Afghanistan War

Many academics and policy-makers have misunderstood or ignored this trinity, however, and in different ways. Firstly, the the trinitarian analysis is a tool, not a ‘formula’ or doctrine, 3 secondly the trinity of the state – the ‘Summersian Trinity’ – has been misused,4 thirdly, that armies since the 1990s have attempted to forgo the trinity and its effects.5 This essay, elaborating on these misunderstandings and ignorance, will firstly illustrate where Clausewitz’s critics go wrong, then highlight how the trinity, both as a whole and in its individual elements, is still of such value in the twenty-first century.

Beginning in July 2010 an investigation of veteran and active-duty military arrests in El Paso County, Colorado, was undertaken based on daily arrest and booking reports provided by the sheriff. This report encompasses veteran arrest data from 2011 as the base year and data collected since.
El Paso County contains five separate military bases and is the third-largest concentration of military forces in the United States. All police departments within the county and all five bases use the county criminal justice center (CJC) for detention.
In 2011 ~3,200 veterans and active-duty military were arrested and booked into the CJC. Statistical analysis of these arrests and associated charges is summarized in eighteen tables, five figures, and four appendices. There is nothing in this data that implies the current justice system deters crime or violence by veterans. In fact, evidence suggests the present system is criminogenic. In many cases interaction with the justice system increased a veteran's potential for violence, up to and including homicide. Current policies of "catch, convict, and release" were plainly a factor in increased rates of homelessness, suicide, and homicide among veterans.
The wars of the 21st Century have resulted in many thousands of casualties returning to El Paso County suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the signature wound of these wars, Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI), as well as many other combat injuries. The characteristics of these injuries make it very likely that the veteran will be brought to the attention of peace officers, who often have little option but to make an arrest under current laws. As this report illustrates, that amounts to several thousand veterans arrested each year in this one county.
A criminal conviction often makes it impossible for veterans to obtain employment and frequently devastates families and children.
Cases involving domestic violence, an add-on charge in Colorado, are the most common basis for arrest in this study. Some 30% of the veterans booked into CJC in 2011 were arrested for domestic violence. But in only half of those cases did the charges include an actual violent act.
Behaviors characteristic of PTSD, TBI, and many other combat injuries are indistinguishable from the definition of intimate partner violence under current laws. As a result, the justice system, and concurrent legal abuse syndrome, exacerbates the veteran's injuries. The end result is a justice system, that, in effect, punishes veterans for serving their country.
Our analysis repudiates the widespread adoption of a drug-court model for veteran courts. In this study, only 13% of charges are for drugs or alcohol. Further, a "drug-court" model is of no value in domestic violence or traffic cases, which constitute the bulk of veteran arrests in this study. Treating substance abuse alone in cases where the veteran has PTSD/TBI is contraindicated as it does not address the underlying problems.
Another startling result is that while arrests of civilians tapers off sharply after age 30, arrests of veterans continues steadily regardless of age. After age 50 virtually all the inmates in the CJC are veterans and the county jail effectively becomes an Old Soldiers Home. Available data make it evident that veterans who remain in El Paso County after their first arrest will keep getting arrested over and over again.
Injuries like TBI are clearly associated with early onset of dementia and in many cases veterans are being arrested for that. Other biological factors, e.g., perimenopause in females, correlate with veteran arrests.
Clearly these veterans are bringing back a psychological plague that is not being properly or fully diagnosed, that is not being addressed at the critical time to prevent more harm and violence, and is spreading to family and friends. And evidence in this report makes it clear that the epidemic today will echo down the decades until at least mid-century even if the wars ended today.
The repercussions are magnified by OIF/OEF veterans who have endured multiple combat tours and survived injuries that would have been fatal in previous conflicts.
When comparing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with those from Vietnam it is clear that the passage of many new laws, e.g., the War on Drugs, domestic violence statutes, sexual assault and rape shield laws, has a dramatic negative effect on the ability of veterans to reintegrate into society. However, we find no evidence that these draconian measures have improved public safety.
Our study is ongoing and our next effort is to incorporate court outcomes for many of these veteran arrests now that we have sufficient longitudinal data.

