ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a very different manifestation of the strategic conundrum of confronting armed groups. In Afghanistan and Iraq, United States (US)-led coalitions intervened to change regimes, before handing power to reconstituted host governments. The US deemed that al-Qaeda, a terrorist group with a pan-Islamist and anti-Western ideology, had been helped in carrying out the 9/11 attacks by the Taliban, a ruthlessly puritanical but essentially local movement. The US military intervention after 9/11 reversed this outcome, backing the Northern Alliance to rout the Taliban. The Coalition came to rely on a policy of legitimising some armed groups and fighting others. The roots of this policy lay in the Coalition Provisional Authority, which governed Iraq immediately after the invasion. The state-building interventions of the post-9/11 era reflected a particular set of circumstances and, with hindsight, unrealistic US expectations.
