The spatial antecedents for drone governance in Afghanistan

Abstract

This paper problematizes the use of surveillance technologies such as drones for security governance in Afghanistan by foregrounding the spatial conditions of the possibility of such measures. How did the security architecture in Afghanistan become so fragmented to require technologies such as drones as extensions of the government security surveillance apparatus to govern ungoverned space? While much literature on drones considers how drones rewrite spaces in their theaters of operation, it is also true that space is rewritten to enact governance-by-drone in the first place. In Afghanistan, historical shifts in the global political economy resulted in spatially fragmented security architecture, thus laying the spatial pre-conditions for security governance-by-drone. This paper brings together debates on geopolitics and geoeconomics with those of roll-back, roll-out, and roll-over neoliberalism to construct a genealogy of spatial reconfiguration in Afghanistan. It begins by exploring earlier geopolitical forms of statecraft in Afghanistan, which focused on augmenting state power through large-scale development projects. It then moves on to show how these were replaced by geoeconomic forms of statecraft that emphasized the rolling back of government involvement, heavy privatization, and foreign investment, resulting in deeply fragmented security architecture. Finally, neoliberalism's roll-out and roll-over phases correlate with reviving geopolitical forms of statecraft aimed at territorial consolidation. The new geopolitical, however, is a form of statecraft that tends toward territorial power through compensatory technological means like drones as opposed to meaningful development. Rulership was leaning toward this new authoritarian, technocratic model well before the capture of these technologies by the Taliban after its transition to power following the 2021 US retreat.

Introduction

The story of drone use for policing purposes in Afghanistan goes like this: First, during its decades-long occupation, the United States used drones in its counter-terrorism operations against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. General Atomics, a pioneer company in the military drone industry, advertise that their drones are able to target “over the horizon” to enact “wide-area surveillance … [and] real-time situational awareness anywhere in the world—day or night” (General Atomics, 2022). Drones ultimately represent auxiliary technologies to governmental reach and surveillance; they symbolize the triumph over the obstacles of geography. As remotely piloted aircraft that are equipped with sensors, cameras, and even weapons, drones enabled the US to reach terrorists who would “take refuge in remote tribal regions … hide in caves and walled compounds … [and] train in empty deserts and rugged mountains” (Obama, 2013). Drones worked because, as described by former President Obama in his famous “Drone Speech” at Northwestern University, terrorists were “hid[ing] in some of the most distant and unforgiving places on earth” (Obama, 2013). The US could not rely on law enforcement in “territories that have no functioning police or security services—and indeed, have no functioning law” (Obama, 2013), so drones represented the tool of choice for surveillance and counterterrorism operations.

Drones are not only valuable for warfare, but as policing technologies they enable “law enforcement” and “border enforcement” (General Atomics, 2022). These qualities of drones would come in handy for the Afghan government itself: around the same time as Obama’s speech, the New York Times reported that the US was giving the Afghans their own fleet of drones (Ahmed, 2013). Former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai announced that the US “will train Afghans to fly them, use them, and maintain them” (Ahmed, 2013). After a $174 million investment in the program, surveillance technologies such as drones and biometrics were beginning to get integrated into the government's permanent security apparatus. The Afghan National Army (ANA) fielded its first ScanEagle surveillance drone in March 2016 for use in the Shorab district of the Helmand province (DoD, 2016). The ANA continued to use drones in the Helmand Province, considered one of Afghanistan’s “most dangerous province[s]” (Anderson, 2015) for surveillance and to support targeting efforts, eventually scaling this security model to cover several other rural areas (DoD, 2017).

Again, drones worked because certain territories have “no functioning police or security services—and indeed, have no functioning law” (Obama, 2013). In other words, certain territories were effectively “ungoverned.” According to RAND's Ungoverned Territories report, territories are considered ungoverned in so far as they exhibit low levels of state penetration into society, the state's monopoly on the use of force is diminished, the state lacks control over its borders, and the state is subject to external intervention by other states (Rabasa et al., 2007: 3). ¹ One of the most evident indicators of state penetration is the extension of physical infrastructure as well as formal economic activity (Rabasa et al., 2007). Drone-governed territories often lacked these markers.

Since then, the security apparatus, complete with its drones and other surveillance technologies, has been captured by the Taliban as part of its government takeover following the 2021 US retreat. According to the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism’s (ICCT) policy brief on the Taliban’s so-called spoils of war, such devices will be decisive in the Taliban’s ability to “consolidate their control over territory” as “they are not only used to fight adversaries, but also to maintain order as the now de-facto government” (Mehra et al., 2022: 11, 8). Indeed, just one month after the government takeover, the Taliban had already begun to employ armed drone units to track and take down select targets in certain remote, hard-to-reach areas (Qazizai, 2021).

In an effort to look beyond a narrative of drone governance in Afghanistan that sees the drone as a technological hand-me-down from regime to regime, this paper problematizes the use of drones for extended security governance by foregrounding the spatial conditions of the possibility of drone governance in Afghanistan. Who is using these technologies matters less than what particular problem these technologies address in Afghanistan in the first place. The question is, how did the security architecture in Afghanistan become so fragmented, and certain spaces be left so ungoverned, so as to require drones as extensions of the Afghan government's surveillance apparatus to govern ungoverned space? If one of the most evident indicators of state penetration is the extension of physical infrastructure as well as formal, as opposed to informal, economic activity, then a study into the historical patterns that result in these markers is warranted.

Even as some spaces are naturalized as “remote space” to be governed remotely in Afghanistan, this paper contends that remote space for which drones appear as the best governance technologies has a distinct genealogy that has its roots in the first wave of neoliberal restructuring of the global economy. This paper examines the effect of processes of “roll-back, roll-out, and roll-over” neoliberalization as articulated by Peck and Theodore (2019) on spatial geographies in Afghanistan as a means of explaining the contemporary practice of security governance via drone in Afghanistan's remote and peripheral areas.

