The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 has sparked a new debate in leading academic circles within the contemporary international community. In this context, the analyses of South Asian authors have gained significant importance worldwide and their academic surveys have provided a range of insights regarding the post-US withdrawal from Afghanistan and its impacts on the strategic, political, and security landscape of the region.
These analyses primarily aim to offer a deeper understanding of regional power dynamics, positioning Afghanistan as the epicentre of South Asian power politics between New Delhi and Islamabad. Similar to a few studies that delve into Kabul’s political landscape and the complex process of state-building during the two-decade-long US presence in Afghanistan, the book under review attempts to portray a critical picture of Afghan society under US influence.
It scrutinises the ineffective American efforts to bring about democratic changes and socio-economic developments. The author, Saira Aquil, is an active member of the Islamabad-based intellectual community and is professionally affiliated with a public sector university in Pakistan. Her work comprehensively examines the challenges and shortcomings faced by US initiatives in Afghanistan, offering valuable perspectives on the region’s evolving dynamics. She argues that the US interventions, despite their extensive resources and ambitious goals were fundamentally flawed and ultimately unsuccessful before the challenge of non-state actors.
Aquil emphasises that the US’s failure to understand and engage with the local cultural, political, and social dynamics led to misdirected strategies and programs in Washington’s Afghan policy. In other words, the US intervention was a failed account of conflicting interests with the local ethnic, tribal, and political groups, which led to the US’ ineffective and counterproductive policies for Afghan society. Furthermore, the author talks about the paradoxical relationship between the security and development efforts of the US.
While the US focused heavily on military solutions to ensure security, these efforts often undermined developmental initiatives by fostering instability and violence in Afghanistan. Saira Aquil is a prominent intellectual figure in Pakistan specialising in Afghanistan. Her extensive research and numerous publications have established her as a respected authority in the field. Aquil’s expertise has also led her to contribute to academic conferences and policy discussions in Pakistan, where she provides unique perspectives on the complexities of Afghan society and its interactions with international forces. Her contributions enrich the conventional understanding of Afghanistan in Pakistan’s academic community and shed light on the broader implications of foreign interventions in the region.
The book’s central theme is rooted in Aquil’s PhD dissertation, where she analyses Washington-sponsored state- and democracy-building processes in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Aquil’s critical approach in the book characterises the US-led intervention under its broader counterterror campaign as a failed attempt to achieve the desired outcomes in Afghanistan, facing multi-layered security challenges and constant resistance from domestic Afghan society. The validity of Aquil’s position was underscored in 2021 when American state officials signed a peace deal with the Taliban in Doha and decided to withdraw its coalition forces from Afghanistan peacefully.
The central theme of the book revolves around Afghanistan’s post2001 developments and their unquestionable associations with the traditional societal frameworks of Afghan society, where the deep-rooted influence of the Taliban was an undefeatable challenge for the US. The book’s nine chapters focus on different aspects of US-supported state-building military campaigns and their negative impacts on the ideology-driven fixed patterns of indigenous Afghan culture. Aquil begins the debate from the conceptual foundations of the failed states and their emergence in the post9/11 structure of the world. The theoretical understanding of the Failed State phenomenon and its evolution in the twenty-first century under the shadows of non-traditional security threats explains the increasing focus of US foreign policy on the changing patterns of the international security environment in the book’s first chapter.
The subsequent chapters cover the changing dynamics of Afghanistan’s national security against the foreign intervention led by the Bush Administration. The second chapter provides the historical background of Kabul’s political developments and their persistent growth under the countywide conflicted and unstable political environment.
In addition to highlighting the process of state formation in Afghanistan and its undeniable dependence on the historical tribal Afghan culture in the first chapter, the second chapter underlined the roots of modern Afghan history starting from the Saur Revolution supported by the Soviet Union in the last phase of the Cold War. The debate in the rest of the chapters concentrated on the central theme of the book, in which the author analyses an interconnectedness between Afghan domestic politics and international power politics consisting of geo-strategic competitions of great powers on Afghanistan.
Based on the critical viewpoint of the author on the role of the US in Afghanistan, it can be maintained that the book Destined to Fail is an analytical survey examining the role of international actors, the US and NATO, and their use of coercive means to alter the domestic social and political structures of Afghanistan. The author has highlighted in her arguments the massive American financial and military investments in US-supported domestic forces to cultivate the desired political system on the Afghan land without estimating its deteriorating effects on Afghan society’s public and political mindsets. The author’s position has made her analysis in all chapters of the book conceptually exceptional and logically sound. Her meticulous research and deep understanding of the region’s complexities provide a robust foundation for her arguments.
The book explores how the fragile indigenous security situation hindered the developmental efforts of the US in Afghanistan despite launching multi-level reconstruction aid packages for Afghan society. The author illustrates the serious challenges faced by the US-sponsored aid programs Afghanistan through detailed case studies and statistical data.
Thus, the book is a valuable resource for those interested in studying the evolution of social and political aspects of Afghanistan during the two-decade-long US presence. It is a comprehensive academic account that critically describes US humanitarian aid to Afghan society within the context of its global war on terror campaigns. Therefore, the author adopts a non-traditional approach to support her argument, offering fresh perspectives and insights that challenge conventional narratives. This innovative approach enriches the discourse on international aid and conflict resolution, making the book a significant contribution to the field.
