Domestic Regime Change vs. FIRC: Lessons from beyond Afghanistan and Iraq

• In Event: Development and Conflict in the Era of American Withdrawal

Abstract

This paper draws on the string of successful popular uprisings in the Arab world, and the author’s firsthand observations in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, to better understand the relative impact of foreign military interventions on regime type and regime stability.

The costs and consequences of the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are well-established and, among many North American analysts, bitterly regretted. Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom inflicted levels of destruction and human displacement unmatched in the region since the devastating 1980s. They also failed to achieve their strategic objectives, i.e., replacing states that challenged American preferences with self-sustaining pro-US allies. In addition, as the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate again rules Kabul and a majoritarian Shia-led government runs Baghdad, regime change on the ground has not produced the boost for popular emancipation that the core proponents of the invasions cited as an auxiliary justification.

The literature on foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) has situated America’s latest attempts at large-scale political reengineering in a longer history, replete with grand ambitions and ruinous policies (Bellin 2004; Brownlee 2007; Brownlee 2024; Coyne and Davies 2007; Dobbins et al. 2003; Downes 2021; Downes and O’Rourke 2016; Edelstein 2004; Grandin 2006; Pei and Kasper 2003; Reiter 2017; Wertheim 2010; Young and Gardner 2007). The modal method in this field involves careful qualitative comparisons across instances of FIRC that vary in their outcomes. At one end of the spectrum stand the exemplars of US-led nation-building: postwar Germany and Japan. On the other end lie the cautionary tales of Vietnam and the post-9/11 wars. Numerous cases (e.g., the Philippines, Panama, Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc.) rest somewhere in-between. The general upshot from these studies is that civilian leaders in Washington and their troops overseas have lacked the power to lastingly redirect behavior in the targeted population. By contrast, indigenous conditions and authority traditions that predated America’s entry tend to structure the course of FIRCs, from the initial invasion through the day after withdrawal.

The substantial influence of antecedent local contexts raises the question of what marginal effect FIRC has (for good or ill, but seemingly for ill in most cases) when compared with reasonable counterfactuals of self-determined regime change. Is foreign-imposed regime change particularly damaging or is any radical political reordering – by an alien hand or an indigenous force – liable to disappoint its architects and harm its presumptive beneficiaries? Work addressing the gamut of FIRCs has not explored this possibility, in part because the research designs have tended to vary the outcome in question (the dependent variable) but not the source of regime change, externally or indigenously (the explanatory variable at issue). The present paper probes this contrast space, setting the infamous recent cases of FIRC (Afghanistan and Iraq) alongside initially inspiring popular uprisings that toppled authoritarian rulers without US military intervention: Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan.

The author takes advantage of a rare opportunity to visit postwar Afghanistan and Iraq in fall 2023, as well as extensive familiarity with the contrast cases, to identify two general problems that confront any polity after regime change. These problems are analogous to the challenges of political rule in authoritarian settings: 1) management of elite conflict and 2) management of public dissent (Frantz 2018; Gandhi and Przeworski 2007; Geddes 1999; Huntington 1968; Svolik 2012). Both processes, of foreign-imposed regime change and domestically-imposed regime change (“DIRC”), directly unsettle existing solutions to these problems, saddling the interim rulers (and rule-crafters) with the twin tasks of coup-proofing and revolution-proofing.

Author

• Jason Brownlee, University of Texas at Austin