Afghanistan: A Seriously Disrupted State

A striking feature of the post-Cold War world has been the dramatic increase in the number of states which, in a variety of ways, can be classified as disrupted. Of all these disrupted states, Afghanistan stands out as a rare case. This article has three objectives. The first is to look at variations in the form of the state, and forms of state-society interaction, and to outline what constitutes a disrupted as opposed to a cohesive state. The second is to examine the internal and external sources of "disruption" in Afghanistan, more specifically since the successful pro-Soviet communist coup of April 1978, followed by the Soviet invasion twenty months later, and since the US-led intervention in October 2001 in response to the al-Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, DC, a month earlier. The third objective is to touch on some responses which are still available to the parties on the ground, drawing on lessons learned from the 1989 Soviet withdrawal.