This volume explores the way governments endeavoured to build and maintain public support for the war in Afghanistan, combining new insights on the effects of strategic narratives with an exhaustive series of case studies.

In contemporary wars, with public opinion impacting heavily on outcomes, strategic narratives provide a grid for interpreting the why, what and how of the conflict. This book asks how public support for the deployment of military troops to Afghanistan was garnered, sustained or lost in thirteen contributing nations. Public attitudes in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe towards the use of military force were greatly shaped by the cohesiveness and content of the strategic narratives employed by national policy-makers. Assessing the ability of countries to craft a successful strategic narrative, the book addresses the following key areas: 1) how governments employ strategic narratives to gain public support; 2) how strategic narratives develop during the course of the conflict; 3) how these narratives are disseminated, framed and perceived through various media outlets; 4) how domestic audiences respond to strategic narratives; 5) how this interplay is conditioned by both events on the ground, in Afghanistan, and by structural elements of the domestic political systems.

This book will be of much interest to students of international intervention, foreign policy, political communication, international security, strategic studies and IR in general.

War and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan proved to be the undoing of the 'Best Little Army in the World' (Akam, p.19). While Britain's soldiers could demonstrate their capacity to adapt under difficult conditions, they still could not deliver campaign success. In The Changing of the Guard and Blood, Metal and Dust we have two alternative explanations for these failures. One accuses the Army of indolence, arrogance and unjustified over-confidence. The other of systemic failings in strategy-making, political direction and the challenge of working within an alliance structure. Taken together both books offer excoriating analyses of an Army muddling through. As the public records for these two campaigns have yet to be released, however, these books are best seen as presenting another opportunity to reflect on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what they tell us about contemporary British society.

Ten years ago the Taliban appeared to have been defeated. In retaliation for the 911 attacks, the United States had invaded Afghanistan and, in a matter of months, had overthrown the Taliban regime. By mid-, US and British task forces were chasing the last remnants of the Taliban out of the country and hunting down Al-aeda terrorists. A decade later, Karzai is still in power and Afghanistan has received massive international developmental and security assistance. But the Afghan state is also battling a Taliban insurgency that shows little sign of abating. How did the Taliban return to Afghanistan, and why have they not been defeated? We answer these questions by looking inside the Afghan insurgency, using Helmand province as a case-study. We draw on a large number of original interviews with Taliban field commanders and fighters to produce a uniquely detailed picture of the Taliban at war. The picture that emerges is of a resilient insurgency that has adapted under immense military pressure to become more centralized and more professional.

Šioje knygoje pirmąsyk lyginamuoju, komparatyvistiniu požiūriu žvelgiama į Afganistano karą, prasidėjusį 1979-aisiais ir iš esmės vykstantį iki šiol. Daugelis ir kariai, ir tyrinėtojai teoretikai karą vadina beprasmiu. Tačiau baisiausia yra ne ši tiesa, o tai, kad iš tikrųjų jis nesibaigė ir greičiausiai niekada nesibaigs. Tarnybos dienas itin gyvai prisimena devyni skirtingi žmonės iš Lietuvos, dalyvavę Afganistano kare, – nuo seržanto iki generolo. Taigi turime skirtingus požiūrio taškus, kurie turėtų padėti suvokti, kas vis dėlto vyko ir vyksta Afganistane. Knyga gausiai iliustruota.

In Search of Peace for Afghanistan is a collection of twenty-two essays on war and peace making in contemporary Afghanistan. The volume is inspired by the discovery in 2019 of three historical letters of President Najibullah and historian M. Hassan Kakar. In the correspondence, exchanged in 1990, Najibullah and Kakar speak candidly about hopes and desires of the Afghan people for peace, about plans to bring peace to Afghanistan, and about actors, factors, and obstacles vis-à-vis the states of war and peace, then in post-Soviet Afghanistan. The contributors, all established and emerging Afghan and international scholars, public intellectuals, and former and current members of the civil society, policy, and state institutions, offer analyses of the correspondence in the contexts of the past and present peace making processes, and insights on modern Afghan state-society relations, public and political spaces, and development. They also offer renewed perspectives on the role of wider global and regional geopolitics and non-state actors in the current war in Afghanistan, as well as provide comparative examples of successful peace negotiations and best practices from international conflict resolution and history.