This paper argues that although there was a point in time when Afghanistan began experimenting with holistic, regionally integrated models of development which would augment the security architecture throughout the country, the trajectory of that moment would never reach its full potential. This model was disrupted not only by the eruption of conflict but also due to campaigns led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and backed by international donors to “roll back” and privatize government functions like infrastructure-building and security-provision, ultimately resulting in the proliferation of “ungoverned territories” (Rabasa et al., 2007) and profoundly fragmented security architecture. That legacy of what has been called “roll-back” neoliberalism relies on the further incursion of private actors and compensatory solutions like drones to address this problem as agents of “roll-out” neoliberalism. Finally, just as drones are compensatory roll-out solutions to the spatial crises of roll-back neoliberalism, which represented a moment of geoeconomic rationality, they are also part of a “roll-over” moment, which is marked by the return of authoritarian forms of governance globally, whereby older geopolitical concerns toward territorial consolidation have been revived.

In situating the Taliban's authoritarian, technocratic, drone surveillance-based style of governance within the history of spatial reconfiguration that made such a style of governance possible, this paper overcomes narratives that frame this era as a “radical break” from the past. Such narratives position the Taliban of today as a militia that triumphed “against American forces of occupation, only to establish authoritarian regimes after the latter's departure” (Akyol, 2021). In that picture of events, the Taliban takeover finally puts an end to any goal of achieving a liberal democratic state in Afghanistan (Cho, 2022), marking the re-establishment of a brutal authoritarian regime (Olney, 2021; Verma, 2021). The US withdrawal period was a “world-shattering week that toppled the US Afghan client regime and brought [an era] to a historic close” (Peters, 2021: 1). However, the objective of this paper is to show that the new government exercises power enabled to it by historical continuities that have a distinctly spatial basis. Framing the Taliban's resumption of governance in terms of roll-over neoliberalism thus pushes back against those “epochal” accounts which fail to account for how the conditions of possibility for authoritarian models of government have long been forming in Afghanistan.

Besides engaging with those epochal narratives, this argument contributes to four sets of literature. First, this is the first application of the sociological concept of space as a constitutive feature of social relations to the question of the rise of drone-administered security governance in certain areas. To be sure, there are significant contributions to how drones rewrite spatial and thus social relations from above, or how drones function as an independent variable in the constitution of space. Parks (2017) argues that drones are engaged in “vertical mediation,” a process by which drones alter the world around them, affecting thought and behavior and ultimately rearranging space. Gusterson (2016) argues that drones tend to “respatialize war” by not only scrambling relations of distance, making them simultaneously more elongated and more compressed, but also, by erasing the once clear boundaries between the battlefield and civilian space (Gusterson, 2016: 47). Gregory (2017: 42) shows how the United States has used drone warfare in an “attempt to expand the legal perimeter of the battlefield.” All of these are examples of the spatial effects caused by a drone.

However, this paper argues that just as drones rewrite space in their theaters of operation, rearranging and reconfiguring social reality, it is also true that space has been rewritten for drone use in these theaters. Writing on humanitarian delivery drones, Peckham and Sinha (2019: 1206) argue that the use of these technologies to deliver health goods and services creates para-infrastructures in places where the state's reach is lacking, thus undermining historical “expectations of an even distribution of services across bounded sovereign spaces,” and further eroding the possibility of the establishment of an evenly distributed architecture. Drones not only can foreclose the possibility of evenly distributed state services through basic infrastructure but operate in space where such possibilities have historically been marginalized through continuous disinvestments and asymmetrical development. Though the authors examine humanitarian delivery drones and not military drones, Peckham and Sinha's (2019) larger theory of drones operating in historically produced underdeveloped space is reflected in Akhter's (2019) work on how drones operate in a world of “proliferated peripheries,” whereby peripheries are conceived as “colonial spaces because of their occupation by what Parks (2016) calls the ‘targeted class’” (Akhter, 2019: 65). Besides these aforementioned contributions, there is hardly much work that looks at the political-economic recalibrations of space that presuppose and facilitate a drone security regime.

Most work on the spatial format of military and surveillance drone space theorizes from the Agambian category of “exceptional space” and thus takes the space-making feature of the law, as opposed to the political economy, as its starting point for thinking about drone space. For instance, Mahmud (2010: 56) invokes Agambian categories in his characterization of the drone space of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) as a “zone where bodies and spaces are placed on the other side of universality, a moral and legal no man's land, where universality finds its spatial limits.” Other critical interventions are keen to show that actually, drone governance in the FATA “involves no simple suspension of the law but rather an operationalization of the violence that is inscribed within (rather than lying beyond) the law” (Gregory, 2017: 30). This paper takes inspiration from these theorizations of drone space as a historically produced category but takes geographic manifestations of shifts in the political economy as opposed to the law as the main category in the making of target-space.

Relatedly, this paper draws from and contributes to the rising tradition which investigates the political economy's role in space-making as the second set of literature. A canonical example of this kind of work is Lipton's (1977) theory of the “urban bias” or the asymmetrical development of socio-economic space within the boundaries of the territorial state characteristic of capitalist development. The administrative decisions that make states and markets biased toward the city in capitalism are the same processes that make remote spaces remote through consistent disinvestments as “private individuals [are] indirectly induced by administrative decisions and price distortions to transfer from countryside to town their own resources, thereby reducing the social (but increasing the private) rate of return upon those as well” (Lipton, 1977: 70). Another example is Paudel and Le Billon's (2020) concept of “geopolitical economies of reconstruction,” which the authors use to illustrate how capitalist imperatives shape post-disaster reconstruction processes which thus result in the recalibration of space in ways conducive to capitalist accumulation. Yet another example is found in Harvey's (2007) articulation of the “creative destruction” and “accumulation by dispossession” in which surplus capital overflows to new geographies to resolve the contradictions of over-accumulation in centers of surplus capital creation and in doing so destroy non-capitalist systems by naturalizing capitalist production (see Sparke, 2008). Finally, the concept of historically produced territory by political-economic activities is best articulated by Lee et al. (2018) in their discussion of how the recently escalated economic competition between the US and China through the US Trans-Pacific Partnership and China's One Belt, One Road Initiative results in the production of new dimensions of state territory and projections of power across these new scales of territory.

