Is Afghanistan a Failed State

Abstract

The term failed state is a “currently fashionable notion” (Chomsky, 2006) in International Relations, even though it is widely contested. There are two arguments to be made for its current importance. First of all, Daniel Thurer (1999) argues that the responsibility for the failing of a state is not just within that state but originates for many states primarily in the Cold War era, which thus makes the international community co-responsible. Secondly, failed states have severely negative impacts on the international community, on their region and foremost on their citizens, making its analysis so important for policy-makers. On the international level, failed states can facilitate the proliferation of illicit drugs and arms, they can exacerbate the spread of diseases by not being able to contain the spread within their own borders and they can be a breeding-ground for terrorism, to which I will come back in the next section; on the regional level they erode stability and lead to conflict and on the domestic level they can lead to the insecurity of each citizen (Ottaway, 2004, p. 1). This essay will thus try to elucidate some of the most important arguments made by the pro-failed state advocates and by the anti-failed state advocates. The former see in the notion a possible way to operationalise state’s capabilities into a form which allows predictions for future political disasters, while the latter attack already at the level of conceptualisation, as they believe the notion ‘failed state’ to be indiscriminate of state particularities and a potential slippery slope for interventionism. I will conclude the first section by arguing that a compromise could be to substitute the notion failed state by the notion weak state. In my second section, I will then apply this terminology to Afghanistan.