The Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (1996-2001) : ‘war-making and state-making’ as an insurgency strategy / Yaqub Ibrahimi.

Abstract

This paper examines the institutional and functional aspects of the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). The Taliban's coercive approach and its entire reliance on "war-making" to "state-making" shows the difficulty of the transformation of an insurgent group into a state structure. The Taliban was primarily capable of establishing a two-track system of governance. However, the assessment of the IEA's institutional and functional capabilities shows that the military-political organization formed by the Taliban lacked statehood in all three areas of legitimacy, authority and capacity.