Publication

This text concludes that the countries that participated in the international coalition in Afghanistan failed to establish a joint framework that combined long-term development goals with short-term security needs. A couple of obvious reasons for this failure were that 1) too many civil and military programs did not align with those of the Afghan state, and 2) they inevitably involved armed groups and local warlords who were not trusted by the civil population and had no interest in building an efficient and legitimate Afghan state. The author closes his analysis by describing how to facilitate more coherent interventions in other fragile states.