Matthew Toy

Western policy elites still parse Afghanistan as a jigsaw of “not enough troops,” faulty intelligence or premature withdrawal. My earlier essay, “Avoiding the Capability Trap,” argued the causal chain runs the other way: abundant matériel deepens failure when it substitutes for locally grounded legitimacy.¹ Kabul’s implosion confirms that verdict while exposing the structural biases that reproduce Western misadventures. Reading Afghanistan through Barry Buzan’s taxonomy of nation-state linkages, and turning Mohammed Ayoob’s “security problematic” inside-out, suggests that non-intervention can be the hardest-nosed strategic choice.

1 – Afghanistan and the myth of the state-nation shortcut

Buzan sketches four ways coercive “states” and imagined “nations” intersect.² NATO tried to leap from a plural social terrain to a state-nation, manufacturing the nation from the top down. Such feats, Buzan warns, demand decades of standardised schooling, fiscal extraction and symbolic homogeny.³ The 2001 Bonn Agreement allowed barely eighteen months before nationwide elections; NATO’s calendar, not Afghan social realities, set the tempo.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, was no tabula rasa. Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek identities drew authority from kin networks, shrine endowments and cross-border trade; “Afghan” was a diplomatic label, not a lived community.⁴ Warlords converted donor cash into what Antonio Giustozzi calls emporia of mud: polities legitimated by personal loyalty and local revenue, not Kabul’s ministries.⁵ By 2018 those ministries relied on foreign funds for over 75 percent of their budget,⁶ turning the state into a vessel of structural extraversion rather than a nucleus of solidarity.

2 – The capability trap, revisited

Lant Pritchett’s “capability trap” captures the dynamic whereby lavish resources mask institutional hollowness.⁷ In Afghanistan, US airpower and payrolls produced countable outputs (flights logged, teachers hired) while corruption and predation eroded the outputs citizens actually valued. Sarah Chayes shows how elite rackets taxed every aid dollar several times over;⁸ Carter Malkasian records that, when American air support vanished in August 2021, Afghan troops often cut local deals rather than fight for an abstraction they never owned.⁹ External capability therefore both props up a weak state and delegitimises it by advertising dependency. The more Washington spent, the more Kabul looked foreign – boosting the Taliban’s claim to embody a rooted, Islamic nation.

3 – Ayoob’s mirror: why the European template misleads

Ayoob argues that post-colonial polities face the same nation-state forging tasks that once convulsed Europe, only faster and under tighter scrutiny.¹⁰ The Afghan debacle undercuts that analogy. Europe’s pathway was path-dependent, not path-determining: mercantilist war, colonial plunder and the absence of outside tutors bankrolled its state projects. Early-modern rulers could bleed and tax their populations because no hegemon demanded quarterly reports on “good governance.”

Transposed into today’s legally dense, media-saturated arena, the blueprint backfires. Pressure to display Weberian credentials, typified by monopoly over legitimate violence inside fixed borders, creates Potemkin ministries and finances clientelist bargains that replace, rather than integrate, vernacular authority. In trying to “finish Europe’s journey,” donors help reproduce the insecurity they hope to cure.

4 – Post-Westphalian prudence

Buzan’s matrix makes plain that Afghanistan never offered a plausible route to a unitary state-nation; NATO’s insistence on conjuring one exposed Kabul’s dependency instead. Prudence therefore begins with political triage.

• Contain, don’t transform. Keep a light regional footprint, such as over-the-horizon strike tools, intelligence liaison, calibrated sanctions, to blunt trans-national threats without social engineering.¹¹
• Scaffold plural bargains. In 2011 UNAMA quietly brokered a Helmand River water-sharing accord between rival tribes and Iran, reducing clashes at a fraction of ISAF’s stabilisation budget.¹² Such micro-compacts, extended to customs corridors or pasture routes, secure order by meshing with existing authority rather than overruling it.
• Respect political tempo. Replace annual disbursement cycles with decade-long trust funds that release money only after mutually verified benchmarks, insulating local actors from the rent-seeking churn that sustains capability traps.¹³

This is not intended to be capital-letter ‘Isolationism’. Rather it should be seen as an exercise humility: an admission that legitimacy sediments slowly, and that neither drones nor curricula can manufacture a nation from the outside.

