and their own, for example, appearing as thetargets of United Nations Security Council resolutions and sanctions. Theyare able to play different international actors against one another, instrumen-talize them to legitimize their rule, use foreign countries as safe havens andprotection, and conduct their own personalized foreign relations to accumu-late resources through international and transnational networks, diasporas,and Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In weak-state envi-ronments, they act like states and convince external actors to treat them as

47 These practices are however not limited to international actors. On how access to domesticpatronage networks affects patterns of side switching and alignment in civil wars, see Lee J. M. Seymour,“Why Factions Switch Sides in Civil Wars: Rivalry, Patronage, and Realignment in Sudan,” InternationalSecurity 39, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 92–131.

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such: they have international offices and foreign relations representatives,which they use to develop classic patron/client relationships. In the contextof external state building, they take advantage of an extraordinary influx offinancial resources (development aid, reconstruction contracts, etc.).

Warlords are indeed particularly good at adapting to serious exoge-nous shocks (external intervention, withdrawal of foreign forces, etc.) and atshape-shifting under different structural arrangements. They show tremen-dous flexibility to adapt to new domestic and international environmentsand transform their power accordingly. For example, warlords will build uptheir military power in weak-state environments, where armed forces arenecessary to one’s survival, but will often have no choice but to rely increas-ingly on alternative sources of power when confronted with the presence ofinternational peacekeeping forces and the implementation of disarmamentprograms. Warlords do not solely maintain their power but shift their powerbases (economic, symbolic, military, etc.) through a variety of interrelatedconversion mechanisms (state infiltration, land grabbing, private protection,extortion, etc.) that allow them to use one type of resource to accumu-late another. For example, a warlord can use his militia (military power) tograb land, which he can then use to develop real estate projects (economicpower) or to take control of state institutions (political power), which wouldthen give him access to lucrative business contracts with the internationalcommunity (economic power).

While Dipali Mukhopadhyay convincingly demonstrates that “just strongenough” warlords have incentives to participate in the post-2001 state-building project, she also acknowledges that the resulting “strongman gover-nance” constitutes a highly unstable equilibrium.48 I argue that the dormantwarlords who willingly participate in state-building processes are likely tobecome active again should a sharp decrease in state resources occur. Thisphoenix-like tendency allows them to bide their time and undergo a tran-sition when the international environment changes. This power conversionprocess highlights how parallel bases of authority continue to exist and howsupposedly more marginal actors continue to assert considerable agencyto shape the efforts of seemingly more powerful actors. As Kimberly Martenperceptively notes: “The story of warlordism is... one that combines structureand agency: certain individuals at any time in human history may be psy-chologically disposed to become self-interested specialists in violence; weakstates provide these individuals with the opportunity to become warlords.”49 Idemonstrate that externally-induced structural changes are unlikely to lead tostate consolidation. Rather, international intervention provides warlords withnew opportunities to deploy the same strategies and can at times intensify

48 Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors, and State Building.49 Marten, Warlords, 7.

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the process of state-level fragmentation while preventing the consolidationof a Weberian bureaucracy.50

THE AFGHAN CASE

In this section, I consider the fit between the conceptual typology devel-oped above and Afghanistan, the theory-generating case. Given the country’sgeostrategic location (magnified by the “Global War on Terror”) and the un-precedented state-building effort of the past decade, Afghanistan is a paradig-matic case.51 The analysis is based on over two hundred semi-structuredinterviews with high-profile political actors conducted from September 2007to February 2014.52 These actors include ministers, governors, a vice presi-dent, the current chief executive officer of Afghanistan, warlords and theirentourages, opposition leaders, foreign diplomats, NGO workers, and lo-cal researchers. The same individuals were interviewed multiple times andtheir testimonies triangulated with contemporaneous journalistic accountsand interviews with political opponents to mitigate the risk of ex post mis-representation of historical events and ensure the quality of information.53

The analytic narrative of the Afghanistan case fills the gap betweenmacro-level outcomes (the failure to consolidate) and micro-level explana-tions (warlords shifting resources). Careful process tracing shows how shiftsin resources generate different political orders. It sheds light on warlords’strategies and survival mechanisms, which in turn explain the absence ofstate consolidation.54 I illustrate this by examining the political trajectories ofthe three major Afghan warlords before and after the U.S.-led intervention:Mohammad Ismail Khan in the west, Abdul Rashid Dostum in the north, andAhmad Shah Massoud in the northeast.55 These cases provide variation andsimilarities in the way they operate in the international system and convert

50 This is consistent with Barnett, Fang, and Zurcher’s finding that “increasing resources is unlikelyto produce a more liberal outcome unless the lack of resources is the principal constraint (which it rarelyis).” See Barnett, Fang, and Zurcher, “Compromised Peacebuilding,” 610.

