How Washington’s “warlord” myth helped bring back the Taliban

On 27 November, just blocks from the White House, an Afghan evacuee named Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly opened fire on two U.S. National Guard soldiers on duty.  One of them, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, has since died; her colleague, Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remains in critical condition.  Lakanwal had previously worked with a U.S.-backed paramilitary unit and later entered the United States under Operation Allies Welcome after Kabul fell.  His alleged crime is his alone, but his trajectory — from US-backed unit to evacuee — points back to the kinds of political and security structures Washington helped build during the war.

Within hours, politicians and pundits were blaming vetting failures and demanding a broad crackdown on Afghan immigration and a freeze on new visas. The story quickly became another argument about “dangerous Afghans” versus “worthy allies,” replaying a familiar script from the war itself.

What is missing from this debate is the same thing that was missing during two decades of intervention in Afghanistan: a willingness to look honestly at the political structures and ethnic projects that Washington helped build, and at the myths it chose to believe.

For nearly twenty years, Western governments let themselves be guided by a narrow Afghan elite — mostly Pashtun technocrats and power brokers — who sold a simple story about “modern reformers versus warlords.” That story did more than distort reality. It helped dismantle the only forces that had ever successfully resisted the Taliban and cleared the way for the restoration of an ethnically dominated regime, now reborn as the “Islamic Emirate.”

I write this not as an outside analyst, but as someone who served in senior positions in the Afghan government and later worked with the United Nations in Afghanistan. From that vantage point, the fall of the Republic was not a sudden collapse. It was the predictable end of a political project Washington endorsed and funded.

 The “warlord” as a political weapon

From about 2003 onward, the new Afghan elite promoted a relentless narrative: Afghanistan’s main obstacle to modern state-building was the “warlords” — above all, the former mujahedin commanders who had resisted both the Soviets and the first Taliban emirate. Many of the loudest voices were expatriates who had returned from Western capitals and quickly occupied key posts in Kabul as ministers, advisers and ambassadors. A significant share were Pashtun, and their agenda went beyond rule of law.

They framed Tajik and other non-Pashtun leaders — especially those associated with the Northern Alliance — as the principal “spoilers.” The message to Western donors was seductive: support us, the clean technocrats, and we will deal with them, the corrupt strongmen.

The “warlord” label did three things at once. It erased historical legitimacy by reducing the 1990s resistance, which had prevented Afghanistan from becoming a fully unified jihadist sanctuary, to a caricature of criminality. It cleared the field for a narrow elite, allowing a small circle of mostly Pashtun technocrats to present themselves as the only “civilized” partners and monopolize access to donors and key ministries. And it disarmed the only real counterweight to the Taliban, because any independent security capacity outside Kabul’s direct control could now be condemned as “warlordism” and delegitimized by donors.

 Abuses by mujahedin factions were real and serious. The problem is that “accountability” was applied selectively: it was used above all to weaken non-Pashtun resistance networks, not to build an impartial system where all armed actors — including those tied to foreign intelligence services or the presidency — were subject to the same rules. 

From state-building to soft ethnocracy

On paper, post-2001 Afghanistan was rebuilt as a democracy. In practice, the state operated much closer to what scholars call an ethnocracy: a system where one ethnic group dominates key institutions while others are managed through token representation.

Inside ministries in Kabul, it was common to hear, in private, an assumption that Pashtuns had a natural claim to rule — whether under the banner of the Republic or the Emirate. Many Pashtun politicians within the Republic saw the post-2001 order as a temporary disturbance in the historical hierarchy. The aim was to recentralize power in a Pashtun-led center, with Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and others relegated to junior roles. On the other side of the front line, the Taliban expressed the same ambition more bluntly: a Pashtun-dominated Islamic Emirate with limited space for real power-sharing.

That shared assumption shaped everything from security appointments to negotiations in Doha. And the “warlord” narrative became the bridge between these two worlds. By delegitimizing non-Pashtun power centers — especially those rooted in the anti-Taliban resistance — it cleared the path for a new monopoly over the state, whether under a republican or an Islamist banner.

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How Washington helped clear the path

Western governments were not forced into this framework; they welcomed it. Under pressure to show progress, diplomats and donors gravitated toward a story that fit their own preferences: English-speaking, Western-educated technocrats promising reform on one side; rough local power-brokers on the other. The result was a series of choices that, taken together, systematically weakened Afghanistan’s pluralism.

Centralisation policies celebrated as “modern state-building” often translated in practice into concentrating power in the hands of one ethnic network. Security reforms aimed at dismantling “warlord” structures often hit hardest those forces that were most committed to resisting the Taliban, while leaving other militias and intelligence-linked units largely intact. Political deals prioritized personal alliances with presidents and palace circles over genuine balancing between regions and communities.

No individual symbolised this convergence of Western expectations and Pashtun-centric state-building more than US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. Many Afghans, especially from non-Pashtun communities, saw his approach — and the Doha process that sidelined many of the Republic’s non-Pashtun constituencies — as one more iteration of the same project: speak the language of “peace” and “reform,” but in practice treat a narrow Pashtun-led bargain with the Taliban as the natural endpoint of the war.

When the Taliban began their rapid advance in 2021, many of the actors with both the motivation and capacity to resist had spent years being told — by their own government and its international backers — that they were illegitimate by definition. The outcome should not have been surprising.

A warning from Washington

Seen from this history, the shooting near the White House is more than a tragic crime. Lakanwal appears to have been part of the paramilitary structures that Washington itself cultivated during the war and then abruptly abandoned during the rushed evacuation. He also comes from the same overwhelmingly Pashtun milieu that US policy consistently privileged — from palace technocrats to Doha negotiators to CIA-linked units. Yet the immediate response has been to shift attention away from those choices and toward a broad suspicion of Afghan evacuees as a group.

This mirrors what happened inside Afghanistan: Washington built relationships with selected elites and armed actors, refused to scrutinise the deeper political projects they served, and then swung from uncritical trust to blanket mistrust when things went wrong.

The issue is not that Afghans — or Pashtuns — are “double-faced.” The issue is that US policy has repeatedly refused to treat Afghan politics as politics: with competing ethnic projects, interests and power struggles that must be managed openly. Instead, it has relied on moralized categories — reformers versus warlords, allies versus others — that flatter certain partners and obscure the real distribution of power.

Lessons for future policy

 If Western policymakers want to avoid repeating this pattern — in Afghanistan or elsewhere — three lessons are crucial. First, always ask who benefits from the narrative: when local partners tell you that one set of actors are “the problem,” look closely at whose authority is expanded if you accept that framing. Second, regulate power rather than wishing it away: strong local actors cannot simply be erased because donors dislike them; they need to be brought under transparent, collectively accepted rules. Third, treat ethnic monopoly as a red flag, not a cultural fact: when one group claims a natural right to dominate the state, any political order built on that assumption will be unstable. 

The Republic that fell in August 2021 was not just a corrupt government. It was a political experiment built on the comforting myth that Afghanistan could be stabilized by empowering one narrow segment of society and delegitimising those who had actually resisted the Taliban.

Afghans are now paying the price for that illusion. The least Washington can do is finally confront the role its own narratives — including the warlord myth — played in bringing us to this point.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.