Footnotes

1. Matthew Toy, “Avoiding the Capability Trap: A Framework,” matthewtoy.com, 20 July 2025. https://matthewtoy.com/strategy/avoiding-the-capability-trap-a-framework/
2. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991), 42–54.
3. Ibid., 48–50.
4. Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 271–75.
5. Antonio Giustozzi, Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan (London: Hurst, 2009), 103–15.
6. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Why the Afghan Government Collapsed, Report 23-05-IP (Arlington, VA: SIGAR, 2022), 1–3.
7. Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock, “Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA),” CID Working Paper 240 (Harvard Kennedy School, June 2012), 2–7.
8. Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 67–72.
9. Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 443–50.
10. Mohammed Ayoob, “The Security Problematic of the Third World,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (1991): 257–83.
11. Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 69–100.
12. Helene von Bismarck, “Water Sharing in Helmand: UNAMA’s Quiet Diplomacy,” Journal of Peacebuilding 12, no. 1 (2016): 41–55.
13. Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock, “Escaping Capability Traps,” 5.

Photo by Suliman Sallehi: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-concrete-building-on-top-of-hill-1484776/

Repeated Western military interventions, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, show that technological and financial superiority does not ensure political victory. Such dominance can obscure political realities and even undermine legitimacy. Precision strikes may heighten views of occupation, while excessive funding often breeds corruption (Clemis, 2025; SIGAR, 2023a). This “capability trap” is the mistaken belief that military and economic power guarantees political outcomes. The true test is whether local actors genuinely accept foreign presence, not simply endure it (U.S. Department of the Army, 2014). To address this, interventions should undergo early political-sociological assessment to confirm mission viability before detailed planning and avoid confusing military means with political ends.

The Futility Assessment Framework

The framework proceeds through a sequence of determinative questions. An affirmative flag in any phase indicates a high risk that material advantages will prove strategically irrelevant or even counterproductive.

Phase 1 – Transformation Gate

The initial and most fundamental question is one of intent: Does the mission’s authentic end-state involve remaking the basic institutions or social contract of the target society? This question demands an honest appraisal, looking beyond stated aims to the practical requirements for success. Indicators of a transformational goal include a significant ‘partner-capacity delta’, where host-nation forces are projected to remain reliant on foreign kinetic enablers after a period of five years, or a ‘governance-gap delta’, where routine state functions like revenue extraction or dispute resolution would likely collapse without sustained foreign tutelage (SIGAR, 2023b). If the answer is yes, the mission must be treated as transformational and subjected to further futility screening.

Phase 2 – Elite-Coalition Viability

The next inquiry assesses the local political foundation for change: Is there a cohesive indigenous elite bloc, minimally fragmented, that is willing and able to incur the costs of coercion required to secure the new order after foreign withdrawal? External powers cannot substitute for a legitimate local monopoly on violence. Successful political consolidation requires local actors who see the post-intervention state as their own and are prepared to defend it. The absence of such a bloc, or the presence of deep and intractable divisions, signals a critical vulnerability that foreign support can rarely overcome (Hazelton, 2017). This condition represents a high futility risk and should prompt a reassessment of primary objectives.

Phase 3 – Social-Terrain Depth Test

A critical political-sociological test follows: Must the campaign uproot kinship, religious, or customary systems that have been embedded for generations? When an intervention’s success is conditional upon altering social structures with deep historical roots, such as tribal allegiances, powerful religious hierarchies, or customary law systems, it faces a profound challenge. These systems are often the true sources of social cohesion and legitimacy. Attempting to displace them is not a matter of mere policy implementation but of cultural re-engineering, a task for which military force is singularly ill-suited and which requires decades, if not generations, to achieve (French, 2012). An affirmative answer here strongly indicates a high risk of futility.

Phase 4 – Legitimacy Inversion Screen

Consideration must be given to the paradoxical effect of overwhelming strength: Will the visible preponderance of foreign power itself delegitimise local partners? This ‘legitimacy inversion’ occurs when the very instruments of intervention undermine the goal. Key indicators include when the external force’s firepower comes to dominate the battlefield narrative, when aid flows grossly exceed the local absorptive capacity and breed parasitic rent-seeking, or when the political mythology of the new state requires public deference to its outside patrons (SIGAR, 2016). The presence of any two of these factors suggests that the intervention is likely to empower its opponents by branding its partners as puppets.