51 For the state-building effort, see Astri Suhrke, “Reconstruction as Modernisation: The ‘Post-Conflict’Project in Afghanistan,” Third World Quarterly 28, no. 7 (October 2007): 1291–308.

52 For more on this type of methodology, see Christoph Zuercher, The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion,Ethnic Conflict, and Nationhood in the Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

53 Elisabeth Jean Wood, “The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones,” QualitativeSociology 29, no. 3 (September 2006): 373–86; Colin Jerolmack and Shamus Khan, “Talk Is Cheap:Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy,” Sociological Methods & Research 43, no. 2 (May 2014): 178–209.

54 Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, “Process-Tracing and Historical Explanation,” in CaseStudies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 205–32; JasonLyall, “Process Tracing, Causal Inference, and Civil War.”

55 Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, another major actor of the most recent Afghan wars, never had the abilityto control his own proto-state and therefore cannot be considered a warlord. The Taliban, also a majoractor since the mid-1990s, do not qualify as a case of warlordism: their rapid territorial expansion,organizational structure, and ideology make the Taliban a very distinct armed group.

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resources to maximize their autonomy. The first two are typical warlordswho managed to develop their own form of diplomacy: Ismail Khan, a for-mer jihadi leader, did so through routine diplomatic ties and a symbioticrelationship with the NGOs operating in his fiefdom; and Dostum, a for-mer pro-government militia leader, through an idiosyncratic combination offormal and personal networks, in particular after 2001. Massoud, who wasassassinated two days before 9/11, is an atypical case of warlordism thatprovides me with further variation: a “mix” between a purely patrimonialleader and a purely ideological one who “highjacked” a community,56 aimedto capture central power, and managed to resist the Taliban in part due tohis advanced diplomatic skills and international strategies.

These warlords’ trajectories across shifting contexts show that this do-mestic logic of authority predated the U.S.-led intervention and continued asstate-building efforts provided warlords with means to transform their basesof power to serve their interests and ensure their survival, thus preventingthe emergence of a centralized bureaucratic administration. Throughout the1980s, the Afghan political order evolved from a situation in which a weakyet consolidating state (in the 1960s and 1970s) shifted toward one teeteringon the brink of failure. This situation of parallel authority, characterized bythe combination of a foreign invasion with a strengthening but fragmentedinsurgency, shows how insurgents were able to play the international systemto their advantage.57 The Soviet withdrawal crucially weakened the Afghancentral state, which in 1992 gave way to a fragmentation of political orderand the progressive regionalization of warlord polities. This developmentculminated in the Taliban controlling most of the territory and engaging in aprocess of state consolidation that was only stopped by the post-9/11 U.S.-led intervention. In the absence of a central state, former warlords were fora short period of time able to retake the regional polities they controlled inthe 1990s. Their relative weakening, combined with the massive injectionof external resources and the emergence of the Taliban insurgency, has ledto a situation of parallel authority where the state has coexisted with bothdormant warlords and insurgents.58 This situation has changed again withthe announcement of NATO troops’ withdrawal: warlords are now preparingto transform once again and are increasingly relying on military resources.The evolution of political order in Afghanistan is simplified and summarizedin the figure below (Figure 2).

56 Antonio Giustozzi, interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 11 October 2008.57 Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan.58 A Western diplomat interviewed in February 2014 wittingly mentioned the existence of “two

shadow governors” in the Northern province of Jowzjan: the Taliban governor and Dostum. See Westerndiplomat 2, interview by Romain Malejacq, Mazar-e Sharif, 6 February 2014.

