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UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS, PRAGUE

FACULTY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Post-2001 Afghanistan: a Critical Analysis of the US WoT and State- building Discourse(s)

Dissertation Thesis

PhD Student: Pamir Halimzai

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Jan Eichler, CSc.

Doctoral degree programme: International Economic Relations Study field: International Political Relations

Prague, April 2021

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Declaration

Herewith I declare that I have written the Dissertation Thesis, titled, Post-2001 Afghanistan: a Critical Analysis of the US WoT and State-building Discourse(s), on my own and I have listed all sources and literature that I used.

Prague, April 2021

……….

Pamir Halimzai

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Dedication

For my parents who gave up with their personal lives to raise me and my siblings, having only one dream to see us

stand high, be successful, and happy!

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Abstract

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Acknowledgements

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Preface: a Personal Narrative

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List of Graphs, Tables and Timelines

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List of Abbreviations

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This page is intentionally left blank.

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Prelude

Our war on terror is well begun, but it is only begun. This campaign may not be finished on our watch — yet it must be and it will be waged on our watch (The White House, 2008, p. 106).

“Some say knowledge is power. Some tell us that all power comes from the gods.

Others say it derives from law. (…) Who truly killed Eddard Stark, do you think?

Joffrey, who gave the command? Ser Ilyn Payne, who swung the sword? Or . . . another?”

Tyrion cocked his head sideways. “Did you mean to answer your damned riddle, or only to make my headache worse?”

Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”

“So power is a mummer’s trick?”

“A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow” (Martin, 2000, p. 133).

The government of Afghanistan and the Taliban¹, for the first time in 19 years since the events of September 11, 2001 (hereinafter called 9/11), formally began the peace and reconciliation process in Doha, capital of Qatar, on September 12, 2020. Earlier, the United States (US) signed a peace agreement with the Afghan Taliban on February 29, 2020 (Department of State, 2020).

The agreement (full text is available in the Appendix A pp.237-240) paves the way for the complete withdrawal of the US and international troops from

1 The word Taliban is the Pashto version of Talib in Arabic. The root of the term Talib is Talab which means to seek or to demand in Arabic. Talib, thus, is a noun meaning seeker. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Azerbaijan and some Arab countries, Talib-e Ilm means the male seeker of knowledge or precisely a student. The word in Afghan and Pakistani religious schools/seminaries (or madrassahs) is often abbreviated as Talib. In other words, every male student at religious school is called Talib instead of Talib-e Ilm. The female student is formally called Taliba-e-Ilm and shortly Taliba. The plural for Talib and Taliba in Arabic is Tulaba and Talibaat, respectively. The plural for Talib in Pashto is Taliban. The term Taliban is repeatedly used incorrectly by the Western media, scholars, politicians, and international troops in Afghanistan. They use it as a singular when referring to Taliban both as an extremist group and as a single militant. Following the Pashto structure and meaning of the word, this dissertation takes Taliban as plural and thus uses are, were, them and so on instead of is, was etc.

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Afghanistan by the middle of 2021², in return of security guarantees from the militant group such as breaking ways with terrorists organizations like al Qaeda, fighting against the Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K)³, an affiliate of the Islamic State (IS)⁴ group that emerged in Iraq and Syria and preventing Afghanistan’s territory from being used as a sanctuary for the militant groups endangering the security of the US and its allies and threatening international liberal political order.

The inauguration of the negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban (called the intra-Afghan dialogue) is just the beginning of a lengthy and challenging process which could take years to arrive at its core objective i.e., restoring peace in the country convulsed by protracted conflict since 1992 and political disorder stretched since 1973 that resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Afghans, displacement of millions and a permanent state of destitute for over 30 million people.

In October 2001, weeks after 9/11, the US-led international coalition invaded Afghanistan to fight against al Qaeda, remove the Taliban from power and rebuild a modern, liberal-democratic Afghan state that will, as a responsible member of the community of states, ensure to thwart the recurrence of another 9/11-style incident –an event that at the beginning of the 21^st century changed the discourses of political and security landscape of the world.

2 Joe Biden, after getting elected as the president of the US in November 2020, ordered a review of the agreement and later suggested the set date of withdrawal of troops cannot be met and should be delayed for a few months.

3 Islamic State in Khorasan (in Arabic: ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fi Khorasan) is the regional militant wing of the IS for its so-called Central Asian province. Khorasan was the name of a region in ancient Afghanistan. The IS-K appeared in 2014 after Hafiz Saeed Khan, a former Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) – the Taliban Movement of Pakistan – commander, brought together some other members of the TTP after parting ways with the main militant wing and pledged allegiance to the IS in Iraq and Syria. The IS-K is responsible for Afghanistan and Pakistan operations (for a detailed account see: Giustozzi, 2018). This dissertation uses IS as an acronym for the main Islamic State group and IS-K for its affiliate in the Central Asia region.

4 The group in the beginning was known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) which is also called Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). It formally changed the name to Islamic State (IS) after announcing its Caliphate (Khilafah or Khilafat in Arabic) in 2014 (Dabiq, 2014).

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Post-9/11 world is by no means of less significance than the events of the end of Cold War and the rise of a new time and space which compelled Fukuyama (2006) to go beyond the positivist conviction and tradition and rather sweepingly claim the end of history.

