Building and Rebuilding Afghanistan’s Army: An Historical Perspective

This article discusses the serial efforts made by Afghan rulers and governments, between the early nineteenth century and the present, to build modern regular armies and analyzes the reasons for the repeated failure of these efforts. Its context is the urgency of the current army reform programme being undertaken by the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in Afghanistan, which constitutes a key exit strategy for Western forces. The article situates the historical failure of military reform within the framework of a broader failure of state-building, and locates a central difficulty in successive Afghan governments’ strategies towards tribal power.