Phase 5 – Corruption Elasticity Gauge

A more quantifiable, yet crucial, metric concerns the integrity of resource transfers: What is the estimated share of new funds likely to be diverted through informal or corrupt networks before reaching their intended end-use? When this figure exceeds 30 per cent, corruption ceases to be a mere inefficiency and becomes a self-defeating ‘strategic tax’. Such a leakage rate not only wastes resources but actively finances malign networks, delegitimises the partner government, and creates a powerful constituency with a vested interest in perpetual conflict and instability (SIGAR, 2016).

Phase 6 – Political-Metabolism Mismatch

Finally, the framework assesses temporal feasibility: Are the timelines required for deep socio-political change congruent with the domestic electoral horizons and fiscal patience of the intervening state? Meaningful political transformation operates on a generational timeline, arguably requiring a commitment of fifteen years or more. This is fundamentally misaligned with the two-to-four-year cycles of Western domestic politics and budgetary processes, which create artificial pressures for immediate, demonstrable results (Posen, 2014). A definitive mismatch between the political metabolism of the target society and that of the intervening power represents a high futility risk.

Aggregate Rule and Quantitative Cross-Check

An aggregate rule is simple: if two or more of the above phases are flagged with a ‘HIGH FUTILITY RISK’, the recommendation must be Do Not Proceed with a transformational objective. To provide a more granular assessment, a weighted scorecard can be applied:

Indicator	Weight
Elite-coalition failure	3
Deep-rooted social structures must be altered	3
Legitimacy inversion	2
Corruption elasticity >30%	2
Political-metabolism mismatch	2

A total score of 5 or higher should trigger an immediate pivot away from transformational objectives towards a menu of more limited, realistic alternative strategies.

Alternative Strategy Menu

When a futility assessment counsels against transformative intervention, decision-makers are not left without options. The challenge is to select strategies that acknowledge political constraints while still addressing core security concerns.

Containment and Offshore Balancing

Instead of attempting internal transformation, the focus shifts to preventing adverse developments from affecting core national interests. This may involve a combination of offshore military presence, robust intelligence capabilities, and diplomatic containment structures (Luttwak, 1999). This approach accepts political realities in the target region while maintaining sufficient influence to shape outcomes at the margins.

Regional Coalition Building

This strategy involves empowering and supporting regional partners who possess greater cultural legitimacy and political sustainability than an external intervention can hope to achieve. It requires accepting that regional solutions may not align perfectly with external preferences, but recognises that an indigenous, or at least proximate, locus of legitimacy is often more durable and effective than an imposed one (Denison, 2020).

Selective Partnership and Conditional Support

This approach entails working with existing power structures rather than attempting to replace them. This requires a pragmatic acceptance of local legitimacy patterns, including those rooted in traditional or religious authority, while using conditional assistance to influence behaviour incrementally over time. It trades ideological satisfaction for practical influence and sustainability.

Intelligence Cooperation and Targeted Disruption

Specific threats can be addressed through deep intelligence partnerships and precise, targeted operations rather than comprehensive political-military projects. This maintains operational flexibility while avoiding the significant legitimacy deficits and resource drains associated with a sustained, visible military presence (Paul et al., 2013).

The fundamental insight remains consistent: when a society’s political and social context renders transformation futile despite an intervener’s material superiority, strategic wisdom lies not in doing nothing, but in pursuing different objectives that work with, rather than against, the grain of local political reality.

Bibliography

Clemis, M.G. (2025). The Enduring Lessons of Vietnam: Implications for US Strategy and Policy. Parameters, 55(2), pp.23–25.

Denison, B. (2020). The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Failure of Regime-Change Operations. Policy Analysis 883. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

French, D. (2012). The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945-1967. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hazelton, J.L. (2017). The ‘Hearts and Minds’ Fallacy: Violence, Coercion, and Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare. International Security, 42(1), pp.80–113.

Luttwak, E.N. (1999). Give War a Chance. Foreign Affairs, 78(4), pp.36–44.

Paul, C., Clarke, C.P., Grill, B. and Dunigan, M. (2013). Paths to Victory: Lessons from Modern Insurgencies. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.

Posen, B.R. (2014). Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). (2023a). Why the Afghan Government Collapsed. Arlington, VA: SIGAR.

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). (2023b). The Factors Leading to the Collapse of the Afghan Government and Its Security Forces. Arlington, VA: SIGAR.

U.S. Department of the Army. (2014). Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies (FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5). Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army.