The Fall of Kabul Was a Century in the Making

What the West mistook for collapse was actually a return to the fractured reality beneath a failing state

In the summer of 2021, the world watched Kabul fall—again. Western headlines were full of shock. Commentators asked how a twenty-year state-building project, supported by the world’s richest nations, had unravelled in just eleven days. But the collapse was not sudden. Nor was it unprecedented. Afghanistan has long existed in a state of perpetual collapse. Because the truth, unpalatable though it may be, is this: the Afghanistan state was never built to last.

What we call “Afghanistan” today was never a nation-state in the way European political maps like to imagine. Its borders were drawn by unfamiliar administrators. Its central government forged by foreign powers. And its ruling class—almost exclusively urban, elite, and ethnically Pashtun—was propped up again and again by imperial design. What we are witnessing is not the failure of Afghanistan. It is the failure of an imposed idea of Afghanistan—a top-down, Kabul-centric project that never truly reflected the mosaic of identities, languages, loyalties, and sovereignties that exist within its borders.

To understand this, one has to return not to 2001 or 1996 or even 1979, but to the 19th century, when British imperial interests collided with the geography of Central Asia. Afghanistan was not conquered in the same way India or Egypt were, but it was contained. The British didn’t seek to colonize Kabul so much as to control it—or rather, to ensure no one else did. Afghanistan became a buffer, a bulwark against Russian expansion. And to keep the peace, the British sought a ruler who could centralize power in a country that had never been truly centralized.

That man was Abdur Rahman Khan, known to some as the Iron Emir. He was brutal but effective. Armed with British subsidies and weaponry, he launched a savage campaign of internal conquest. Hazaras, one of the largest ethnic groups in the country, were massacred. Nuristanis, an Indo-Iranian ethnic group native to the Nuristan Province, were forcibly converted. Tajik communities, a Persian-speaking Eastern Iranian group of people native to the land, were violently suppressed and displaced. Whole regions were resettled with loyalists. In the name of “unification,” diversity was punished. And thus, a state was born—not through consensus, but through coercion.

In return for each new territory concession or border agreement, Khan secured increased British funding. His rule became transactional—every external line accepted was met with internal repression, and every border drawn came with another bag of blood-stained coins.

But the coercion didn’t end there. The cultural architecture of the Afghan state was also engineered from above. As a British protectorate, Afghanistan’s foreign affairs were controlled by Britain, while its internal governance was left to the ruling elite. Persian, the language of poetry, administration, and intellectual life for centuries, was pushed to the margins. In its place, Pashto was elevated as the symbol of Afghan nationalism. A new capital, Kabul, was styled as the seat of legitimacy. And a singular Afghan identity was manufactured to fit the logic of the state.

This was not simply an Afghan invention. It mirrored British colonial ways of seeing. Mountstuart Elphinstone, the first British envoy tasked with documenting and mapping the region, never even reached Kabul. Yet his observations—written from the fringes—were later published in a book confidently titled An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul. The authority he claimed over the country was based not on immersion, but on a method of knowing common to empire: distant, selective, and filtered through the lens of elite informants. As historian Shah Mahmoud Hanifi has noted, “Elphinstone’s colonial methods of knowing and engaging the country through Kabul and Pashtuns were adopted by both Afghan rulers and international actors in the 20th and 21st centuries.” That worldview persisted through Soviet interventions, through American occupation, through NGO reports and UN briefings that rarely ventured far from Kabul or far beyond the Pashtun narrative. The Afghan state, in this telling, was Kabul. And Kabul was the state.

Yet much of Afghanistan exists outside that frame. The Persianate traditions that shaped cities like Herat, Balkh, Kabul, and many others. The Turkic influences of the northern provinces and the Shia communities of the central highlands have all been repeatedly excluded from the image of what Afghanistan is supposed to be. When aid arrived, it arrived in Pashto-speaking hands. When appointments were made, they were often ethnically aligned. When peace talks happened, they revolved around men with guns, not the pluralities of language, belief, and memory that make up Afghanistan’s deeper history.

This is why the state collapses so easily: the foundation was never strong. The scaffolding was built not on local insights or ethnic inclusion, but on imposed centralization. A country stitched together to serve an empire cannot hold the weight of modern aspirations.

The Taliban’s rise did not create a crisis of representation—it revealed one. What we see now is not the exception, but the logical outcome of a political geography drawn for strategic convenience and maintained through violence. The Afghan state was never designed to work for its people, and certainly not for all of them.

If there is a future, it won’t be found in resuscitating what has already failed. Afghanistan, in its current form, does not work—and will never work—for everyone.

Before we can discuss solutions, we need far more writing, far more research, and far more truth-telling about what Afghanistan really is and what it has been. The country’s history has too often been written by those who sought to rule it, map it, or manage it. Until we confront that history on its own terms—not Kabul’s terms, not the West’s terms—we are not building peace. We’re just negotiating over the furniture in a house with no foundation.

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