Ontologically speaking, the attack of 9/11 can itself be seen as a noteworthy question mark on the notions of national and international orders, sovereignty, and borders. The post-9/11 world led to remarkable changes in international Westphalian order and the advent of abruptly changing and transforming international phenomena. For example, the War on Terror (WoT) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, Mali and elsewhere and the war against alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq were just the beginning of continuously changing and evolving scenes constructing and affirming the notions of globalization of terror and at the same time, enriching conceptual toolbox in the discipline of International Relations (IR) and providing room for questioning them. The concepts of globalization and interconnectedness were thus not limited to the liberal market economies but became increasingly political even in the illiberal socio-economic and socio- political spaces.

Over the period of two decades, the global WoT expanded to the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. The war in Iraq that began with the removal of Saddam Hussein and a long fight against al Qaeda, culminated with the installation of a parliamentary democratic apparatus. The US-led coalition withdrew its forces from Iraq in 2011 arguing that despite challenges, the country will function as a democracy on its own. However, soon after that the government of the former prime minister Nuri Al-Maliki and the national parliament became dysfunctional and in liberal media and academic discourse Iraq was termed as a failing state. Deepening sectarian strife among Iraqi population led to the use of widespread political violence claiming thousands lives annually.

The emergence of the IS capturing large swathes of Iraq and Syria and the killing of hundreds of civilians, two US journalists and one British aid-worker soon transformed the conflict into a transnational security threat. During the crisis, the calls for referendum in the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq

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challenged the unity of the state. Another international coalition was formed against the IS and its affiliates in Iraq and Syria and the war continued.

By the end of 2014, after the drawdown of the US-led international combat troops from Afghanistan, all security responsibilities were transferred to Afghans, thus practically making them in-charge of the state of affairs, over a decade after the intervention. As the transition of security transfer ended, the war in Afghanistan raged in 2015 and 2016. Many districts fell to the Taliban and according to the United Nations (UN), out of the total 34 provinces, security situation rapidly deteriorated in 29 of the provinces. At the same time, an affiliate militant group of the IS emerged, called the IS-K (Giustozzi, 2018;

Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2018) in the eastern province of Nangarhar. On the other hand, for the first time in 15 years, the northern and north-western provinces like Kunduz, Baghlan, Faryab and Badakhshan faced increasing insecurity due to the Taliban insurgency.

On the democratic front, world leaders hailed “successful” and “secure”

Afghan presidential election of April 05, 2014. According to the Afghan Independent Election Commission (IEC), almost seven million people (out of 12 million registered voters) had turned out on the Election Day. When the voting concluded, Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani, the then Chairman and Commissioner of IEC told a news conference in Kabul that approximately 36%

of women and 64% of men had voted for their presidential and provincial candidates. It was, according to Nuristani, the first time that women personally went to the polling stations across the country. Before that, during the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2004, 2005 and 2009, 2010 respectively, official records showed a relatively large number of women who voted; however, most of those votes were cast by male members of the families, ergo, paving the way for massive fraud.

The peaceful election in April, as the then president Hamid Karzai and interior minister Mohammad Omer Daudzai claimed, was a proof that Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) were fully capable of taking security responsibilities and defending the country against internal and external threats. But at the

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same time, on the day of election militants launched as many as 690 attacks⁵ (Van Dyk, 2014). Afghan interior minister, Daudzai, on the conclusion of voting process told reporters in Kabul that at least 16 ANSF members were killed across the country in attacks. More than 200,000 ANSF service members were deployed near and around the polling stations and on the eastern border with Pakistan to tackle any cross-border militant activity and ensure election security. Former president Hamid Karzai in a statement said that it was one of the largest “Afghan-led and Afghan-owned” military operation as well as the whole process of voting was handled by the IEC which was “entirely composed of Afghans” (Karzai, 2014).

The presidential candidate Abdullah, however, challenged election outcome claiming that the results were manipulated in favour of his rival Ashraf Ghani.

The US intervened, the then Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated with Abdullah and Ghani ending the impasse and forming a National Unity Government (NUG) – an agreement that undermined the very democratic ideals the US wanted to implement and establish in Afghanistan.

The second election in 2019, faced a similar fate. The US administration, under president Donald Trump, mediated a power-sharing deal between Ghani and Abdullah for the second time. The turnout in 2019 presidential election was historically low –around 1.6 million of the almost 10 million registered voters cast their ballots. During the years since January 2015, the levels of political violence kept rising and according to the UN, more than 10,000 Afghans were killed and wounded in 2019 alone.

Themes and questions

The overview offered suggests that there are two predominant subjects revolving the Middle East and Afghanistan. One is the continuation of war or security challenges and problems and the second is the democratization.

Given the broad scope of the events and regions, this dissertation focuses on the post-2001 WoT and state-building discourse(s) in Afghanistan and argues that both are inseparable. In other words, the US discourse on WoT and the discourse of state-building imply each other thus examining them

5 This includes all small- and large-scale attacks through IEDs, coordinated militant attacks, launching rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and cross border attacks from Pakistan.

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independent of each other breaks down the holistic context and mars plausible explanations and conclusions that this work seeks to present.

This dissertation is an effort to understand the complex post-9/11 changes and transformations in Afghanistan. Before discussing the central theme and questions, it is important to briefly state what I mean by terms discourse and state-building in the context of this research work.

In the dissertation I do not reduce discourse to language, conversation, speech, text, policy, framework, roadmap, or an ideology but following Foucauldian thought, see it as a source of power. Discourse itself is a product of power. In fact, the power/knowledge nexus builds up a discourse and at the same time reveals its mode(s) of construction and domination/marginality.