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FIGURE 2 Evolution of Political Order (Afghanistan, 1978–2014)

From Soviet Afghan War to Afghan Civil War (1979–94)

In the 1980s, most mujahideen leaders who were later involved in the 1990s“warlord politics” had indirectly been U.S. clients in the war against the SovietUnion through the Pakistani intelligence services.59 During that period, rela-tively weak warlords, supported by a variety of outside actors (in particularPakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United States) faced a relatively weakstate. This situation led to what I depicted above as fragmented authority,what Rubin coined the “fragmentation of Afghanistan.” Any would-be com-manders in the country could rally one of the seven Sunni Islamic partiesofficially recognized by Pakistan (with American support) or one of the eightShia parties recognized by Iran.60 Both Ismail Khan and Massoud belongedto one of the former, the Jamiat-e Islami. They both progressively establishedtheir grip over entire regions while increasing their autonomy vis-a-vis theparty: Ismail Khan became known as the Amir of Herat, Massoud as theLion of Panjshir. Dostum, on the other hand, was a pro-government militialeader fighting the insurgents. He also became increasingly autonomous, to

59 Some, like Dostum, had not participated in the jihad against the Soviet Union and the communistgovernment but belonged to the “orphan warlord” category developed by Giustozzi: “mostly formercommanders of the central state army who faced with a political crisis at the centre opted to set up theirown fiefdoms.” See Giustozzi, Empires of Mud, 16.

60 Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan.

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the point where he allied with Massoud to take the Afghan capital after thecollapse of the Soviet Union had caused a sharp decline in state resources,a move that hastened the end of his former patron’s rule.

The mujahideen lost the support of their American patron followingthe Soviet troops’ complete withdrawal in 1989 and the collapse of the pro-communist regime in early 1992. Both warlord and state resources declinedsimultaneously, leading to a highly fragmented political order, sometimes de-scribed as neo-medievalism.61 Some warlords, like Massoud, captured whatwas left of the central state; others, including Dostum, at times, formed al-liances to defeat those in control and seize said state institutions;62 and againothers, like Ismail Khan, strictly focused on expanding their zones of influ-ence. This situation led to a progressive concentration of power with theemergence of regional warlord polities.63 Proto-state builders started to ruleautonomously over significant parts of the state’s territory on which they hadestablished political civilian structures, while developing their own foreignrelations.

Ismail Khan, the warlord of Western Afghanistan, perfectly illustrates thisprocess. Although he had already started concentrating power during the ji-had, it was only when the Soviet–Afghan war ended that he truly managedto centralize power in his fiefdom. His forces seized the government officesand the revenue-generating border posts, as well as the weapons and ammu-nition that were left behind by the communist regime. Herat then becameknown for its security. Ismail Khan, who had a “relatively large resourcebase to tap,” maintained the existing official administrative system whilebuilding a “mini-kingdom” that remained almost entirely autonomous fromKabul.64 Schools were reopened and so was the university, social benefitswere distributed, the city’s infrastructure was improved, and small businesswas encouraged. Ismail Khan was also careful to show symbolic display,taking care of important celebrations, commemorating the martyrs of jihad,and visiting his provinces while making sure that his activities were reportedby the local television channel.65

The Amir of Herat also managed to assert his own diplomacy. Apartfrom receiving numerous foreign delegations (including from Saudi Ara-bia and European countries), he created routines of diplomatic ties and

61 Ibid.62 On the formation of warlord alliances in 1990s Afghanistan, see Christia, Alliance Formation.63 Gilles Dorronsoro, “Afghanistan: Des Reseaux de Solidarite Aux Espaces Regionaux,” in Economies

Des Guerres Civiles, ed. Francois Jean and Jean-Christophe Rufin (Paris: Hachette, 1996), 147–88.64 Giustozzi, Empires of Mud, 226.65 Ibid.; Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, 2nd ed.

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Bernard Dupaigne, “Herat, Un Modele et Une Chance Pourl’Afghanistan,” Afghanistan Info 34 (1994); Veronica Doubleday, “Printemps 1994 A Herat,” AfghanistanInfo 35 (1994).This paragraph is also drawn from interviews by Romain Malejacq, Herat, Winter 2011.

