India, June 13 -- On Thursday, 13 Afghan civilians - most of them children - were killed in airstrikes by Pakistan in Afghanistan's Khost province. A day earlier, a child was killed in a brutal crackdown by the Afghan State on a protest against paralysing gender codes; 30 women were arrested. A target for Pakistan and an autocrat at home, the Taliban-run State today has little resemblance to the shape it was expected to take after US occupation in 2001. US-based researcher Ahmad Shah Azami's The Dynamics of State-Building in Afghanistan: US policy post 9/11 helps understand this gap. The book examines three central pillars of the US project in Afhganistan - security and peacebuilding, democratisation, and economic development and reconstruction - and where the occupiers lost the plot, leading to the Taliban taking over again in 2021. The fragility of State-building through external stimuli is underlined in the book, and, in turn, helps explain the country's present....