Discourse both fixes and destabilizes the meanings of things, objects, identities, ideas, politics and so on. In this sense discourse is in action and reveals itself as various practices. Therefore, whenever the word discourse is mentioned in these, it must be understood as accompanying certain practice(s) as well. In some places, I reiterate this point by mentioning

“discourse (and practice)” to remind the reader that the notion, such as WoT discourse, not only means a perspective, a policy, or a collection of ideas/statements but an action/practice too. For example, Bush’s discourse on WoT resulted in the invasion of Afghanistan. So, the discourse is in action having visible, material existence and effects.

I frequently use a second term, state-building, which does not mean an all- inclusive discourse (and practice) of rebuilding all state apparatuses and organs. Instead, state-building in Afghanistan in this dissertation is taken as only the security and democracy building and briefly the economic development in the country. I explain it further in the first chapter.

The central theme of the dissertation is to read, understand, problematize, and critically delineate the US discourse (and practice) on WoT and Afghan state-building that is precisely security, democracy building and to an extent, the economic development in the country since 2001. For that purpose, this dissertation asks the following interrelated questions:

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i. How George W. Bush shaped and made his WoT discourse dominant in Afghanistan? Why a reinterpretation of his discourse is important almost two decades after 9/11?

ii. How the (dominating) discourses on WoT and state-building during the terms of three American presidents were (re)shaped, ordered, organized, and operationalized in post-2001 Afghanistan?

iii. What are the implications of the US WoT and state-building discourses for Afghanistan and beyond?

The dissertation postulates that the US discourse(s) did not achieve the stated goal of defeating terrorism and rebuilding a liberated, democratic Afghanistan but instead resulted in further confinement of the Afghan state. To do so, the dissertation develops a Foucauldian-inspired concept of the politics of confinement and asks a fourth equally important question:

iv. In what ways the US WoT and state-building discourses are representative of wider depoliticization of the society and paved the way for the illiberal, oppressive politics of confinement and necropolitics?

The discussion around the notion of the politics of confinement and necropolitics vis-à-vis WoT and state-building in Afghanistan constitutes the core of this theory-driven work.

Moving ahead with the conclusion of the critical reinterpretation and reflexive analysis of the US WoT and state-building discourses, the dissertation posits that the global WoT discourse altered the ways wars are fought and security is practiced in the 21^st century.

Building upon Foucauldian and poststructural works on power, I put forth the notion of abiopower (non-living power) and observe that the global WoT discourse has changed the ways wars are fought and security is practiced, therefore, the dissertation asks a fifth relevant question:

v. How the rise of abiopower alters the faces of (near) future warfare/security practices?

The answer of the fifth question marks the point of departure from the WoT and state-building in Afghanistan towards the construction of a more general futurology vis-à-vis warfare and security practices as well as a brief description

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of the future of biopolitical control of societies through increasing penetration of abiopower.

Given the situation in Afghanistan, I argue it is imperative to understand the ways discourses and practices of dealing with security problems operated in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2020 and offer an alternative view of their implications.

In other words, instead of focusing on Afghanistan as a problem, this dissertation problematizes the US WoT and state-building discourses in the country and maps their increasingly illiberal and oppressive consequences for the Afghan state and the emerging realities of warfare and security practices of the future.

Constructing Afghanistan as a p roblem

The US-led international community and Afghan government have been involved in (re)constructing a modern, democratic state since 2001. Many liberal and positivist studies identify post-2001 Afghanistan as a problem. They argue that despite global efforts of war against extremism, conflict resolution strategies, state-building, and the introduction of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) such as the one operated and ran by the government of the Czech Republic in Logar province (Hynek & Eichler, 2011), the successfulness and viability of international and Afghan efforts cannot be established.

Ever since 2001, Afghanistan is in a state of conflict and the literature suggests militant safe havens still exist in the bordering Pakistan (Shahzad, 2011;

Economist, 2011; Rashid, 2012), its economy and new democracy are fragile (IRIN, 2007; Rashid, 2008; Ghani & Lockhart, 2009), poppy cultivation and drug trade is as high as it was during the Taliban rule in late 1990s⁶, corruption is the second biggest concern for Afghans (Rashid, 2008; Cordesman, 2010a) and poverty and illiteracy rates are very high (UNESCO, 2012; Ghani &

Lockhart, 2009).

6 Multiple annual reports of the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) reveal that Afghanistan is still one of the world’s largest producers of opium which is smuggled through Karachi of Pakistan and Central Asian countries to Europe and North America. The report in 2013 said that during 2012 and 2013 the area on which poppy was grown increased 35%.

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In addition, state organs and the formal institutions⁷ are not efficient and the institutional vacuum in many areas as well as incapability to enforce them (Katzman, 2009) is also a challenge that the state and international community are trying to address.

Furthermore, after almost two decades of liberal state-building efforts, a political culture necessary for the formation and functioning of political parties does not exist (Reilly & Nordlund, 2008) and the legislature is not functioning appropriately (Joya, 2009). Socially, the population is ethnically divided, and the idea of collective identity or nationhood seems vague to an extent that one can argue that the fragmentation of society is posing internal threats to the state.

