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This book maps out how political networks and centres of power,
engaged in patronage, corruption, and illegality, effectively
constituted the Afghan state, often with the complicity of the
U.S.-led military intervention and the internationally directed
statebuilding project. It argues that politics and statehood in
Afghanistan, in particular in the last two decades, including the
ultimate collapse of the government in August 2021, are best
understood in terms of the dynamics of internal political networks,
through which warlords and patronage networks came to capture and
control key sectors within the state and economy, including mining,
banking, and illicit drugs as well as elections and political
processes. Networked politics emerged as the dominant mode of
governance that further transformed and consolidated Afghanistan
into a networked state, with the state institutions and structures
functioning as the principal "marketplace" for political networks'
bargains and rent-seeking. The facade of state survival and
fragmented political order was a performative act, and the book
contends, sustained through massive international military spending
and development aid, obscuring the reality of resource
redistribution among key networked elites and their supporters.
Overall, the book offers a way to explain what it was that the
international community and the Afghan elites in power got so wrong
that brought Afghanistan full circle and the Taliban back to power.
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