Third, this paper traces the production of drone space through Peck and Theodore's (2019) helpful schema of “roll-back,” “roll-out,” and recently, “roll-over neoliberalism,” which offers a generative theoretical framework that captures the relationship between the different mutations of neoliberalism overtime and its correlating regulatory and political expressions. Roll-back neoliberalism is a summary term for all the policies promoting the privatization of nearly all government functions, public disinvestments in holistic models of development, and security measures that emerged first in the Global North in the 1970s and 1980s and have since been exported to the Global South. These interventions produced certain crises, one of which was deepening socio-economic and spatial variegation. Roll-out neoliberalism describes the set of policies and practices that now address the outright failures and crises created by roll-back neoliberalism, but do so in ways organized by inherently neoliberal market rationality. The cost-effective, targeted, compensatory neoliberal solutions to crises caused by neoliberalism are now giving way to a third phase identified by Peck and Theodore as roll-over neoliberalism, which is a phase marked by the (re)turn toward political authoritarianism and reactionary politics (Peck and Theodore, 2019). As neoliberalization is a global phenomenon, its periodizations are identifiable in Afghan regulatory regimes over the years. My goal is to trace these manifestations of neoliberalism in Afghanistan, which resulted in a fragmented security infrastructure in which military drones represent a compensatory, roll-out intervention, and to situate the Taliban’s resurgence and Afghanistan’s “return” to authoritarian models of governance as part of a longer history of political-economic transformation.

Finally, this work deepens debates on the meanings and manifestations of geopolitics and geoeconomics by linking geoeconomic discourses to the “roll-back” and “roll-out” schema and arguing that the latest “roll-over” phase is marked by the revival of geopolitical discourses. This paper argues that while the periods of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism were defined by geoeconomic discourses of open economies, small governments, market-based solutions, and international economic interdependency for international security, older geopolitical ambitions of augmenting the central state's central control and territorial consolidation are revived as part of roll-over neoliberalism. In making such an argument, this work contributes to the dialogue started in Peck and Theodore's (2019) latest piece on the subject titled “Still Neoliberalism?” wherein the theorists attempt to articulate a relationship between the ever-evolving processes of neoliberalization, and the contemporary “reactionary forces that may be driving authoritarian (re)turns across the mutating cultural economy of neoliberalism” (Peck and Theodore, 2019: 248). This work contributes that not only is roll-back neoliberalism marked by the return of authoritarianism, but also by the return to militaristic geopolitical forms of governance concerned with strong borders and territorial consolidation.

It is important to note that while it is tempting to think of these phases of roll-back, roll-out, and roll-over neoliberalism as time periods, and I do so here to delineate the transforming policy regimes of neoliberal governance, they are better understood as “dialectically intertwined moments of ongoing regulatory transformation” (Sparke, 2018). The same is true for their correlative geostrategic discourses—geopolitics and geoeconomics are best understood less as distinct periods of statecraft but together as “dialectically entangled … geostrategic discourses … [that] share common drivers in capitalist tendencies and contradictions” (Sparke, 2018).

Structure and method

Illustrating the historically contingent conditions of drone space is a project that asks if the spatial configuration was ever in such a way that might anticipate a different form of security governance, and if so, what shifted its trajectory? For this case study on the creation of peripheral space that is governed by drones, I first consider the spatial configuration of Afghanistan's pre-neoliberal era, which I illustrate regarding the case of the Helmand Valley dam projects. I show how the geopolitical, territorially bounded state sought to augment its reach over its territory through such large-scale modernist development projects, which would geographically consolidate the country to bring to light the alternative trajectories for domestic security and governance that were latent in this era. The Helmand dam development project is a representative case study due to a stark historical contrast between the “international pariah” that Helmand represents today (McGeough, 2007) and the developmental hopes it once represented. Formal governance has failed to control Helmand, as evidenced by its continued status as one of the world’s largest opium-producing regions (BBC, 2021) and a hotbed for terrorist activity. Thus, it is hard to imagine that Helmand once hosted one of the country’s most ambitious modernization projects that were meant to extend the government’s reach through infrastructural development.

Next, I consider how neoliberal reforms in their roll-back phase rearranged space to facilitate the conditions for a governance style more inclined toward targeted interventions via drone. Geoeconomic discourses of the neoliberal political economy's capacity to overcome geopolitical problems permeated through these neoliberal reforms. Afghanistan's neoliberal roll-back moment saw increased foreign direct investment in urban centers such as Kabul, despite the government's hopefulness that international investment would naturally flow throughout the country. These investments typically required low capital commitments and could be withdrawn quickly, they often catered exclusively to the upper class. If they did feature more extensive capital commitments, then they typically required the protection of the security apparatus made up of primarily private defense firms, thus concentrating the provision of security within urban centers and among the upper classes. Here, we see the beginnings of spatial fragmentation in Afghanistan's security architecture.

Next was the roll-out period. The Afghan government addressed the apparent spatial crises created by roll-back disinvestments in an era of roll-out regulations that attempted to discipline the private security regime and para-security networks run by warlords in peripheral and remote spaces. ² The neoliberal roll-out aimed to address these issues through the establishment of compensatory governance initiatives such as Provincial Reconstruction, the failed re-regulation of the private security sector, and the use of compensatory technologies such as biometric systems and targeting drones to combat domestic insecurity in peripheries. The patchwork nature of interventions further exacerbated asymmetry in the security sector.

While geoeconomic discourses of open borders, foreign investment, and market-inspired governance shaped the roll-back and roll-out moments in Afghanistan, the revival of geopolitical forms of statecraft correlates with a moment of roll-over neoliberalism. As technologies like biometrics and drones stand in for traditional security mediated through development, the result is a security regime that is almost entirely dependent on drone use to augment the state's presence. ³ Finally, the peak moment of roll-over neoliberalism in Afghanistan coincides with the Taliban takeover after 2021.

This comparison between pre- and post-neoliberal development is meant to demonstrate the triangular relationship between political economy, space, and style of (geopolitical or geoeconomic) governance in each era. I suggest the following counterfactual: if the reigning orthodoxy of spatially holistic development had continued, despite its many issues and failures, drones would not today stand in for governmental reach problems and security consolidation due to variegated space in Afghanistan, nor would the Taliban perform its domestic security geopolitics via the use of such technologies.