Some of the studies on Afghanistan rightly identify the regional context arguing it faces challenges of militancy and destabilization from neighbouring countries like Pakistan (Fair, et al., 2014; Waldman, 2010; Riedel, 2012; Fatah, 2013). Pakistan’s influence on Afghan Taliban previously hampered and sabotaged the American reconciliation and Afghan-led peace processes with Quetta Shura⁸ of the Taliban. Afghan government officials and some parliamentarians have complained repeatedly of the Iranian involvement in the political and social affairs of Afghanistan (Joya, 2009; Bush, 2010;

Waldman, 2010).

Finally, in the rationalist and liberal studies, the problem of Islamist extremist and fundamentalist ideology among Afghan militants and parts of population as well as operations of Pakistani militant groups (trying to impose their interpretation of an Islamic state) are not only seen as challenging Afghan

7 I am using Douglass C. North’s interpretation of the word institution here. An “institution”

in his study includes both formal and informal laws of the country. The informal laws come from culture, for details see North (1990).

8 Quetta is the capital of southwestern Baluchistan province in Pakistan. The word Shura in Arabic means council. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban chief, alongside other important Taliban leaders were based in Quetta where they had formed a council called the Quetta Shura. Two other important Taliban councils, Peshawar Shura (the provincial capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Miramshah Shura (capital of North Waziristan tribal district), exist in northwest Pakistan.

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stability but are also threatening neighbouring states (Fatah, 2008; Haider, [2008] 2010; Haider, 2012) and in a broader sense, even the world⁹.

As will be clear, I argue that the discourse of the Taliban, constructed as extremist, fundamentalist, hard-line and violent, needs to be contested and elucidated in an alternative way to make sense of their rule in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.

Problematizing the US WoT and state-building discourse

The rationalist construction of Afghanistan as a problem is unstable, inconsistent, paradoxical, and loaded with discrepancies. Some of the studies cited above fall short of offering a fuller picture by not adopting a holistic approach and keep reconstructing and fixing dominant forms of social reality.

They establish linear causal links suggesting that a policy needs to offer a solution and a stable, fixed end-result.

This dissertation inverses the equation by problematizing the US discourses instead. In doing so, Afghanistan is contextualized in a holistic manner along with its turbulent history since 1970s because I argue without a proper, all- encompassing perspective on Afghanistan’s history, the US discourses’

formation, domination, and consequences cannot be ascertained.

Put differently, I do not adopt a problem-solving approach to see why the US discourses on WoT and state-building could not achieve their stated objectives. Unlike mainstream studies, I do not wish to propose that if the loopholes in the US discourses were fixed, they could translate into a desirable outcome vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

With the help of a Foucauldian poststructuralist and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) theoretical and methodological approaches, I unpack the discourses of three US presidents on WoT and state-building, observe their rationalist formation and domination; then I reinterpret and question them and offer an alternative perspective on their wide-ranging implications for Afghanistan and

9 Many media reports have suggested the involvement of Pakistani militants in Syrian and Libyan conflicts.

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beyond. In the meantime, I also offer a detailed critique of the liberal discourse and practice of state-building in Afghanistan.

This dissertation, ergo, does not provide a solution to the problems of conflict and state-building in Afghanistan and instead of progressing in a simplified, linear way, it exposes the complexities of Afghanistan, contemporary state- building discourses, and practices and the illiberalizing and oppressive effects of the US discourses.

Dissertation outline

The first chapter of the dissertation lays out the theoretical and methodological sketch of the study. It begins with a brief critique of mainstream approaches illustrating why rationalist and positivist approaches may fall short of understanding the ever-changing situation in Afghanistan.

Then I present the ontological and epistemological profile, a brief introduction of poststructuralism as a theoretical agenda and discuss the notion of discourse and my understanding of it within the confines of this dissertation.

The chapter contends that critical and alternative approaches such as poststructuralism can serve as better theoretical frameworks because of their focus on intertextuality and contexts. The next section of the chapter outlines the methodological framework (i.e., CDA) of the dissertation and discusses the method, text-delimiting models used and a note on the referencing and footnotes in this research work.

The fourth section of the chapter deliberates on and critically assesses contemporary (international) state-building discourses and practices of intervention, before offering a detailed analysis of the transformation of state- building discourses in the 21^st century. The critical literature review delineates the liberal-realist understanding of state fragility, weakness, or failure. The remaining part of the fourth section, contextualizes the (re)birth of what I call a novel discourse of state-building vis-à-vis the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its detrimental results. The chapter also puts the term state-building in the context of this dissertation.

The second chapter has two sections. The first segment of the chapter historicizes Afghanistan that serves crucial purposes. There are countless Orientalist (Said, 2003) accounts about Afghanistan’s post-1973 tumultuous

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history, the conflict, and the Taliban rule. While an all-inclusive critical review of the developments of five decades in Afghanistan does not constitute the scope of this study, a detailed analysis is warranted to offer a fuller picture and for the historical context. This section reveals how many authors writing about Afghanistan eschew various aspects of the country, its politics and society that leads them to draw implausible conclusions.

For example, a repeating narrative is that the coup d’état of the so-called Marxist political party in 1978 is the root cause of the subsequent upheavals, emergence of Islamist extremist groups and conflict. I contest this narrative by focusing on the domestic and international contexts carefully and offer an alternative history in which I try to unearth those missing linkages that are buried under the prevalent dominant discourse. This contextualization rejects Orientalist explanations and as following chapters on the US WoT and state- building discourses will show, is imperative to understand and then analyse the tragic story of Afghanistan. The history since 1970s is also important in understanding the conditions that made the emergence of the Taliban possible and paved the way for their five-year rule.

