ABSTRACT
The international statebuilding effort in Afghanistan followed in the wake of the autumn 2001 military intervention which removed the Taliban regime. Regime-changing intervention was not the consequence of the Taliban’s blockade of Hazara villages or of its excesses there, nor of the Taliban’s harsh rules and conduct in the enforcement of its interpretation of Islam. Even the East Africa Embassy bombings of 1998, the attack in October 2000 in Aden on the US warship USS Cole, or, for that matter, the thwarted millennium bombing plot against Los Angeles were not enough to bring it about. It took the magnitude of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon for a US-led coalition of the willing to be interested enough to decisively intervene and to try to fundamentally transform local conditions in the hope of sustainable change and the exclusion from the area of unwanted elements, namely al-Qaeda and its local hosts, allies, and beneficiaries, the Taliban. It is the efforts since then that the present chapter reviews in detail, providing an overview of what the extensive literature on the subject may tell or reveal to the observer about statebuilding in Afghanistan.
