Announcements of an impending victory over the Taliban have been repeated ad nauseam since the Allied invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, particularly after the Presidential elections of 2004, which were said to have marked the "moral and psychological defeat of the Taliban." In moments of triumphalism, some commentators claimed that "reconstruction and development" had won over the population, despite much criticism of the meagre distribution of aid, the lack of "nation-building" and corruption among Kabul's elite. In March 2006, both Afghan and American officials were still claiming, just...

Warlords, namely charismatic military leaders who exploit the weakness of central authorities to seize control of and autonomously rule a sub-national area, have earned much notoriety in recent years on account of the excesses of civil wars in Liberia, Somalia and Afghanistan. But notwithstanding their bad reputation, warlords have often participated in state formation. In Empires of Mud, Giustozzi analyses the dynamics of warlordism in Afghanistan within the context of such debates. He approaches this complex task by first analysing aspects of the Afghan environment that might have been...

In today's dominant discourse of liberal interventionism, the role of coercion and the monopoly of violence have been neglected, argues Antonio Giustozzi, an analyst justly renowned for his research and writing on the Taliban. It is widely assumed that a functional, liberal state can emerge out of a political settlement between warring parties based on political inclusiveness and a social contract, which involves pressuring political actors to reach a deal. But the post-Cold war experience of such deals has been so disappointing that a re-examination of these 'certainties' is warranted....

Policing is not a popular topic of serious scholarly research. Although a vast literature on policing exists, it is mostly technical in nature and only rarely analytical. Even the police forces of Western Europe and North America have rarely been investigated in depth as far as their history and functioning goes. In particular, the politics of policing, its political economy, have been largely neglected.
This book is a rare in-depth study of a police force in a developing country which is also undergoing a bitter internal conflict, further to the post-2001 external intervention in...

This book is the first full length political history of the Afghan Army, and as such is unparalleled in the range and depth of its analysis of this vitally important institution. Giustozzi locates the Army's development within the wider context of state-building in Afghanistan. His volume includes a brief survey of the period to 1953, but focuses mainly on subsequent developments, over the last four decades, as the officer corps began to be politicised and later factionalised, especially during the Russian-backed regime of the Communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which...

This volume is an historical survey of advisory and mentoring missions from the 1920s onwards, starting from the Soviet missions to the Kuomintang and ending with the mission to Iraq. It focuses on Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and after 2001, but also deals with virtually every single advisory mission from the 1920s on-wards, whether involving 'Eastern Bloc' countries or Western ones. The sections on Afghanistan are based on new research, while the sections covering other cases of advisory/mentoring missions are based on the existing literature. The authors highlight how large...