The second section of the chapter argues that Orientalist arguments incorrectly identifying the Taliban merely as an extremist religious group need to be contested. Poststructuralist CDA is not possible without intertextuality and to offer an alternative representation and reinterpretation of the discursively established, dominant forms and modes of social reality, it is substantially significant to comprehend and put in perspective the advent and evolution of political-religious thought in Afghanistan that culminated in the Taliban rule in 1996 and the subsequent Talibanization of Afghanistan.

Talibanization, in the dissertation, is seen and understood as a reverse state- building discourse and process that the last section of the chapter elucidates.

The third chapter of the dissertation opens official discourses of the three US presidents regarding the war and state-building in the post-2001 Afghanistan.

The first portion delineates president Bush’s discourse on WoT and security and democracy building in Afghanistan during his two terms in the White House. This section shows how Bush constructed a terrorism discourse and made it dominant. I argue that revisiting his discourse almost two decades

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after 9/11 is essential to offer alternative insights regarding the WoT in Afghanistan.

The second segment of the chapter deals with the discourse of Barack Obama since he took office in 2009 until the end of his tenure in 2016. This section delves into how Obama strengthened and expanded the WoT discourse and in what ways advanced the state-building of Afghanistan.

The final section provides a detailed overview of president Trump’s discourse regarding the war and state-building in Afghanistan. I claim that the discourses of the three US presidents –Bush, Obama, and Trump– complement one another. While reading texts and examining the formation, consolidation, and domination of their discourses, I observed a peculiar unity and sameness among the discourses of the three that I try to reveal with the help of the CDA in the chapter.

Drawing upon poststructuralist theoretical and philosophical ideas, the final chapter critically analyses the US WoT and state-building discourses in post- 2001 Afghanistan. The discursive process of identifying and framing al Qaeda and the Taliban as evil, barbarian and anti-freedom is what this chapter sees as part of the depoliticization of the conflict and society, having serious consequences. The first section delineates the process of depoliticization through evilization before turning to the Foucauldian-inspired concept of the politics of confinement that I see as oppressive and illiberalizing.

Bush’s discourse on WoT made the politics of confinement possible in Afghanistan through which spaces of confinement were established. This part, building upon Foucault’s analysis of psychiatry and the emergence of asylum centres in Europe, claims the interplay of power/knowledge nexus becomes increasingly visible when the dividing practices are strengthened with the foundation of scientific reason. It argues that as the medical knowledge operates as a new mode of social control in the confinement centres for the mad, the same way the WoT discourse through wider depoliticization clears the path for the politics of confinement which is unilateral and subjugating and is a system of construction of the spaces of confinement where the opposing voices (if any left) are forcefully silenced. From here the chapter

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proceeds to Obama’s discourse and argues that it expanded the politics and spaces of confinement beyond Afghanistan’s borders.

Drone war in neighbouring Pakistan’s tribal areas is a phenomenon that explains well the expansion of the spaces and politics of confinement during Obama’s presidency. It shows the politics of confinement transcending the juridical and sovereign borders of states and regions as well as the boundaries of the airspace and waters. After a critical discussion on Obama’s drone war, the chapter suggests that the politics of confinement and necropolitics go hand in hand in Afghanistan.

To explain the rise of necropower/necropolitics, I turn to Foucault’s notions of biopower and biopolitics that are the epistemological source for the theorization of Mbembe’s concept of necropower. I argue that the US WoT and state-building discourses under three presidents exhibit characteristics of complete domination through various power technologies including necropower.

The third section of the last chapter identifies shortfalls, discrepancies, inconsistencies, and paradoxes of building democracy and economic development in Afghanistan and then elucidates four forms of the politics of death (necropolitics) within the country arguing that necropower constructs a society where people breathe, eat, and walk but are socially dead. This segment of the chapter also sheds light on the (re)construction of the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) and discusses how the state security apparatus became a tool or an agent of exercising necropower. I argue that the rationalist, problem-solving US discourses (and practices) did not achieve the objective of resolving Afghanistan’s issues but resulted in further solidifying existing illiberal circumstances.

The next section of the last chapter not only reflects on Trump’s peace process and signing of the agreement with the Taliban, but also attempts to draw a sketch of the potential outcomes of the intra-Afghan dialogue.

The dissertation, keeping in view the analysis of the discourse (and process) of the Talibanization as reverse state-building in the second chapter, claims that if the Taliban emerge as a decisive force from the negotiation process

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and once again aspire to establish an Islamic state of their choice, the chances of ending political violence in Afghanistan are bleak because their discourse is exclusionist and discriminatory. Instead, agreeing with Richmond (2008), I also claim that the idea of peace needs to be taken as a process than as a fixed, end state in Afghanistan. I state that a poststructural version of peace would not be merely the absence of violence but a situation where no discourse dominates the other i.e., a symbiosis of all existing and competing discourses in the country.

The final section, building upon Foucault’s notion of biopower and biopolitics, contends that the US WoT discourse altered the facets of war and security practices –not only in Afghanistan but beyond. In other words, for example, drone war and surveillance systems represent new modes of fighting war and practicing security, respectively. These new forms are made possible by the increasing use of semi/fully-autonomous machines.

