Antonio Giustozzi

Dr Antonio Giustozzi is Senior Research Fellow at RUSI and visiting professor at KCL. He is the author, among else, of Taliban at war (Hurst, 2019).

The Afghan state was dying before the Taliban took over

To understand how Afghanistan is going to change in the future, you have to first understand what the ‘Islamic Republic’ established by the United States was like. Even before the Taliban took over, Afghanistan’s democracy had been deteriorating for some time, with three presidential elections in a row ending in bitter controversies over vote rigging,