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Event Description
As the Taliban completed its rapid march on Kabul in 2021, policymakers, scholars and citizens worldwide sought to make sense of the sudden collapse of the Afghan government. Particularly confounding was how the Taliban — a group that had been evicted from power in 2001 by the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom — had mustered the wherewithal to take back power so quickly. They ought not to have been surprised. As military analysts and intelligence officials had warned over the preceding decade, the Taliban had worked for years to rebuild their organizational capacity and military power, seeking to overcome a host of challenges internally and on the battlefield.
If the Taliban’s path to Afghan victory seems overdetermined, its journey from a broken organization to an effective and coherent military force was anything but. Rather than following a linear and coordinated path of progress, the Taliban’s reconstitution as a fighting force developed in fits and starts, gaining and losing capabilities and the resultant capacity to perform different military missions. While guerrilla warfare has been consistently identified as the means by which less powerful actors can defeat, or at least stymie, much stronger fighting forces, there is much less understanding of how organizations gain the capacity to implement these strategies. Supporting such forms of military power requires reliable small units that can fire and maneuver to retain the tactical offensive against much stronger foes.
Unpacking the Taliban’s resurgence, Worsnop argues that the Taliban, like many other successful military organizations, developed a cadre of skilled and committed small-unit combat leaders — what he refers to as a military cadre. Cadres serve a key role in planning coherent operations and preparing fighters to implement these operations. The synthesis of training and planning generates task-based cohesion in units, which unites soldiers around a shared expectation of competence and technical trust.
About our Speaker
Alec Worsnop is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park and a research fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM). His research looks into sub-state conflict, with a particular focus on the internal dynamics of non-state armed actors. Ongoing projects examine insurgent groups’ combat capability and training programs, their recruitment strategies to attract high-skilled fighters, and their civil-military relations.
Worsnop's work on insurgent military organizations has appeared in Security Studies and Political Science Research and Methods and has been supported by organizations including the Modern War Institute at West Point, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation.
Worsnop received his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an affiliate of the security studies program. Previously, he worked for a USAID implementing partner, developing and managing assistance programs for Afghanistan and the Middle East.