Warlord Survival explains how Afghan warlords adjust their strategies to survive and prosper as their contexts change. Romain Malejacq argues that warlords’ authority and influence on followers go beyond their ability to coerce compliance or control territory. The reason is that warlords have the capability to convert military power into economic resources, political influence, and social status—or vice versa—as circumstances require. They also have the ability, if they play their cards right and are given the opportunity, to exert influence well beyond their geographic areas of control. This capacity to metamorphose and stretch their power, Malejacq argues, makes it very difficult to get rid of warlords in state-building projects such as Afghanistan’s. Even when they cannot fight the state, warlords maintain enough influence through ties of patronage to weaken it and to keep their areas of influence at least partly under their control. In effect, they are masters of the skill of remaining relevant and indispensable to their followers, the leader of the state, and international stakeholders such as foreign states and NGOs.

Malejacq’s argument is intellectually provocative and original, and his case studies are compelling and valuable. He documents meticulously how four Afghan leaders who established themselves during the Soviet occupation, either as heads of regime militias or as Mujahideen commanders, managed to remain influential despite the seismic changes that Afghanistan experienced. To do so, he relies heavily not only on media accounts but also on extensive field research and interviews in the country over a number of years.

The book’s weakness lies in the author’s attempt to abstract a generalizable theory from his case studies, even though the book would have been perfectly useful and relevant without such an attempt. The forced attempt to formulate theory unfortunately leads Malejacq to make errors of conceptualization and methodology.

Malejacq’s definition of his unit of analysis, the warlord, requires some fine-tuning. He defines warlords as “‘autonomous and powerful individuals,’ not members of armed organizations bound by institutionalized forms of collective decision making (such as the Taliban or the so-called Islamic State” (p. 4). Designating Ahmad Shah Massoud and Ismail Khan as warlords when they were resisting the Soviet occupation, however, signifies that any and all those who resist foreign occupations of their own country without being part of a highly structured organization should be painted with this stigmatizing designation. Of course, they were not warlords then, the same way many anticolonial leaders such as the Algerian Emir Abdulkader or the Libyan Omar al-Mukhtar were not warlords. Their reliance on patronage is not sufficient to define them as warlords—patronage is merely a modality of leadership and social organization in Afghanistan and other traditional societies. It is also worth noting that Massoud, one of the four “warlords” studied by Malejacq, does not fit his own definition of the term because he led a well-structured military and administrative organization.

What is missing from Malejacq’s definition is context. Warlords resist state encroachment outside of the context of conflict. An Afghan becomes a warlord because of what he (they are almost all males) does, not because of his position in a web of patronage. Massoud and Ismail Khan became warlords when Massoud made a bid to take over Kabul and when Ismail Khan competed with the state over resources after the overthrow of the Taliban government. The same person can fall into and out of the category; yet Malejacq implies that once a warlord, a person becomes a warlord, even retroactively, for the portion of his life that begins when he becomes a leader and ends with his death. This is problematic because it feeds into the author’s argument that warlords are nearly impossible to reform into genuine state officials or organizational members. The category of warlord, which defines the entire study, deserves a deeper discussion than the author provides.

The evidence from Malejacq’s fieldwork resides in three chapters that share substantive and well-written case studies of four Afghan leaders—Ismail Khan, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and his successor as Shura Nazar leader, Mohammad Fahim. These are some of the most successful leaders, and sometimes warlords, in post-1979 Afghanistan. Others remain relevant, but none at their scale; thousands of others, from the leaders of a dozen fighters to regional strongmen, have perished, been co-opted, or been sidelined. The author’s selection of the most successful warlords for the case studies raises serious methodological and policy concerns—he is selecting on the dependent variable by considering only warlords who survived, even flourished, in a study of warlord survival. What if warlords who were successfully sidelined or defeated used similar tactics and yet failed to adapt to changing circumstances the way the most successful ones did? If that is the case, then the secret to warlord survival would be different from what the author hypothesizes.

In addition, Malejacq’s main policy argument is that warlords are almost impossible to sideline because of their impressive ability to transform their influence, yet he completely ignores the demise of many of them in his study. Militarized local leaders of different degrees of influence have been sidelined momentarily or permanently by the Najib regime, Hekmatyar’s Hizb, major Mujahideen commanders, more powerful warlords, and the Taliban. One important example is Jalaludin Haqqani (later succeeded by his son Sirajudin), who was successfully co-opted by the Taliban and remained loyal to the organization through thick and thin. Haqqani, one of the more important commanders of the Afghan Jihad against the Soviets, was not mentioned once by Malejacq, even though a study of his trajectory would add much more depth to a discussion of how states and insurgent organizations could deal with warlords. Malejacq’s selection of his own cases prevents him from identifying the ways warlords can be weakened or co-opted. Of course, warlords can be sidelined with the right strategy—not only has it been done in Afghanistan but many of today’s modern states also had potent and resilient warlords in their past.

The case-selection bias keeps Malejacq from developing a convincing theory of warlord survival with its own testable hypotheses. Ironically, Warlord Survival would have been almost beyond reproach if it announced itself more accurately and modestly as a study of how the most successful Afghan warlords, not warlords in general, manage to survive in a precarious environment. It did not require a veneer of generalizable theory, and the accompanying methodological expectations, to be relevant, informative, and compelling within the scope of what it actually accomplishes.

The tome’s conceptual and methodological shortcomings should not detract from Warlord Survival’s important substantive contribution to the expanding scholarship on warlords in Afghanistan and beyond. Malejacq does a remarkable job tracing the mechanisms of survival of some of the most successful Afghan strongmen, and the case studies are based on solid field research. The book should be valuable for scholars of Afghanistan and of state-building dynamics seeking well-developed insights, graduate students interested in conducting fieldwork in the context of conflict, and for policy makers struggling with state-building efforts.