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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 state-building 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, is 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. The façade of state survival and political order was a performative act, 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"--

In 2014, while the international military could support and justify their exit strategy by citing a fragile peace at the national level, at the local level competition over resources led to increasing violence and instability. Nowhere is this more visible than Afghanistan's extractive industry where powerful individuals and networks vie for access and control of valuable resources. Donors such as the US military have attempted to partner with these sub-national actors in a bid to manage conflict and ensure state stability/order (or more accurately, the facade of stability). The international assistance financially empowered key regional commanders; this enabled the latter to consolidate power within the state at sub-national level. Inadvertently, this approach reinforced the Taliban's own strategy of generating local revenue from the drug/extractive economies. linking the different levels of economic and violent interaction (local, sub-national, national, and international), detailed analysis of key resources can help identify shifts in power relationships within and between networks. Identifying who controls commodities and exchange, as well as the means of violence that determine the distribution of profits, can shed light on trends in the relationship between war economies, conflict onset and persistence, and even state (in)stability