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connections with neighboring states.66 He developed close political andeconomic relationships with Iran (which had played an important role inbuilding him up during the Soviet–Afghan war), Turkmenistan (with whichhe signed a business cooperation agreement), and Pakistan. His other ac-complishment in terms of foreign relations was to harness NGOs and interna-tional organizations working in his fiefdom.67 This provided Ismail Khan witha new means of attracting resources while framing how outsiders engagedwith him. These organizations had to deal directly with him and were thuscomplicit in strengthening his local legitimacy. The Amir of Herat provedthat he could recruit foreigners to provide the expertise and services that helacked. This political strategy exploited the advantages of foreigners’ efficientand technocratic organizations (and tapped new conduits for resources) ina manner that rendered these experts politically impotent while contributingto Ismail Khan’s personal authority.

The Taliban Period (1994–2001)

The emergence of the Taliban in the south and their conquest of Afghanistansignaled the end of the warlord era. Pakistan’s logistical support and financialresources gave the Taliban the means they needed to defeat all their domesticcompetitors (including Ismail Khan in 1995 and Dostum in 1997/98) andrapidly enlarge their zone of influence. The Taliban took control of most ofAfghanistan from 1994 to 1998, further expanding their regional polity andshowing early signs of state consolidation, but never gained internationalrecognition. Despite controlling most of the country (including Kabul since1996), only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates recognizedthe Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan.68 The process of stateconsolidation could never be completed as Ahmad Shah Massoud, defenseminister under the mujahideen government, created the Northern Alliance—adisparate coalition of warlords and commanders who had fought each otherthroughout the 1990s—which successfully resisted the Taliban until the endof 2001.

As Massoud progressively became the face of the Afghan resistance tothe outside world, his ability to exert agency in the international systemplayed a critical role in the survival of the newly created alliance. He, forexample, got involved in the Tajikistan peace process, which facilitated hisuse of this neighboring country as a safe haven as well as a transit route forRussian and Iranian supplies.69 Dushanbe became the heart of the Afghan

66 Giustozzi, Empires of Mud.67 Bernard Dupaigne, “Etat des lieux en decembre 93,” Afghanistan Info 34 (1994).68 On the process of bandwagoning around the Taliban, see Christia, Alliance Formation.69 Giustozzi, Empires of Mud, 286; Former Military Attache in Tajikistan (1997–2000) and Russia

(2000–2003), interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 25 October 2008.

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resistance and the main venue for Massoud’s foreign policy meetings.70 TheLion of Panjshir also developed his international networks through his rep-resentatives abroad and used newspapers and radios to contact the Afghandiaspora.71 According to Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the new chief executiveofficer of Afghanistan formerly in charge of the Northern Alliance’s foreignaffairs, the main offices abroad worked “like branches of the Foreign AffairsMinistry more than as mere embassies.”72 Abdullah attended multilateral andbilateral events whereas Massoud traveled abroad himself, including trips toRussia, Iran, Uzbekistan, India, and France, which were facilitated by the factthat the Northern Alliance managed to remain recognized as the official rep-resentative of the Islamic State of Afghanistan throughout the war. Regulardeliveries of logistical support, arms and ammunition, along with his increas-ing international legitimacy, made a significant difference in Massoud’s abilityto resist the Taliban and exert his regional authority. His diplomatic activitiesshowed that he could represent his military prowess and charismatic lead-ership capabilities to a variety of foreign governments that were concernedabout Afghanistan’s political developments. Massoud then was able to usethe resources that these foreigners provided to him to assert his domesticauthority: not only could he control the distribution of military resourceswithin the Northern Alliance, but he also proved to all that he was the onlyAfghan resistance leader with international stature.

The Warlord Strategy (2001–4)

The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, combined with theassassination of Massoud two days earlier, fundamentally changed the dy-namics of the conflict once again. The U.S.-led intervention and the adoptionof the so-called Afghan model of warfare—“in which indigenous allies re-place American conventional ground troops by exploiting U.S. airpower andsmall numbers of American special operations forces”—completely disruptedAfghanistan’s political order, leading to the collapse of the central state andthe regionalization of the former warlord polities.73 The George W. Bushadministration worked closely with the former warlords (at least those who

70 Former Commander of Massoud 1, interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 6 December 2008; SteveColl, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion toSeptember 10, 2001 (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 47, 464.

71 Ahmad Wali Massoud, Brother of Ahmad Shah Massoud and Director of the Massoud Foundation,interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 13 February 2011; Former Media Expert under Ahmad ShahMassoud, interviews by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 22 and 25 November 2009, 4 February 2011; FormerRepresentative of Ahmad Shah Massoud in Washington DC, interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 2February 2011.

