Misreading Statehood: Intelligence Failures in the War on Terror

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores why Western intelligence systematically misjudged regime fragility in Afghanistan and Iraq during the War on Terror. It argues that the key failures arose not from missing information but from deeply embedded Weberian assumptions about statehood, which framed these regimes as coherent, institutional, and sovereign despite their fragmented and externally supported realities. Employing theory-driven process tracing and a structured coding scheme on primary sources, the study shows how these assumptions shaped interpretation and obscured risks of collapse. As an alternative, it introduces Charles Tilly’s model of state formation—focused on coercion, capital, and worldviews—and assesses how its absence contributed to strategic blind spots. In Afghanistan, intelligence misread a foreign-backed shell as a state; in Iraq, it failed to grasp the social foundations sustaining the regime despite dismantling coercive structures. This reframes intelligence failure as a theoretical, rather than informational, problem. The findings suggest that anticipating collapse requires not more data but a fundamentally different conceptual framework.