Buy Now: https://www.amazon.com/Search-Peace-Afghanistan-Historical-Najibullah/dp/B09328FD57

İmparatorluklar mezarlığı Afganistan’da yaşanan Taliban’ın hakimiyet mücadelesi Afganistan’ı ele geçirmesi ile sonuçlandı. Taliban’ın izlediği vahabi çizgisi Afganistan vatandaşlarının güvenliğini tehlikeye attı. Afganistan vatandaşları korku ile başka ülkelere her türlü yolu deneyerek girmeye çalışıyorlar ve bu sebeple ani göç dalgasına sebep oldular. Yaşanan ani kitlesel göç dalgası Türkiye’de olumsuz sosyal hareketlilik yaratmaktadır. Siyasiler ve yerli halk, Buzan’ın güvenlik dışılaştırma (Afgan göçmenleri mağdur olarak görme) yaklaşımını henüz hukuki statüsü bulunmayan Afgan göçmenlere karşı izlememektedirler. Afgan göçmenler için hukuki statü belirsizliği ve Türkiye’de bulunan mevcut Suriyeli göçmenlerin şeffaf ve yeterli olmayan geçici koruma statüleri ülke içinde olumsuz toplumsal hareketlilik yaratmaktadır. Bu çalışmada, göçmen profillerinin niceliksel ve niteliksel analizleri yapılarak eğitim, siyasi, güvenlik, toplumsal ve ekonomik yönden etkileri incelendi.
İzlenen göç politikası sürdürülebilir ve şeffaf olmadığı için ani göç hareketi ülkeyi ekonomik, sosyal, eğitim ve güvenlik yönünden olumsuz etkiledi. Yeni medyada yer alan söylemler ve görüntüler göçmen karşıtlığını tetiklemeye yöneldi. Göçmen karşıtlığı güvenlikleştirme kuramı ile siyasette popülist söylemler ile politize edilmeye başlandı. İş piyasasını da olumsuz yönde etkileyen göçmen dalgası yerli emekçilerin haklarını zedelemektedir. Bu çalışmada göçmen profilleri de göz önüne alınarak değerlendirme yapılmıştır. Çeşitli raporlar incelendikten sonra sürdürülebilir göç politikası önerileri sunulmuştur.

The article analyzes the Invasion of Afghanistan by the USA in accordance with the Democratic Peace Theory. According to the Kantian perspective, some of the core elements of the democratic peace conception such as the legitimate defensive war of democracies, universal liberal-democratic norms, the confederation (zone) of liberal peace, principle of perpetual peace, rule of international law, the necessity of maintenance in  international trade and international organizations for the perpetual peace ideals will be applied to the case. In this perception, a set of basic explanations related to the democratic peace which reflect the structural, normative, monadic, and dyadic and democratization conceptions will also be assessed and then adapted with the reasons, development and outcome of the case.

This paper identifies two trends within the US and UK: the “militarisation of intelligence”; and the rise of “special intelligence” (SI). The concept of a “militarisation of intelligence” already exists and is generally accepted, especially in reference to the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). SI, whereby special operations forces (SOF) and intelligence activity are combined, is a term and concept that this paper is intending to introduce. In particular, this paper argues that since 9/11 Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has introduced many significant changes within SOF and intelligence action. The paper will use past examples to provide a comparison to JSOC’s actions since 9/11, which shall be ascertained both by personal accounts and secondary sources. JSOC’s activities in Iraq 2003-2011 during the al-Qaeda insurgency are of particular note and value. JSOC will be considered in counterinsurgency, counterterrorist and intelligence roles. This paper will argue that these models are enough to classify elements and certain activities of JSOC as SI, as well as arguing that JSOC presents a model for the future.