Throughout this research, I draw on secondary and primary sources to illustrate the political-economic trends and correlating spatial configurations. This research draws on publicly available materials published by the US and Afghan governments and armies as well as various news agencies, and thus does not require approval from a human subject review board.

Pre-neoliberal alternative futures

Pre-neoliberal development patterns in Afghanistan were distinctly modernist in that they featured a high emphasis on regional, holistic development through infrastructure. It was not until new political-economic trends came along that a shift away from this model began to occur and the spatial antecedents of drone governance became apparent. Understanding the potential futures competing for survival in Afghanistan's spatial history requires first unearthing the historical lineage of possible alternative futures, and how what is won out over what might have been. Despite Afghanistan’s deep ethno-religious complexity and other centrifugal forces that threatened projects of holistic development and the territorial augmentation of state reach, the period of 1933–1973 represented a period of possibility for realizing these.

To be sure, regional integration in Afghanistan was historically difficult. As major towns in Afghanistan began to emerge as sites of political power and economic movement during the early 20th century, tribal groups that ruled the provinces and the countryside in between remote terrain insisted on autonomy from the established Afghan monarchy “to ensure that their hold over the limited natural resources (like land and pastures) remained secure from outsiders” (Roy, 2020: 7). Only a few roads and communications structures existed throughout the country and were concentrated in major cities.

For Zahir Shah who assumed the throne in 1933, the political survival of Afghanistan was contingent upon expanding and deepening the authority of the state. Despite tensions arising from the semi-autonomous countryside, plans to consolidate the territory through widespread modernist economic development were in effect. Plugging all parts of Afghanistan into Zahir Shah's vision of economic development was challenging in a country with very few roads and telecommunications phone lines. Shah thus sought foreign assistance: advisers from Japan, Italy, and Germany laid plans for a modern communication network, roads textile mills, power plants, and factories, all of which would be nationalized industries owned by the Afghan monarchy (Cullather, 2002). In 1937, a radio tower was erected in Kabul, which forged communication links with remote areas (Cullather, 2002). Parts of the largely informal economy began to become formalized by the imposition of state tax codes, and Afghanistan was beginning to see the formation of the distinctively modern state apparatus and political economy extend through its geography.

By the 1950s, the Soviet Union and the United States were added to this list of international investors. Both powers were interested in “economic planning, oil, gas, and other geological exploration … highway construction; power development; land reclamation; technical education; housing and food grain storage” in Afghanistan (Ramyar, 2015: 51). Although their involvement in Afghanistan reflected broader geopolitical Cold War rivalries between them, the reigning orthodoxy for both Western and Soviet development models was “modernist” in nature, thus adding fuel to the already existing plans industrialize the country. The impressive industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1950s accomplished through massive infrastructure projects and investments in fixed capital such as machinery and roads, animated the same ambitions in many other newly independent countries (Mallaby, 2006). Similarly for the West, modernization was seen as an evolutionary process that involved capital accumulation and investments into developing countries’ infrastructure, machinery, and roads, enabling societies to mature to the “age of mass production,” and more centralized, efficient governance (Rostow, 2015). The fundamental idea was that modernist development, which entailed fundamental re-spatializations through investments in state infrastructure, could augment the geopolitical state's power.

Upon coming to power in 1953, Zahir Shah's Prime Minister Mohammad Daud also had geopolitical aims in pursuing foreign aid for development. Daud believed that without rapid growth, “Afghanistan would dissolve into factionalism and be divided among its neighbors” (Cullather, 2002: 528). As a part of establishing a strong geopolitical state and overcoming Afghanistan's centrifugal forces, Daud's government embarked on the Helmand Valley dam projects. These were the largest project of land reclamation, water development, and national-scale electric power generation owed to American assistance (Ramyar, 2015). Lavishly funded by US foreign aid, multilateral loans, and the Afghan government, this development scheme sought to integrate numerous sectors under the singular power of the government. As was the case with most countries that embarked on large-scale development projects during this era, “the Helmand project symbolized the transformation of the nation, representing the legitimacy of the monarchy, [and] the expansion of state power” (Cullather, 2002: 515).

The Helmand projects would deepen the state's power in the regions in various ways. First, the Helmand Valley projects would help the government re-engineer social relations in ways conducive to state power. Developing the Helmand would assure the “allegiance of the largest and most important tribal group” of the southern Pashtuns who wanted investment in the area (Fry, 1974). The hope was that modernizing Helmand would result in stronger state control in the region, and greater access to and control of the country's most important demographic—thus, the “Afghan government's social and economic policies combined gradual modernization with overt favoritism toward Pashtuns” (Bradford, 2019: 187).

Next, dam building and land reclamation in Helmand developed alongside a broadening regulatory framework. The Helmand and Arghandab Valley Authority (HAVA) (which was modeled and inspired by the Truman administration's Tennessee Valley Authority), sought to codify space in the Helmand region by mandating that both newcomers as well as tribes that already occupy the land now apply to HAVA for housing and water distribution. By the late 1950s, HAVA had begun constructing whole communities for residents that were resettled from various districts in the Helmand province (Cullather, 2002). After security screenings, resettled families would receive a “pair of oxen, a grant of two thousand Afghanis, and enough seed for the first year” (Cullather, 2002: 529). The regulation, reclamation, and redistribution of land alongside the resettlement of small groups and ethnic minorities fundamentally reshaped some of the country's previous tribal divisions. While it created new tensions in society between new settlers and previous inhabitants, in the eyes of the state it was a necessary step to bring some nomadic clans, who were especially resistant to state projects, under state control (Bradford, 2019).

The country's security apparatus was extended further into reclaimed areas to shape social relations there as the government's vision ran up against the activities of US officials. For instance, US officials attempted to frame the project as a community-building effort by enlisting agricultural expertise from farmers from feuding tribal groups and establishing cooperative organizations between them. The US also saw religious leaders who were interested in community development as a useful force of encouragement and even produced media that tied economic development in Helmand to Afghanistan's religious heritage (Cullather, 2002). However, Daud was not receptive to the idea of cross-cutting cooperative groups among certain tribal heads and was especially averse to any expanding religious influence. The government thus enlisted security forces to dispel such newly formed alliances.