While the concepts of biopower and necropower are extremely useful in understanding the functioning of contemporary states and the ways of constructing security and war practices, I contend, technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine-learning, robotics etc. reveal that both notions fall short of explaining how security and war practices might look in near future.

Also, given that biopower and necropower are exercised by the states that are run by humans, a new form or technology of power that I call abiopower has emerged which is non-living and rooted in the operations and functionalities of autonomous-machines.

I explicate that such machines operate independent of human agency or control, to exercise their abiopower. It has (to an extent) and will further transform security practices, the dissertation maintains. Abiopower does not exclude other power technologies such as discipline and biopower, instead exhibits the same characteristics.

Abiopower is a rather postmodern/late modern technology of power that is a non-living power which is not derived from humans directly but is capable of making decisions of life and death on its own like a living organism (or more precisely, like a human).

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Advancing existing studies on drones, drone swarms and robots employed in the fields of security, the section constructs a futurology of security/war practices. It concludes that abiopower is already operating as a distinct technology of biopolitics and disciplining modern individuals raising fundamental political, ethical, moral, and social questions.

The Epilogue summarizes the findings of the dissertation and offers concluding remarks.

Limitations

The first and foremost limitation of this work is that it does not offer an all- encompassing study of the state-building of post-2001 Afghanistan. As the final section of the next chapter reveals, state-building is an overarching enterprise –both as a theory and practice– but I have chosen only security and democracy building and to a smaller extent the economic (re)construction, from it meaning that these pages fall short from showing a fuller and complete picture of the post-2001 Afghanistan. There are certain blurry parts in this picture and some are totally missing from it, which include but are not limited to, central and local governance issues, institution building, capacity of the institutions, the development of monetary bodies, a comprehensive analysis of the economy, and infrastructure reconstruction.

However, as the war and security remain defining features of Afghanistan having profound impact on the rest of the areas, and as the next chapters show, the US discourse also mostly revolves around the WoT and security and democracy-building of Afghanistan, it can explain my subjective inclination towards these themes.

A second, and equally important, gap in this dissertation is that it does not discuss peripheral discourses. I offer an extensive critique of the US discourses of war and state-building, claiming that their hegemony suppressed and subjugated Afghan society, but do not elucidate the Afghan discourse. This way, I have not attempted to resuscitate the stifled Afghan discourse.

Finally, I have not offered due space to other less dominant discourses vis-à- vis the war and post-2001 reconstruction of Afghanistan. These include policy discourses of all the US allies such as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states, European and other countries and organizations

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which have been practically engaged and involved in Afghanistan for almost two decades. While it could enrich the work considerably, including the analysis of the Afghan and US allies’ discourses would mean sliding away from the central theme of this work and entering into different terrains.

Some considerations

In this dissertation I have used terms like tribe and tribal in some parts that have their roots in the colonial past of the region. While postmodern, poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical instruments have criticized the use of such terms describing them as stemming from Orientalist discourses, I still retain their usage albeit with a different meaning.

A tribe reflects the social and political organization of Afghan society for centuries and rather than having negative connotations (such as being barbaric or uncivilized as Orientalist literature suggests), is held in high esteem because of its indigenous origins.

The Afghan tribal structure is embedded in ancient codes of Afghaniyat (Afghanism) and Pashtunwali (Pashtunism) which, if understood in the pure Afghan context, are not about barbarism and savagery and are not representative of a stone-age but are ever-evolving ways of life. Tribe is a social and political system that complies with domestic and native legal frameworks. Hence, tribe or tribal are not mentioned as labels or in oppositional relation with civilization/civilized but as local manifestations of Afghan social reality.

Other terms such as Islamic and as Islamist are also used with precise meanings. I argue that Islam as a faith system and as a political discourse are separate yet normally viewed as one in the mainstream literature –which is in fact the point from where widespread misunderstandings originates.

It is not the faith system that I tend to problematize but the political Islam as a discourse (and practice) leading to the establishment of, for example, the Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The words, Islamic and Islamist, thus are used only to describe the political and the politics of Islam as a doctrine and as a discourse. This is where approaches such as poststructuralism challenge and

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problematize rationalist representations and labels such as Islamic fundamentalism, religious extremism, and terrorism.

Much has been said about these terms in critical and poststructuralist literature since 9/11 in the same way as other political notions such as state and sovereignty are problematized and a further critical evaluation of these words and phrases is beyond the central theme of this dissertation. Just to mention it though, in accordance with the tenets of poststructuralist thought, I also disagree with the usage of such expressions and do not understand them as religious, instead conceptualize them as political and see terrorism as political violence.

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1 Theory, Methodology, and the Discourses of International State-building

[K]nowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting (Foucault &

Rabinow, 1984, p. 88).

[T]he agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not supposed to know (Foucault, 1978, p. 62).

1.1 Introduction

¹⁰

This chapter sets out the theoretical and methodological sketch to understand and offer a critical and alternative understanding of the US WoT and state- building discourses (and practices) in Afghanistan. The discipline of International Relations (IR) has predominantly engaged with rationalist approaches to understand and analyse global political space and time.

Ever since its emergence at the end of World War I, IR has evolved and transformed into many ways resulting in a large body of knowledge both in terms of academic theoretical and policy-oriented literature. The Great Debates of 1930s and 1940s between realists and idealists had left out the questions of epistemology (Smith, et al., 2008) and the field has had remained largely positivist during its first decades and had revolved around debates of positivism. In mid-1960s, the debate on methodology left ontology and epistemology aside. Another debate came during late 1960s which was concerned with induction/deduction, i.e., whether inquiry was carried out through observation or by theory, that, again, was a methodological debate (Ibid., p. 33).