Uluslararası ilişkilerin temel aktörü olan devletler günümüze kadar silahlı çatışmaların da temel aktörü olmuştur. Devlet dışında pek çok aktörün ortaya çıkması ve etkinlik kazanmasıyla bu durum değişmeye başlamıştır. Devlet dışı aktörlerin silahlı çatışmalara doğrudan veya dolaylı etkisi artmaktadır. Devleti temel aktör olarak kabul eden uluslararası hukuk, devlet dışı aktörlerin silahlı çatışmalarda oynadıkları rolü yeterince kapsamamaktadır. Bu çalışmanın temel amacı devlet dışı aktörlerin yetki ve sorumluluklarını incelemektir.

This chapter argues that it is through their parallel engagement with the global that American and Canadian literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have opened up bilateral conversations and avenues of cultural exchange. While a continental or hemispheric identity has shaped transnational North American Studies, it is worthwhile to take an even broader perspective and consider the global networks that have brought American and Canadian writing into closer proximity in mutually illuminating ways. The chapter is organized around two related arguments. Firstly, a sustained comparative inquiry into the global remapping of North American literature must begin with an analysis of how transnational reading paradigms in the two countries seem to proceed in somewhat inexplicable ignorance of one another. While Canadian studies of literature and globalization tend to remain under the radar of U.S.-based scholars, Canadian scholars also appear largely unaware of key works in comparative and transnational American Studies that have transformed the field. Secondly, to redress this mutual misrecognition, the chapter circumscribes the question about the global dimensions of U.S. and Canadian literatures to a scrutiny of how they imagine wars on proxy territories in which both countries have become entangled. American and Canadian literatures have been influenced by international conflict to a greater extent than we may have been aware. To make sense of this influence is to redraw the map of globalized North American Studies in ways that take seriously and do justice to the violent tensions from which such synthesis inevitably grows. Specifically, the chapter examines texts that are uncongenial to the dichotomies of nationality and postnationality often proffered in defense of a global reading of literature, suggesting instead triangular modes of thinking by which the laws of contemporary warfare complicate the one-to-one comparison of one North American national literature to another. In triangular texts of different literary genres, such as Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul (2001) and Jane Urquhart's poetic novel Sanctuary Line (2010), we can trace the fraught terrain of global North American Studies not as a field that imposes a choice between the national and the transnational, or a reconciliation of both, but as an opportunity to compare two distinct visions of the global, visions that have been forged by conflicts in an international arena.

PDA Research Monograph #6, 30 January 2002. A close blow-by-blow analysis of the initial months of Operation Enduring Freedom - the US-Afghanistan war. The report shows how the inadvertent effects of the war were already overtaking the intended ones. Includes appendices addressing: the war’s impact on the humanitarian crisis; the missing political framework for American action; the source of power and the strategy of the Taliban; and the limits of the Bonn agreement and the challenges facing the interim government.

Includes appendices addressing: The war’s impact on the humanitarian crisis; The missing political framework for American action; The source of power and the strategy of the Taliban; and, The limits of the Bonn agreement and the challenges facing the interim government.

Im Fokus dieses Beitrages soll die Unterstützung der in Afghanistan operierenden Kräfte der Bundeswehr durch Drohnen liegen. Diese Betrachtung erfolgt aus soldatischer Sicht und gestützt auf die eigene Einsatzerfahrung als Kompaniechef in der nordafghanischen Provinz Kunduz. Vorzüge und Nachteile des Drohneneinsatzes werden sowohl aus taktisch-operativer Perspektive als auch wissenschaftlich-theoretisch beleuchtet. Damit soll ein Verständnis für die Erfordernisse von Bodentruppen erzeugt und in die Diskussion um die Sinnhaftigkeit von Drohneneinsätzen eingebracht werden.

In April 2021, President Joe Biden has announced that the remaining US troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September 11th, 2021. Delaying the May 1st deadline given by the Trump administration. This will create a security vacuum in the region. Experts fear that this decision might result in the breakout of another Civil War. This was the longest-running conflict in US history, the war has cost the US around $2 trillion and 2400 American troops lost their lives. India's involvement there could be jeopardized. India needs to update its priorities to prepare for this change.