72 Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Chief Executive Officer of Afghanistan and former Foreign Affairs Ministerof Afghanistan, interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 7 February 2011.

73 Stephen D. Biddle, “Allies, Airpower, and Modern Warfare: The Afghan Model in Afghanistan andIraq,” International Security 30, no. 3 (Winter 2005/06): 161.

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accepted to cooperate with the United States, including Dostum, Ismail Khan,and Mohammed Fahim, Massoud’s successor), using the Northern Alliance’sfighters as proxies on the ground. Teams of paramilitaries from the U.S. Cen-tral Intelligence Agency (CIA) were sent to Afghanistan, embedded with localcommanders in various places, creating lasting personal relationships withwarlords and other non-state armed actors.74 Afghan warlords took controlof state institutions with the Bush administration’s blessing, leading some totalk about a “warlord strategy” that required “living with ambiguity.”75 Thissudden infusion of resources, along with the collapse of state institutions,allowed former warlords to retake their regional polities, shifting the politicalorder from a consolidating Taliban state to a failed state made of multipleregional authorities.

Dostum, the Uzbek warlord from northern Afghanistan who recentlybecame the first vice-president of Afghanistan, perfectly illustrates how war-lords instrumentalized international actors to maximize their autonomy.76

Dostum truly embraced a pro-American stance from the opening days ofthe intervention and fully cooperated with CIA paramilitary officers and U.S.Special Forces to recapture Mazar-e Sharif in November 2001, using his war-rior ethos to establish personal connections with them.77 One would expectthe United States to operate through formal channels, in support of the con-struction of a state that conforms with Weberian ideals of bureaucratic andinstitutional control, in line with the Bonn Agreement of December 2001and the wider reconstruction project.78 Instead, in the context of the GlobalWar on Terror, Dostum was able to personalize his international relationsdown to individuals and create “familial bonds” with U.S. Special Forces.79

Not only did his collaboration with the United States give him the resourcesto rearm and remobilize, but it was also instrumental in legitimizing andstrengthening his local authority, showing that he, rather than the central

74 Ibid.75 For “warlord strategy,” see Afghanistan’s Bonn Agreement One Year Later: A Catalog of

Missed Opportunities,” Human Rights Watch, 5 December 2002, https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/12/05/afghanistans-bonn-agreement-one-year-later. For “living with ambiguity,” see Zalmay Khalilzad, “How toNation-Build: Ten Lessons from Afghanistan,” National Interest 80 (Summer 2005): 22.

76 For more on Dostum, see Brian Glyn Williams, The Last Warlord: The Life and Legend of Dostum,the Afghan Warrior Who Led US Special Forces to Topple the Taliban Regime (Chicago: Chicago ReviewPress, 2013).

77 Giustozzi even claims that the role given to Dostum by the CIA “was the result of contacts betweenDostum’s representatives in Tashkent and the Agency, which had been going on already some monthsprior to the 9/11 attacks.” See Giustozzi, Empires of Mud, 136.

78 In Mukhopadhyay’s words: “Warlords may have been valuable compatriots in the fight against theTaliban, but they represented enemies of the post-2001 Afghan state to the degree that it was to fulfill itsgrowing governance mandate.” See Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors, and State Building,1. On the Bonn Agreement and the reconstruction project in general, see Suhrke, “Reconstruction asModernisation.”

79 Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode toVictory in Afghanistan (New York: Scribner, 2009), 197.

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government, was in charge of Northern Afghanistan’s international affairs.80

His return to full-fledged warlordism was accompanied by an idiosyncraticform of diplomacy that built on both personal relationships and formal chan-nels with the United States as well as on existing connections in Uzbekistan,Iran, and most importantly Turkey.81

The New Rules of the Game and Warlord Power Conversion (2004–9)