However, because of various global changes such as the formation of alliances, the rise of liberal capitalism, the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ending the Cold War and the third wave of democratization both mainstream approaches like realism and liberalism as well as Marxist frameworks encountered ontological and epistemological challenges in understanding, explaining, and (re)interpreting international

10 Some parts of the theory and methodology sections are already published in the peer- reviewed Insight Turkey journal. For more, see (Sahill, 2019).

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politics. At the peak of the academic crisis, reflectivist approaches provided an alternative and questioned positivist and rationalist theories and strategies of analysing global politics. Despite that, until now the field of IR remains largely positivist and Western but the reflectivist turn has succeeded in revealing cracks and inconsistencies at both theoretical and empirical fronts.

Moreover, the world during the last decade of the 20^th century and in the 21^st century has become further complex and cannot be understood in oversimplified Cartesian ways. Given the intricacies of Afghanistan after 2001, this dissertation finds anti-positivist and reflectivist strategies more suitable to not only reveal the inconsistencies and discrepancies in Afghan state-building processes but also to provide alternative and critical understanding and perspective. That said, this chapter is organised around four sections.

First, I offer a brief critique of mainstream approaches illustrating why rationalist and positivist approaches may fall short of understanding the ever- changing situation in Afghanistan and how can poststructuralism serve as a suitable theoretical framework for this research work. Then I move to explore the ontological and epistemological contours of the dissertation and after I present a brief introduction of poststructuralism as a theoretical agenda, I discuss the notion of discourse and my understanding of it within the confines of this dissertation.

The next section of the chapter outlines the methodological framework of the dissertation and discusses the method, text-delimiting models used and a note on the referencing and footnotes in this research work. The fourth section of the chapter first discusses and critically assesses contemporary (international) state-building discourses and practices of intervention. Then a detailed part of the discussion is devoted to the transformation of state- building discourses in the 21^st century. Afterwards, I delineate the liberal- realist understanding of state fragility, weakness, or failure.

The remaining part of the fourth section, contextualizes the (re)birth of what I call a novel discourse of state-building vis-à-vis the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and concludes with its detrimental results. Here I also clarify the usage of the term state-building in the dissertation. The last portion augments the

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theoretical underpinnings of the dissertation outlined in the previous segments of the chapter.

1.2 Theoretical agenda: the symbiosis of ontology and epistemology within the confines of discourse

This dissertation scrutinizes the WoT and post-2001 Afghanistan state- building discourses through a Foucauldian poststructuralist theoretical framework because, first, rationalist and positivist approaches are reductionist and veil important phenomena by not paying attention to the detail.

A mainstream theoretical approach, as Richmond (2008) claims, “repeats and tests the narrow parameters of reductionist and parsimonious orthodoxies in liberal institutional settings,” and does not look for “new areas of understanding not determined by pre-existing conventions” (pp. 134-135). For example, a bulk of literature available on the concepts and practices of conflict management, post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding and state-building provides a liberal view of what the problem is and how to solve it.

Although I offer a comprehensive, critical literature review of the international state-building discourses later in this chapter that will serve as a supporting pillar to the theoretical section, just to mention it briefly here, various models (mostly implemented by international organizations like the UN, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU) etc.) delineate the importance of building peace in conflict affected societies. Many of such studies (Zoellick, 2009; Fukuyama, 2004; OECD, 2008;

OECD, 2009; Ghani & Lockhart, 2009; Pease, 2007) in the post-“end of history”

era are based on the norms and values of the West (Chandler & Sisk, 2013).

In this regard, policy tools and some studies on state-building explain the

“theory and practice” (Hehir & Robinson, 2007) of transposition of socio- political and socio-economic makeup of a war-wrecked country (Benedek, et al., 2011).

The practices of post-Cold War state-building aim for (re)constructing a society on liberal democratic lines (Sisk, 2013), thus trying to make it synchronized with the West.

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In the case of Afghanistan, efforts of international community after Bonn Process in 2001 clearly demonstrate the implementation of the liberal model to (re)construct and rehabilitate the society (Edwards, 2010). The poststructuralist approaches in IR, on the contrary:

indicate that knowledge is discursively produced and reproduced, rather than objective, and that discourses of power and truth merely represent hegemony and interests, rather than neutral, value-free and universal theories. They view liberal–realism as ‘primitive positivism’ which disguises the fact that power and knowledge are intricately entwined, as are theory and practice (Richmond, 2008, pp. 137-138).

Second, a fundamental issue with most of the literature on post-9/11 Afghanistan is that it constructs, presents, and represents it as a problem and not only suggests a solution but provides justification and legitimacy to the US and its allies’ actions there. The discourse and practice of “fixing ailing”

states first require the construction of a problem that is necessary to legitimize intervention for its solution.

In the words of Cox (1981), the problem-solving approach “takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions” (p. 128) without questioning accompanying inconsistencies, limitations, and contradictions in the making of such world. In a similar way, after 9/11, Afghanistan was taken as an expanding and enlarging problem threatening the world therefore it was needed to be solved by an international coalition.

