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Western countries established a militia regime in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, thereby giving a radical form to the transnational economy of violence and its socio-political effects. In Afghanistan as elsewhere, the formation of militias was generally justified as a palliative for a state that was failing to control its territory. However, the milicianization of the Afghan state is not the consequence of weakness or of its lack of historical anchorage, but rather a result of international intervention. The U.S. army applied an imaginary anthropology according to which Afghan society would consist of an aggregate of local isolates, apolitical and resistant to any form of state interference. The militia arrangements they put in place produced a transnational economy of violence and strengthened supposedly local actors at the expense of official institutions.