Since the First Gulf War strategists have preferred seeing and debating western military campaigns as particular “models.” While such practice of deductive thinking is crucial in a scientific context, one is likely to face analytical problems without first having conceived of the broader
picture. The organizer of the most recent scientific gathering dedicated to examining contemporary
western military intervention writes: “...we believe western military efforts over the past two decades
have formed a definable interventionist cycle if not a distinct, single paradigm…” As a follow-up,
this paper seeks to explain the conceptual fundamentals of western military involvement from Iraq
to Libya, reveal and address some misunderstandings regarding the essence and (democratic)
implications of the use of force by the West, as well as identify the future trends and limitations in the
projection of western power.

This informal study compares total deaths from the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela (1999-present) and the US war in Afghanistan (2001-2021). First I present perspectives on 3rd Generation asymmetrical warfare as applied in Afghanistan, and 4th Generation Warfare (4GW) as applied in Venezuela, as it will add context to the data presented in this study. Next, I explain the methodology of how I arrived at figures of 278,783 dead in Afghanistan and 402,985 deaths in Venezuela. This is followed by interpretations of the new data from this study, with commentary on the Cuban occupation and “Cubanization” of Venezuela in the context of the data on fatalities. Finally, the study compares the statistical similarities and differences of outcomes in the Bolivarian Revolution and the US war in Afghanistan.

This publication showcases the value of strategic communication / messaging in peace & stability operations.  It provides lessons from the following operations: Operation Atlantic Resolve (Eastern Europe), Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) (Afghanistan), Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines (OEF-P), Operation Joint Endeavor (Bosnia-Herzegovina), the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Liberia (UNMIL), Operations Odyssey Dawn and Unified Protector (OOD/OUP) (Libya), and Operation United Assistance (OUA) (West Africa).

This thesis uses Mass Observation Project data as a source of evidence for individual British people’s interpretations of British involvement in recent overseas military conflicts. Considering five of Britain’s post-imperial and post-Cold War conflicts in the Falklands, Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq wars, it approaches these cases as objects of historical memory and considers how individuals connect these conflicts to narratives of British identity. Using an interpretative and qualitative method of analysis, it finds that, though contemporary circumstance and context are crucial in determining what is written about each case, these conflicts are given meaning through invocation of Britain’s military past, primarily British experience in the Second World War. Observers’ written responses across the period reveal a pervasive belief in Britain as an historical force for good, the crucible of which is British opposition to the evil of Nazi fascism and dictatorship in World War Two, and its entry into that war to defend both itself and other European nations. These connections began to fragment within the context of the ‘War on Terror’ and the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Popular memories of the past have been critical in framing and clarifying what observers wrote about more recent conflicts, both among those who supported the use of force and those who did not, but have also been sustained as Britain continues to deploy military force in the present. Certain aspects of British experience in World War Two have been kept alive as they retain an explanatory power over contemporary circumstances while others are omitted as they are not thought to be relevant; observers’ written accounts show, in detail, how popular memories of the past have been affected by the changing context in which they are invoked and how military force is related intimately to narrative (re)constructions of national identity.

The Afghanistan: Lessons from Australia’s Whole-of-Government Mission Report, commissioned by the Department of Defence, in coordination with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian Federal Police, outlines the strengths, good practices and challenges of Australia’s mission in Afghanistan at the whole-of-government level.
While each overseas mission has its own particular circumstances and context, there are important lessons that we can take away from the Afghanistan experience.
This Report highlights 17 such lessons to enhance how we work across government and improve cooperation for complex missions of the future.
Key lessons include:
• Involving all relevant departments and agencies in whole-of-government policy development and planning from the outset;
• Establishing a senior level inter-agency group to oversee policy development and provide a high-level nexus with the National Security Committee of Cabinet and the Secretaries’ Committee on National Security;
• Recognising the value of civil-military co-leadership in the field;
• Agreeing principles and protocols be developed at the outset of the mission to define working relationships and responsibilities between different services and agencies; 
• Undertaking collective mission preparation involving military, civilians and police, including exercises focused on developing cross-agency relationships at the headquarters level;
• Establishing a cross-agency public affairs capability to highlight the whole-of-government nature of the mission;
• Synchronizing posting and deployment cycles for civilian, military and police personnel;
• Tasking the Australian Civil-Military Centre with providing a standing whole-of-government lessons learned capability for overseas missions.

Back From the Front: Contemporary Artists at War and Peace

In the year which marked the centenary of the start of the First World War, a series of creative projects in Bristol considered past, contemporary and continuing conflicts. A unique record of these exhibitions and events has now been captured for this book.

Under the generic title Back From the Front: Art, Memory and the Aftermath of War the projects consisted of five overlapping exhibitions staged at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, UK - a curated show of work by John and Paul Nash; a unique gathering of work by contemporary artists examining war and peace under the title Shock and Awe: Contemporary Artists at War and Peace, and a sequence of exhibitions united under the word Re-membering, which were a series of commissions funded by the Arts Council England and co-ordinated by the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership and Bristol 2014. A fifth exhibition The Death of Nature gave a showcase to the recent paintings of Michael Porter RWA.

This article traces the rise of military psychological resilience training, focusing on the US Army’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program, which seeks to assess and instill resilience in soldiers and their families through techniques developed in the discipline of positive psychology. In maximizing the happiness, optimism, and mental fitness of soldiers, military resilience training has two aims: (1) to produce a fit fighting force capable of winning complex wars, and (2) to cut costs, not by averting war, but by ostensibly reducing the need for costly healthcare through a claim to prevent soldiers’ ‘pessimistic’ responses to war. The architects of military resilience are also exporting this model to the civilian sphere of social security, using their military experiment as ‘proof of concept’ of the scientific validity not only of resilience training, but also of positive psychology more generally. The article thus illustrates that ‘social security’ cannot be held separate from inter/national security, because these domains are, in practice, imbricated. It is argued that resilience is not merely a response to war and austerity, but a means for producing these forms of precarity through a fantasy of indomitability. The article concludes by considering the broader ethics of psychological resilience.

This article assesses progress in and prospects for the US-led campaign in Afghanistan. Drawing on extensive field research, it finds that significant progress has been made at the operational level in four areas: the development of a new population-centric approach to COIN, development of Afghan security forces, growth in Afghan sub-national governance, and military momentum on the ground. However, the situation remains bleak at the strategic level. The article identifies three obstacles to campaign success: corruption in Afghan national government, war-weariness in NATO countries, and insurgent safe havens in Pakistan. Further operational progress will not be able to address this strategic obstacles. Thus there is an operational-strategic disconnect at the heart of the ISAF campaign.

Editor (with Spencer Tucker et al.), author of 14 short articles, editor/compiler of Vol. 5 (Documents Volume).

[“Dulles, John Foster,” 1:386-388; “Eisenhower, Dwight David,” 2:408-410; “Eisenhower Doctrine,” 2:410-411; “Europe and the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars,” 2:423-428; “France, Middle East Policy,” 2:463-466; “Kissinger, Henry Alfred,” 2:692-694; “Nixon, Richard Milhous,” 3:902-904; “Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier,” 3:968-969; “Reagan, Ronald Wilson,” 3:1021-1023;  “Shultz, George Pratt,” 3:1125-1126; “Thatcher, Margaret,” 4:1232-1235; “United Kingdom,” 4:1271-1275; “United States, Middle Eastern Policy, 1917-1945,” 4:1310-1315; and “United States, Middle Eastern Policy Since 1945,” 4:1315-1326].

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2011; Booklist, Editors’ Choice, 2011.

This in-depth study of U.S. involvement in the modern Middle East carefully weighs the interplay of domestic, cultural, religious, diplomatic, international, and military events in one of the world's most troubled regions.


• Hundreds of alphabetically organized entries on wars, political events, religious and cultural issues, and diplomatic initiatives, as well as in-depth essays on background material, area and regional analyses, and biographical entries

• An introduction by General Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret), former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command

• A chronologically arranged final volume comprised of primary and contemporary documents with individual introductions

• A detailed chronology of events

• Cross-references and books for further reading appended to each entry

• A bibliography of over 450 books that are the latest in the field