Finally, the kinds of aforementioned rationalist approaches are theoretically unsatisfactory and inadequate. As Blanco (2012) argues, the problematizations of such works are “often shallow” as they, more or less, focus on construction of peace in a society through “problem-solving” strategies and exercises of power. Additionally, from a Foucauldian viewpoint, the practical use of liberal state-building conceptual tools and models seems like a complex amalgam of both coercive and disciplinary technologies of power (Foucault, 1991).

Liberal approaches view post-conflict societies through the ideals that were constructed, formed, and grown through decades (and even centuries) thus

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shaping the liberal world. Such normalizational state-building viewpoints are practiced using various technologies of power completely ignoring the context in which any society (and in this dissertation’s case, Afghanistan) dwelt or presently exists.

Thus, I argue that the shallowness and undertheorized approaches may not explain the socio-cultural characteristics and consequences of international discourse and practice of WoT and the (re)building of Afghanistan. In addition, it is seen that in the case of failures, the blame-game on the international stage regarding the policy and the use of polemics (Foucault, 2002, pp. 239- 297) on academic-analytical levels not only fall short of serving the problem- solving purpose but also further complicate the entire discourse and apparatus of state-building.

1.2.1 Ontological and epistemological profile

While doing research, every researcher encounters some ontological choices and epistemological ways of how to arrive at the social reality or alternatively, what are the modes of knowing, understanding, and explaining various representations of the social reality which according to post-positivist or anti- positivist perspectives does not exist a priori but is rather constructed by the continuous imposition of meaning through discourse.

Ontology in its precise form is “the study of being and existence”

(Bhattacherjee, 2012, p. 7), and in social sciences, ontology deals with assumptions of how one sees the world. In other words, what is the nature and what are the basic elements that make up the social world? (Halperin &

Heath, 2012). Historically, it was Aristotle who separated theology from ontology and universal science in his work Metaphysics (Bhattacherjee, 2012, p. 7).

The challenges Afghanistan is encountering are constructed as problems through predominantly liberal lenses of analysis. These perspectives make both the state-building discourse(s) and the practices Western-centric and are not sufficient in understanding Afghanistan and exploring its complexities. In his critique of realist and liberal ontologies and epistemologies on peace, Richmond argues:

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a Western meta-narrative of ‘timeless wisdom’ represents war and violence as an inevitable aspect of political actors’ interactions, and tends to be extremely conservative in its representation of peace, though it also acknowledges that a normative framework for peace exists. However, the way realism is deployed in IR and in the policy, world more generally accepts security as the main priority before all other objectives can be seriously addressed. Post-structuralists would argue that this means that the states’ obsession with security becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of surrealist proportions.

Similarly, this critique can be extended to liberal claims about states, internationalism and international society whereby such universal norms are represented as fact, but actually merely disguise the interests of powerful actors (2008, p. 139)

The noted argument makes it evident that realist and liberal –as well as other mainstream approaches in IR– ontological and epistemological positions are both essentialist and foundationalist (Smith, et al., 2008) which means that such an ontology (or ontologies) will fall short of understanding the problematic of Afghanistan’s security and democracy-building thus an alternative approach ought to be employed.

Whether the fragility of democracy is taken into account or whether militancy within Afghanistan or in a regional context is concerned, all the phenomena, can be better understood through anti-essentialist, anti-foundationalist ontological and epistemological standpoints as social world is multifaceted, multi-layered, complex and does not reveal itself to us but is constituted and constructed in the form of entities, such as institutions, classes etc. (Halperin

& Heath, 2012; Rosenberg, 2008; Sheehy, 2003).

Put differently, social reality and the social subject are constructed through complex processes that are influenced by and are closely linked to the circumstances and phenomena of the society where the subject is living (Bryant, 2011). It means that socio-cultural forces, socio-economic and socio- political conditions of a society directly influence the making of a subject and social reality. For example, when Foucault argues that productive power is used to discipline individuals to normalize them as subjects (1991), he considers the functions of various institutions like prison, schools, and

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universities. It shows how social conditions, structures, institutions, and power relations are involved in the construction of modern subjects.

Comprehending it from this perspective make ontology and epistemology mutually constitutive which means that the way we look at the social world consequently impacts and influences our conceptualization of it. By employing an anti-foundationalist epistemology “the possibility of building knowledge on, or around, apparently permanent categories or essences” is problematized and questioned that leads to the subversion of essence and meaning. That is how and when:

Political analysis becomes a question of examining the unevenness, and the relative permanence, of certain ensembles of meaning.

According to an anti-foundationalism perspective, there are no foundations to rely upon for an understanding of the world. Thus, socio-political phenomena must be understood by looking at the way in which actors, objects, and politics are constructed within a discourse (Sayyid & Zac, 1998, 2007, p. 250).

The anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist epistemology and ontology reject the possibility of a given or valid “truth” about the world (Renner, 2014, p. 265), suggesting that “truth is not discovered” and that “the analysis of political processes cannot rely on categories which are prior to or ‘outside’

the process itself” (Sayyid & Zac, [1998] 2007, pp. 250-51). It means, there is no fixed, selfish human nature through which “control” over others is sought (Morgenthau, 1978, p. 13) or there is no Will of God responsible for specific processes occurring or continuing.

Rejection of “given truth” about social and political world, however, does not equate with negation of materiality of the world because in that case it will be an idealist –not a poststructuralist– assumption. To clarify further, Laclau and Mouffe’s famous and widely quoted example suits well here:

an earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather