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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Terrorism, freedom fighters, armed struggle
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Hubris, Self-Interest, and America's Failed War in Afghanistan - the Self-Sustaining Overreach (Hardcover)
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Hubris, Self-Interest, and America's Failed War in Afghanistan - the Self-Sustaining Overreach (Hardcover)
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This book describes the conduct of the US-led post-9/11 war in
Afghanistan. Adopting a long-term perspective, it argues that even
though Washington initially had an opportunity to achieve its
security goals and give Afghanistan a chance to enter a new era, it
compromised any possibility of success from the very moment it let
bin Laden escape to Pakistan in December 2001, and found itself
locked in a strategic overreach. Given the bureaucratic and
rhetorical momentum triggered by the war on terror in America, the
Bush Administration was bound to deploy more resources in
Afghanistan sooner or later (despite its focus on Iraq). The need
to satisfy unfulfilled counter-terrorism objectives made the US
dependent on Afghanistan's warlords, which compromised the
country's stability and tarnished its new political system. The
extension of the US military presence made Washington lose its
leverage on the Pakistan army leaders, who, aware of America's
logistical dependency on Islamabad, supported the Afghan insurgents
- their historical proxies - more and more openly. The extension of
the war also contributed to radicalize segments of the Afghan and
Pakistani populations, destabilizing the area further. In the
meantime, the need to justify the extension of its military
presence influenced the US-led coalition into proclaiming its
determination to democratize and reconstruct Afghanistan. While
highly opportunistic, the emergence of these policies proved both
self-defeating and unsustainable due to an inescapable collision
between the US-led coalition's inherent self-interest, hubris,
limited knowledge, limited attention span and limited resources,
and, on the other hand, Afghanistan's inherent complexity. As the
critical contradictions at the very heart of the campaign increased
with the extension of the latter's duration, scale, and cost,
America's leaders, entrapped in path-dependence, lost their
strategic flexibility. Despite debates on troops/resource
allocation and more sophisticated doctrines, they repeated the same
structural mistakes over and over again. The strategic overreach
became self-sustaining, until its costs became intolerable, leading
to a drawdown which has more to do with a pervasive sense of
failure than with the accomplishment of any noble purpose or
strategic breakthrough.
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