Finally, the Helmand project augmented the security architecture as it required the state to do something about opium cultivation in the area. As argued by Bradford (2019), economic development in Helmand was in many ways closely related to US security concerns about the threat of drug addiction in the domestic US. Careful not to offend local farmers, Daud avoided implementing a wide-scale ban on opium production until the regime “had time to consolidate its power in the area”—however, the government did expand law enforcement into certain regions to go after high-level traffickers (American Embassy Kabul, 1973). Daud established newly formed anti-drug smuggling units who had national jurisdiction, unlike previous such units which were under the jurisdiction of local police (Bradford, 2019). The establishment of these units was a major step in transforming the role of the state in regulating its territory.

Evidently, the Helmand Valley projects demonstrated a clear attempt not only to extend development past Kabul, but as controlling the regions was a central concern, to augment the government's security presence and power alongside the such spatial expansion. These developments represented a moment in time wherein the possibility of an alternative spatial organization, and thus security architecture was latent. It was a brief moment when the distance between the center and the peripheries of Afghanistan appeared to be bridgeable. A regionally integrated political-economic model and state security apparatus were not only envisioned but pursued.

For several reasons, this ambition would unfortunately never be fully realized. The model itself was ultimately flawed on numerous fronts, not least the subordination of complex social dynamics to cure-all solutions based on development and the problematic cultural-evolutionary assumptions associated with modernization theory. The trajectory of this model can only be theorized about, as the country's tumultuous experience with Soviet occupation, civil war, and the growth of religious extremism, all of which had disastrous effects on the country's infrastructure, complicate the ability to say with certainty the fate of this model. In 2001, one of the major dam powerhouses became a bombing target of the US Air Force, as a symbolic culmination of the effect that geopolitical breakdown had on earlier dreams of robust development and governmental stability.

Furthermore, those visions of modernity-inspired integrated development were never resumed as the post-2001 reconstruction of Afghanistan coincided with the new global political-economic orthodoxy, that is, neoliberalism. Indeed, the geoeconomic discourses associated with neoliberalism of international peace and stability achieved through small governments, privatization, open borders, and economic interdependency were constructed as the pinnacle solution for the geopolitical problems that had marred Afghanistan's recent past. Geoeconomic solutions would overcome geopolitical problems, but also signaled the foreclosure of that previous model of government led, spatially holistic development.

Roll-back neoliberalism in Afghanistan and its effects

Against this history of geopolitical instability, neoliberal economic policies pushed by global governance institutions in the post-2001 era were pitched at the register of geoeconomic peace. That is, the strategy to overcome the geopolitics and militarism that had riddled Afghanistan for decades situated squarely within the framing of economic reform by former senior officials at the International Monetary Fund. As Sparke (2013) reminds, geopolitics and geoeconomics are intertwined geo-discourses that tend to frame particular territorial problems and ideals in dialectical ways. Sparke gives the example of the way a “‘disputed border’ might be seen as causing geopolitical instability; while a ‘free trade region’ or ‘green zone’ might be idealized as bringing geoeconomic peace and prosperity” (Sparke, 2013: 289). This juxtaposition of geopolitical problems with geoeconomic solutions is evident in former IMF official Del Castillo's (2003) articulation of the problem-solution in Afghanistan:

Since the rout of the Taliban, after two and a half decades of nearly continuous conflict, Afghanistan has embarked on a complex triple transition: from war to peace; from a repressive, militaristic theocracy to a society based on democratic principles … and from a state-controlled, war-torn economy to private sector-led economic development … [T]he heart of this transition is the daunting challenge of economic reconstruction, (Del Castillo, 2003).

As a direct critique of a “state-controlled” economy which coincided with the geopolitical problems of war and militaristic theocracy, “economic reconstruction” commenced in the form of “roll-back” neoliberalization. Recall that “roll-back” neoliberalism is a summary term for the policies promoting the privatization of nearly all government functions. It meant decreased public investments in holistic models of development and a driver-seat role for private industry and foreign direct investment. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s in developed countries, neoliberal roll-back was not uniformly experienced across the globe, but came in waves. The push to restructure the economies of many countries in the Global South was aggressively pushed by large players in international relations and institutions of global governance in order to overcome the geopolitics of the previous era and to ensure international security through heightened economic interdependence. In terms of solving the geopolitical problem of domestic security, however, these reforms were bound to make things worse because neoliberal reform would fundamentally change not only the economic structure but the spatial dimensions of state reach, with deleterious consequences on the country's security architecture. The spatial format latent in earlier models of integrated development and substantial geopolitical territorial consolidation would never be fully revived due to particular spatial externalities of the neoliberalization process which are here explored.

As abundantly clear in Afghanistan's 2002 National Development Framework (NDF), which was greatly praised by del Castillo, economic reconstruction amounted to economic restructuring. In customary neoliberal fashion, down-sizing the role of the state would make room for the private sector to take on more areas of traditional governance and public service. Privatization was the NDF's central strategy. The strategy makes the central point that the delivery of “routine government services will aim to contract out service to the private sector rather than rely on government as the sole deliverer,” since “the market and the private sector is a more effective instrument of delivering sustained growth than the state” (NDF, 2002: 17). Policies were going to “be based on competitive market-led solutions wherever possible,” by outsourcing most government services to private enterprise and as imperatives of neoliberalization would dictate, “minimize government intervention in the market” (NDF, 2002: 38). All sectors were to be reconsidered, from education, where “stakeholders will be brought into a National Task Force to examine the curriculum for secondary schools and develop a program suited to the needs of a private sector led economy” (NDF, 2002: 20), to health, where “the implications of cost-sharing” were starting to be explored (NDF, 2002: 17).

There were two audiences the NDF was speaking (or pandering) to, both of which frequently feature in the document. First, the strategy aimed at getting the attention of donors as its goal was to “meet the international standards for receiving direct donor support for reconstruction and development projects” (NDF, 2002: 9). In an era where the institutions of global monetary governance were tying conditions that reflect neoliberal imperatives to donor aid to less developed nations, from requiring that states privatize government functions and open up their (often hardly mature) economies, the NDF features just the right concoction of neoliberal buzzwords to articulate its policy vision, demonstrating at once the country's need for assistance and signaling its intention to comply completely with the conditions that would be tied to that assistance.

Secondly, the document repeatedly indicates that Afghanistan was trying to attract as much foreign direct investment as possible. Thus, even though the NDF looks to the national “competitive private sector” to act as “both the engine of growth and the instrument of social inclusion” (NDF, 2002: 6), it states its intention to turn to the “international private sector to help us design and implement our projects” (NDF, 2002: 8). To do this, the strategy was to establish a body to oversee the privatization program which would survey state assets and assess their salability, establish a foreign investor facilitation center, guide foreign investors through the investment approval process, and crucially, “the agency would have no regulatory role what-so-ever” (NDF, 2002: 38).

The government did not ignore the consequences that such neoliberal restructurings would have on the spatial configuration of Afghanistan and the reach of the security apparatus. Should the government fail to create the conditions for the reintegration of rural areas, the NDF warned that “there will be an inevitable movement towards urban centers in general and Kabul in particular. Shanty towns, with all their frustrations and disenchantments, will be the consequence” (NDF, 2002: 19). To combat geographical and social disintegration, the government had to encourage economic activity far outside the bounds of the capital and into rural areas, a process which depended on the “provision of security … [and] the establishment of a national army and police force” (NDF, 2002: 45).

The government offered conflicting ideas about the nature and role of such security provisions throughout the country. On the one hand, the NDF acknowledges the necessary link between the “promotion of security conditions [and] … the empowerment of communities” (NDF, 2002: 45). These interlinked goals would be pursued through the “planning of a national community empowerment program that will deliver a series of block grants to communities to enable them to make decisions in a participatory manner on their key priorities” (NDF, 2002: 45). It would inspire geographically holistic participation through the recruitment of men from each of the 32 provinces to be trained in Kabul (NDF, 2002: 47). On the other hand, however, security provision throughout Afghanistan had the more pressing purpose of encouraging donors and companies to invest in areas other than just Kabul—for economic progress is “constrained by perceptions of security. For example, many donors now insist on staying in Kabul, and starting projects there … Thus does the perception of insecurity exclude areas urgently in need of development assistance from receiving attention” (NDF, 2002: 11).

These two imperatives, security for regionally integrated community empowerment and security to encourage foreign direct investment were ultimately conflicting goals. The open-door policy for the international private sector to invest in Afghanistan ultimately worsened the fragmented security architecture throughout the country. Part of the security apparatus was focused on cities which attracted most of the investment. The other part of the security apparatus relied on informal and often criminal provisions of security by warlords throughout rural areas. As foreign investments begin to roll in starting 2002, any ambitions of regional integration envisioned in the document were showing signs of failure. Ultimately, the government failed to inspire investors to take a chance on rural areas because the government and investors had different ends: economic actors act to acquire a return on their investment, and a country's holistic development is not high on their agenda.

There were three tendencies of the investments made in Afghanistan in this era: the first two were that investments often did not require long-term capital commitments that could improve the country in the long run and could be withdrawn easily, and second, investments made catered almost exclusively to the urban upper middle classes (both Afghan and foreign) (Herold, 2003). For instance, Ehsan Bayat's New Jersey-based Telephone System International (TSI) invested $95 million in a joint venture with the government to establish the Afghan Wireless Communications Company (AWCC), which was only available in five major cities including Kabul (Muriel, 2002). A second cell phone network called Rohsan was erected with another $55 million investment which only extended to six major cities again including Kabul (Herold, 2003). The cell phone companies’ capital investments consisted of a few cell phone towers and personnel. Another $48 million went to the development and renovation of two 5-star hotels in Kabul, one Intercontinental and one Hyatt Regency. The first was newly renovated by a Dubai-based company, and the latter, situated just opposite the US embassy, was constructed by three different Turkish construction firms (Herold, 2003). Such investments benefited mostly the upper class that lived in cities could afford cell phones and could stay at hotels, and thus betrayed any hopes for holistic, regionally integrated economic growth.

On the occasion that investments did require longer-term capital and personnel investments, the third tendency of foreign direct investment in Afghanistan was that it often required security provisions typically afforded by the US military and private defense firms contracted by the US and Afghan governments. As was the case across multiple experiments of neoliberalization, from Chile to Iraq to Afghanistan, economic regime change required a facilitative role that could only be assumed by an aggressive military force to protect economic restructuring activities. In 2006, another 85$ million projects for a Marriot hotel financed by the US-based Overseas Private Investment Corp (OPIC) was proposed, although this hotel never opened its doors (Clark, 2016). In a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John Spoke writes to OPIC's CEO: “the $85 million is gone, the buildings were never completed … and the US Embassy is now forced to provide security for the site at additional cost to US taxpayers” (McLaughlin, 2016). What Spoke was referring to was not only the military requirements, but as the US military was undergoing processes of neoliberalization as well, the private defense firms that were beginning to equal the number of military personelle by a ratio of 1:1 (a ratio that went up to 1:3 by the end of 2008) (Serhal, 2021).

As more and more investment poured into Kabul and avoided rural areas, such investment patterns ultimately affected the geographic distribution of socio-economic space and security provision in Afghanistan. Even though Kabul has long since been different from the rest of Afghanistan in terms of development, at no time was the vision of regional integration almost a reality as much as it was in the pre-neoliberal era, and at no time was it further from being realized in the post-neoliberal era. In a four-part series of papers by Herold (2006), the author paints a picture of the “pseudo-development” of urban Kabul. Kabul is an embodiment of a neoliberal

… island of affluence amidst a sea of poverty, a sufficient density of foreign ex-pats, a bloated NGO-community … Neo-colonial administrators, opportunists, bribed local power brokers, facilitators, beauticians … members of the development establishment … foreign bank branches, lucky hotels (Serena Kabul, Hyatt Regency of Kabul), shopping malls (the Roshan Plaza, the Kabul City Center mall), import houses … and the ubiquitous Coca-Cola, (Herold, 2006: 1).

According to Herold's argument, the rest of Afghanistan is maintained “empty space”—however, it is not devoid of any security apparatus. Private security contractors existed there too, only in the remote and peripheral space, these actors were mainly contracted by the US military to secure military supply chains that maintained the troops, not to establish security for the remote populations living there. While the earlier Soviet occupation of Afghanistan devoted a substantial part of its army to defending its supply chain, the neoliberalized US military by contrast outsourced logistics security, with significant consequences for the geographic distribution of the security architecture in Afghanistan. A 2010 US Congress report titled Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the US Supply Chain in Afghanistan documents the way that the contracting out of security has enabled a “vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others” (Congress, 2010). It writes that “although the warlords do provide guards and coordinate security, the contractors have little choice but to use them in what amounts to a vast protection racket” (Congress, 2010: 3). It reports that “warlords are much more difficult to deal with now than they were nine years ago …” and with no formal security apparatus existing there, the population in those places needed to choose in a “fight between warlords and Taliban, and they disliked both of them” (Congress, 2010: 48).

Thus, under the era of neoliberal roll-back, the aggressive incursion of private actors ranging from foreign investors to the private security complex resulted then in a bizarre dynamic of overdeveloped ex-pat city in Kabul in a sea of peripheral space that was a hotspot of terrorism and para-security structures. Geographic asymmetries of the socio-economy and the security apparatus which focused on securing the economic activities pushed by neoliberal reform and military intervention presented a problem for establishing security in “post-conflict” Afghanistan. In what follows I investigate the roll-out of policies and institutions of re-regulation aimed at addressing the failures of roll-back neoliberalism on the security sector in Afghanistan. The most prominent of these is undoubtedly the institutionalization of security governance via drones to address spatial variegation.

Roll-out, roll-over, and the new geopolitical in Afghanistan

Although roll-out regulations sought to regulate the disaster that was the fragmented security industry in Afghanistan, they instead resulted in the institutionalization and thus consolidation of market-based solutions to the problems of fragmented security architecture. Recall that roll-out neoliberalism is neoliberalism's institution-building moment, whereby a set of policies and practices address the outright failures and crises created by roll-back neoliberalism but do so in ways organized by inherently neoliberal market rationality (Peck and Theodore, 2019). There is no distinct moment where roll-back became roll-out; but rather these terms are better understood as “dialectically intertwined moments of ongoing regulatory transformation” (Sparke, 2018). Due to their symbolic triumph over the obstacles of geography via their ability to target “over the horizon” and to enact “wide-area surveillance” in service of law enforcement, the drone in this context represents a neoliberal roll-out device that manages the problem of spatially fragmented security structures caused by the earlier process of neoliberalization.

In what follows, I consider three instances of neoliberal roll-out: first, the roll-out of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) which were foreign-sponsored development projects in Afghanistan that aimed at holistic development and territorial consolidation. While PRT projects only helped Afghanistan's rural spaces modestly develop, they resulted in an even more diversified security presence due to the diverging strategic aims held by a diverse set of sponsors. Second, I consider the Afghan Presidential Decree 62 as a moment of regulatory roll-out neoliberalism, which was the first outright ban of private security companies after scandalous reports of their behavior began to emerge. However, Decree 62 ended up buckling under international pressure and instead consolidated the legal basis for such defense firms to continue operating in Afghanistan. Third, as the outsourcing of security to different security firms did little to address the fragmented security architecture, the security threats that emerged from the peripheries of this patchy architecture were often increasingly dealt with by advancing military technology. This took the form of a systematic biometric data collection program in Afghanistan as well as the drone program, which was shared between the US and Afghan governments.

After exploring these three instances of the neoliberal roll-out, I move on to consider how such roll-out measures gave way to but also overlap with distinct features of the third phase of roll-over neoliberalism as articulated by Peck and Theodore (2019). Just as there is no distinct moment where roll-back became roll-out, there is no clear line between roll-out and roll-over, except that roll-over represents the authoritarian political shifts that protect and embed neoliberal structures in governance. My contention is that both roll-out and roll-over neoliberalism signal the unsteady revival of older models of regionally holistic territorialized governance which seek to consolidate geopolitical control over a country after the failures incurred by geoeconomic roll-back restructurings. Only this time, the national development goals of the earlier geopolitical pre-neoliberal era are neglected as corporate and other international actors are central players in the extension of state rule, thus diversifying the interests served by roll-out regulations and projects.

The gradual deployment of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan was for the intended purpose of improving stability “by increasing the host nation's capacity to govern; enhancing economic viability; and strengthening local government's ability to deliver public services” (US GAO, 2008: 1). However, PRTs were more than just projects of capacity building for the Afghan state: while PRTs were conceived of as a way to enhance the government's capacity to govern, they were also crucially seen as vectors for catalyzing neoliberal forms of development. In a 2009 report to the Congressional Research Service on PRTs in Afghanistan, one comment from a PRT official shows how PRTs were still very much framed according to neoliberal sentiments, in that they required a “cultural shift in thinking” to turn the economy into a “thriving success that is ripe for investment by the private sector” (Matwiczak, 2009: C-30).

Furthermore, while PRT projects only helped Afghanistan's rural spaces modestly develop, they resulted in an even more diversified security presence due to the diverging strategic aims held by sponsors of PRT projects. Some countries, such as Turkey, would avoid military confrontation. In contrast, other Western countries had Taliban defeat in mind; some trained local militias to help with security, some used civilians as part of a strategy to win hearts and minds, while others did not (Strand et al., 2017). Contrary to the aims of the PRTs of enhancing the government's capacity throughout the country, the particular security assemblage that accompanied PRTs in the form of different nations’ militaries, private defense firms, and the employ of local forces only served to worsen the already fragmented security architecture.

Eventually, the fragmented security architecture came to pose a serious problem. The government argued that the private security industry had become a parallel security system that undermined the development of Afghan governmental forces, particularly the nascent public security force, the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF). Therefore, in 2010 the Karzai government issued Presidential Decree 62 which, to the dismay of the international community, banned (almost all) private security companies following scandals and their disregard for laws and local customs. This move was almost inconsequential in terms of eradicating the negative effect of the private security industry in the country for two reasons. First, the Decree allowed embassies and NGOs (mostly located in Kabul) to retain their internal security firms, provided they were registered with the Interior Ministry and remained within the confines of their organization. Thus, the APPF was not tasked with replacing all private contractors, particularly those high-profile international compounds in Kabul that continued to rely on PSCs (Auner, 2013). Second, the PSC ban was made less significant because many PSCs were given a grace period of up to 12 months to either transition their guards to the APPF or transition from PSCs to “Risk Management Companies” (RMCs). Many RMCs from there assumed the role of vetting and training for the APPF, which meant that many former PSCs, now reinvented as RMCs, continued to animate the security environment in Afghanistan even after Decree 62.

The rolling out of regulatory regimes to deal with the problems of rolling back government involvement in governance, thus inadvertently contributed to the institutionalization of privatized security as opposed to its eradication. It also did little to address the geographically fragmented security structure. The result is framed most eloquently by journalist Feroz (2019a):

There are two Afghanistans … We have cities like Kabul where many people care for “modern lifestyles” and watch soap operas or music competitions on Tolo TV and where a small elite benefits from the presence of foreign troops and the military-industrial complex … At the same time, we have many villages—a lot of them not very far from the capital—where the stark reality of poverty and war have is a part of daily life. For years, these places have been bombed and raided by foreign militaries, militias and the Afghan army itself. And today, many of these places are not controlled by the Kabul government or their allies but by Taliban insurgents, (Feroz, 2019a).

It is against the framing backdrop of the fragmentation of Afghanistan into “two Afghanistans” that the reliance on drones to enact security governance should be understood. It is against this framing backdrop that we can explain why only 27 of the 13,072 drone strikes that fell in Afghanistan appear to have targeted Kabul, as evident by an analysis of the strike database recorded by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Media coverage magnifies these strikes, but as the world's attention is locked onto Kabul and other urban centers, “everyday life in the rural regions … is neglected or forgotten. Brutal onslaughts, usually in the form of raids, drone strikes, or other military operations, are carried out on a regular basis” (Feroz, 2019b).

The rest of Afghanistan outside of Kabul and other large urban centers is maintained “empty space” (Herold, 2006) that is kept empty; it thrives on an illegal opium economy, is run by an illicit sub-state private security apparatus and is thus a hotspot for terrorist activity and drone strikes and surveillance. In these parts which make up the second of the “two Afghanistan,” where the official governance apparatus is sparse, drone surveillance and bombardment became a distinguishing governance mechanism. As an analysis of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's database shows, the highest number of strikes were concentrated not in Afghanistan's busy urban areas, but in rural provinces such as Helmand, Uruzgan, Zabul, Wardak, and others.

Helmand Province is a notable example: it has been considered Afghanistan's “most dangerous province” (Anderson, 2015) and incidentally is also remote from the rest of Afghanistan as it has no rail service, 33% of its roads are not passable during certain seasons, and in some places, there are hardly any roads at all. This same province which was once home to a project which symbolized a beacon of hope and development in Afghanistan eventually became the area where the Afghan National Army (aided by foreign drone operation contractors) would field its first ScanEagle surveillance drone mission in 2016. Major Schumacher of the US Air Force wrote in 2021, just before the Taliban takeover, that even more drones should be integrated into the Afghan security apparatus because in the event of the “lack of air cover, ANDSF have had to remain close to population and main transportation routes which has resulted in most rural and remote areas being left to insurgent control” (Schumacher, 2021: 15). It is thus that drones are considered the best solution to govern remote space.

“Besides drones,” President Karzai said in 2013 when the US delivered its first fleet to the Afghans, “Afghanistan will be provided with other intelligence gathering equipment which will be used to defend and protect our air and ground sovereignty” (Ahmed, 2013). Among these technologies are sensitive biometric databases that include approximately 40 pieces of data per person (Guo and Noori, 2021). Where privacy laws were not written until after the US military and private contractors began capturing biometric information, some databases contain information on people's names, their irises and fingerprints, their military specialties, careers, familial connections, and other sensitive information. All of this information is held in the Afghan Automatic Biometric Identification System (AABIS), which itself was modeled after the Department of Defense biometric system which was used to help identify targets for drone strikes (Guo and Noori, 2021). Although it was projected that Afghanistan will quickly begin to maintain and operate these systems on its own, up until the US retreat in 2021, these systems were also operated almost entirely on foreign contractors (Schumacher, 2021). While the Taliban have captured these databases, it remains unclear if and how they use them.

While the fall back on drones as a means of governance and territorial consolidation over remote areas amounts to a moment of roll-out neoliberalism as governments try to solve the fragmentation caused by neoliberal reform, in ways still structured by the market, security governance via drone and all that comes with it represents a moment of roll-over neoliberalism that enables ever more authoritarian forms of governance. Roll-over neoliberalism entails the rise of authoritarian styles of governance which I argue, are capable of reviving older geopolitical forms of statecraft. While augmenting state power and territorial consolidation through large-scale development projects that extended state security throughout the country was the defining feature of older forms of geopolitical domestic statecraft, today, no such development goals are in mind. A para-security structure reliant on technologies like biometrics and drones for persistent surveillance stand in as “the new geopolitical” as the legacy of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism begins finally to roll over. Rulership was tending toward this new authoritarian, technocratic model even before the world witnessed the capture of these technologies of biopolitical governance by the Taliban after they transitioned to power following the 2021 US retreat. The 2022 Taliban is not the pre-2000 Taliban—it is empowered by this legacy, the legacy of neoliberal restructurings that anticipate the techno-surveillance turn in geopolitics.

Conclusion

The purpose of this paper was to trace the relationship between political economy and spatial development in Afghanistan that culminates in fragmented security architecture, the proliferation of remote space, and the incursion of drones as extensions of government rule. It comparatively traces the spatial configuration and security architecture of pre-neoliberal forms of development with the spatial configuration and accompanying security architecture of post-neoliberal forms to offer a theory of the spatial antecedents of drone governance in Afghanistan. It also sought to contribute to and bring together debates on geoeconomics and geopolitics with those of roll-back, roll-out, and roll-over neoliberalism, showing how geoeconomic and geopolitical discourses map onto these periodizations of neoliberalism. Finally, in situating the Taliban's governance in the frame of the geographic dimensions of roll-over neoliberalism, this paper illustrates how technologically mediated styles of authoritarian governance have long been forming in Afghanistan.