Things changed around 2004, as most in the Bush administration believedthe war in Afghanistan to be a success. With the “stigmatization of the mu-jahideen by human rights and woman’s rights organizations” under way,Western policymakers started to impose what then U.S. ambassador toAfghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad called “new rules of the game” that empha-sized channeling resources through the government in Kabul to bolster stateauthority.82 This process of “demythologizing the mujahideen” deprived thewarlords of their territorial control and led to a situation of parallel author-ity.83 Abandoned by the United States and international organizations to favorthe construction of the central state,84 Afghan warlords had no alternativebut to switch their bases of power, become more “discrete,” and rely onresources more adapted to the new environment. With the progressive mo-nopolization of the legitimate use of force by the central government, jihadicredentials became “a liability.”85 Given the international community’s effortof making armed violence illegitimate, Afghan warlords exercised their mili-tary might while they still could to acquire other forms of power that wouldbe more useful in the new political order. They had to develop more subtlestrategies to remain indispensable in the eyes of the central state and theinternational community, and still appear as the only ones who mattered in

80 According to former U.S. envoy to the Afghan resistance Peter Tomsen, the CIA made “somecardinal errors when we went into Afghanistan by passing out millions and millions of dollars to Dostum.”Quoted in Sara Carter, “The Art of Warlord; Flip-Flopping General a Mixed Blessing to U.S. in Afghanistan,”Washington Times, 12 October 2008.

81 Carlotta Gall, “Threats and Responses: The General; Afghan Warlord, With a New Job and Suit toMatch, Bears Fresh Burdens,” New York Times, 29 September 2002; Peter Baker, “Warlord Gets Money,Arms From Iran, Afghan Aides Say,” Washington Post, 7 February 2002; Political Assistant at the UnitedNations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), interview by Romain Malejacq, Mazar-e Sharif, 9November 2008; Former Deputy to the European Union Special Representative for Afghanistan, interviewby Romain Malejacq, Medford, MA, 14 April 2011; Former United States Ambassador in Afghanistan,interview by Romain Malejacq, Evanston, IL, 5 October 2011.

82 For the “stigmatization,” see Michael Bhatia, “The Future of the Mujahideen: Legitimacy, Legacyand Demobilization in Post-Bonn Afghanistan,” International Peacekeeping 14, no. 1 (January 2007): 94.For the “new rules,” see Khalilzad, “How to Nation-Build,” 22.

83 For “demythologizing,” see Bhatia, “Future of the Mujahideen,” 95.84 Olivier Roy, “Afghanistan: La Difficile Reconstruction D’un Etat,” Cahier De Chaillot 73, no. 1

(December 2004): 37.85 Director of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul,

13 March 2011.

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their own fiefdoms. In this context of increasing pressure Afghan warlordsswitched from being active, in control of large swaths of territory, to dormant,thus exerting their power in different ways.

Power conversion took several forms, with Afghan warlords adoptinga number of different roles, successively and simultaneously, to bide time,resist external pressure, and eventually survive. Afghan warlords have oper-ated as patrons, literally and figuratively feeding their followers and provid-ing them with employment and benefits. They have built on their gloriouspast and portrayed themselves as jihadi leaders: Ismail Khan, for instance,has erected a jihad museum aimed at displaying his leadership and high-lighting his role in the Herat revolt of 1979. Warlords have also representedthemselves as traditional leaders promoting ancestral Afghan values, as ex-emplified by Dostum’s and Fahim’s sponsoring of buzkashi, the traditionalAfghan game in which horse riders fight for the control of a goat carcass.86

Some warlords, like Ismail Khan, have tried to appear as true believers anddefenders of Islamic values, others as ethnic entrepreneurs protecting theirkin. This is most notably the case of Dostum, who tries to portray himself asthe heir of Tamerlane and Babur, the great Central Asian conquerors; ownsa television channel (Aina TV), which he uses to promote the Uzbek iden-tity; and recently created another one for his son Batur (B-TV), which onlybroadcasts in Turkic languages.87 Most warlords have also been members ofthe state apparatus, which they used as yet another way to leverage inter-national actors: Ismail Khan has served as governor of Herat until 2004 andthen as minister of water and energy until 2013; Fahim as minister of defenseuntil 2004, and twice as vice president (2002–4; 2009–14).88 All have becomebusinessmen, and most notably Fahim, who used his position in the politicalsystem to “build a business empire” and have “good fortune . . . rain downon the family in the form of lucrative ‘reconstruction’ contracts.”89 Their post-2001 security role gave them leverage over these other agendas. Throughoutthat period, Afghan warlords have continued to switch their bases of powerto rely on resources more adapted to the new environment (for exampledistributing some of the land that their militias had grabbed to invest in realestate development, thus converting military power into economic power).The overall effect was to bring in more resources and political protection fortheir local projects of building patronage systems in their regions. Thus they

86 General Dostum owns about forty buzkashi horses, which he uses to promote his image andexert patronage. On the social and political significance of buzkashi, see Whitney Azoy, Buzkashi: Gameand Power in Afghanistan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).

