Since 1839, Afghanistan has fought five major wars against external powers: three against Britain, one against the Soviet Union, and one against a US-led coalition. Yet these conflicts are typically studied as discrete historical episodes rather than as a connected sequence. This article argues that they form a single causal chain: each war left external dependency and internal fragmentation unresolved, creating the conditions for the next intervention. Drawing on neoclassical realism, which treats domestic-level variables as intervening factors that filter systemic pressure, the article analyzes the interplay between external leverage and internal fragmentation across all five conflicts, and extends this analysis to developments since the 2021 Taliban takeover, including the still-unfolding Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict. The article’s contribution is threefold: a five-stage historical framework, a systematic account of how external and internal factors interact rather than merely coexist, and a set of policy implications for the current period grounded directly in that framework.
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