87 Batur Dostum, Son of Abdul Rashid Dostum and President of the Dostum Foundation and B-TV,interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 24 May 2013; Director of B-TV, interview by Romain Malejacq,Sheberghan, 13 February 2014.

88 Fahim died of a heart attack in March 2014, a few weeks before the first round of the 2014presidential election.

89 Pratap Chatterjee, “Paying Off the Warlords: Anatomy of an Afghan Culture of Corruption,” CBSNews, 18 November 2009.

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might have been engaged in the “civil society sector,” business, and otheractivities, but all contributed to their survival and consolidation of author-ity, with consequences for the international effort to foster the creation of astronger state.

NATO Withdrawal and Post-NATO Afghanistan (2009–14)

The situation changed again on the eve of the 2009 presidential election.The international environment indirectly drove Karzai’s demand for localleadership, that is, warlords, who in turn took advantage of the conflictingagendas of domestic and foreign actors to promote their interest. The ten-sions between the Afghan president and the international community ledthe former, in need of local power-holders able to deliver votes, to bringthe political brokers back into the loop, as the Dostum anecdote mentionedin the introduction perfectly illustrates.90 With the growing influence of theTaliban insurgency and the announced departure of U.S. troops, politicaldynamics have radically changed. According to a former jihadi commander,the rising Taliban insurgency led “the West” to stop describing jihadi fightersas warlords and criminals and start calling them “good people.”91 Warlordswho operate as patrons locally should therefore also be conceived of asclients internationally.

The growing uncertainty regarding the international community’s inten-tions in Afghanistan in the years to come creates a level of domestic un-easiness that drives the local demand for military leadership. As Jan Koehlerpoints out: “The patron-client arrangement might also include armed sup-port if all else goes wrong—in fact, the implicit capability of a patron toraise armed support might be a key source of power on the national level.”92

The U.S. policy of arming and financing local militias to fight the Taliban isgoing against the state-building project, and “it is highly unclear whether thestate will later be able to revoke such partial autonomy and reintegrate suchorganizations into official security structures.”93 It is a strategy of tension thatpromotes fragmentation at the expense of state consolidation (and at theexpense of active warlordism). In the meantime, warlords start rearming,remobilizing, and gathering their followers, using their ability to operate inthe international system. When asked about his current access to weapons, aformer mujahideen commander replied that the United States and the centralgovernment may have tried to disarm them, but they “didn’t close the fac-tories in China, Iran, and Russia.”94 Warlords are getting ready to make the

90 Former Aide to Massoud, interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 28 February 2011.91 Former Commander of Massoud 1, interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, March 2011.92 Jan Koehler, Social Order within and beyond the Shadow of Hierarchy Governance: Patterns in

Afghanistan, SFB-Governance Working Paper Series, no. 33, June 2012, 14.93 Ibid., 15.94 Former Commander of Massoud 1, interview by Romain Malejacq, Kabul, 24 May 2013.

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transition from dormant, in a context of parallel authority, to active warlords,in a failed state context of mixed regional and fragmented authority.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

In this article, I mapped out a typology of political orders in weak and failedstates that provides the basis for more systematic comparative analysis andis able to explain variations in outcomes across shifting contexts. I showedthat Afghanistan is marked by cycles of authority in which warlord authoritypersists and overlaps with that of the state regardless of ambitious state-building missions. I demonstrated the existence of a political logic accordingto which non-state armed actors shape-shift (agency) to adapt to changingpolitical environments (structure). This is not unique to Afghanistan. In mostcases, external intervention fails to enhance state consolidation and insteadempowers and creates ties with the ones it aims to weaken, which in turnexplains why Afghanistan, South Sudan, Libya, and other states are not goingto exhibit western-style state building anytime soon, as a result of interven-tion or otherwise. The recent collapse of the Iraqi army tends to confirm that,consistent with my findings, outsiders can only temporarily bolster state in-stitutions, which will then likely break down once foreign aid and resourcesdry out. External state building is a conundrum: a collective action problemthat cannot be solved permanently.

In Afghanistan, warlords have now started to remobilize and rearm theirfollowers, even though the U.S. administration, in fear of a repeat of whathappened in Iraq with the collapse of the army and the rise of the IslamicState, recently announced its intention to maintain troops at least until 2017.If and when NATO pulls out, warlords will remain businessmen and politicalleaders connected to global economic processes and networks but will shiftto more military bases of power. Post-NATO Afghanistan is likely to resem-ble 1990s Afghanistan and feature a mix of fragmented and regional politicalorders. Should the central state be strong enough to resist the external andinternal pressures and avoid implosion, it would then still be characterizedby the existence of parallel authorities, with clear tendencies toward region-alization and fragmentation in the provinces, therefore resembling what KenMenkhaus calls a “mediated state”: a recourse of a state authority “which hasno choice but to work through local intermediaries if it is to have even tokenjurisdiction in an area within its borders.”95

This phoenix-like tendency has important policy implications. Ratherthan developing highly ambitious and intrusive social engineering projectsaimed at neutralizing alternative forms of governance, Western policymakers

95 Ken Menkhaus, “The Rise of a Mediated State in Northern Kenya: The Wajir Story and Its Impli-cations for Statebuilding,” Afrika Focus 21, no. 2 (2008): 32.

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should question their conceptions of states and governance and revise theirstate-building agendas.96 They need to accept that external state buildingaimed at establishing Weberian institutions has no teleological endpoint. Ascurrently conceived, it is doomed to fail, at least in the short term. War-lords and other non-state armed actors cannot be disregarded nor can theybe circumvented until a generational change actually takes place. Foreigngovernments have no choice but to engage with them once they decide tointervene. They need to develop more inclusionary forms of governance togive warlords and their constituencies just enough incentives to “play thestate-building game,” while trying not to build them up unnecessarily.97 Inpractice this balancing act is extremely difficult to perform. Identifying, train-ing, and supporting local non-state armed actors that exercise capacities tocontrol populations and collect information almost always has unanticipatedlong-term consequences. Policymakers should thus carefully weigh the prosand cons before they adopt strategies of indirect irregular warfare aimed atbuilding up local militias to defeat the Islamic State and other radical Islamistgroups in Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, and elsewhere.

These challenges and pitfalls should encourage foreign governmentsand international agencies to consider the possibility that “under some cir-cumstances, less international intervention may actually lead to more stablepolitical arrangements and state structures.”98 Jeremy M. Weinstein calls thisa process of “autonomous recovery in which states achieve a lasting peace,a systematic reduction in violence and post-war political and economic de-velopment in the absence of international intervention.”99 When the interna-tional community finds it necessary to intervene, it should not aim to buildinstitutions and empower specific decision-making bodies but rather to fos-ter virtuous mechanisms of non-violent dispute resolution and empower thepopulations that warlords and state elites need to be accountable to so thatthey can engage in genuine and indigenous processes of state formation.100

96 For a similar argument, see Krasner and Risse, “Areas of Limited Statehood.”97 Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors, and State Building, 322.98 Staniland, “Wartime Political Orders,” 257. For a similar argument, see Christoph Zurcher et al.,

Costly Democracy: Peacebuilding and Democratization after War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,2013).

99 Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Autonomous Recovery and International Intervention in Comparative Per-spective,” Center for Global Development Working Paper 57, Washington DC, 2005, 5.

100 On the distinction between state building as a project aimed to “contain and direct power for thebenefit of the few” and state formation as a historical, largely unconscious and conflicting process, seeBruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London: James Currey,1992), 15.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is grateful for research assistance from Ilse Renkens and com-ments from Ariel Ahram, Ana Arjona, Rosella Cappella, Kendra Koivu,William Reno, and Lee Seymour. The author also thanks the editors of Secu-rity Studies and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

FUNDING

The field research for this article was funded by the French Embassy inAfghanistan, the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Defense Nationale, the Fon-dation Pierre Ledoux, and the Guerre&Po project (Programme Emergencesde la ville de Paris).

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