This thesis explores the politics and diplomacy of Soviet efforts to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Although Soviet leaders began looking for a way out of the conflict soon after the introduction of Soviet troops in December 1979, the war dragged on because Moscow was afraid of the damage that a failure in Afghanistan could do to its reputation as a leader of the communist world and a supporter of national liberation movements in the Third World. Even as Soviet diplomats engaged in international diplomacy in an effort to secure an agreement for a withdrawal, Moscow looked for ways to stabilise its client government in Kabul. This characterised Soviet policy in the region from 1979 onward, not only under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, but even under the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev. In addition to providing a detailed study of an important and often-misinterpreted conflict, the thesis also situates the Soviet intervention within the growing body of scholarship seeking to understand the Cold War in global context, particularly with regard to the Third World. Thus the thesis focuses on the broader international dimensions of Soviet efforts in Afghanistan, particularly the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, while also showing that communist leaders in Afghanistan were often able to manipulate Soviet decision-making in support of their own internal rivalries. The thesis argues that ongoing Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s must be seen in the context of the Kremlin's official commitment to the Third World, despite the associated difficulties of such a policy.

Two of the main challenges in contemporary strategy are the challenges of complex conflicts and the increased reliance on alliances and coalitions. This study explores the challenges of coalition strategy in the complex conflict of Afghanistan through the strategic behaviour of three NATO-states, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Norway from 2003 to 2008. The study argues that the use of alliances and coalitions is and will remain one of the most important features of contemporary strategy. Given the size and character of contemporary coalitions and alliances, an essential part of any coalition’s strategy both in development and execution will reside with a coalition’s lesser members. Understanding how these lesser coalition members develop and implement strategy will be of great importance to the effectiveness of contemporary and future coalitions. The three states analysed in this study are the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Norway, three states who faced similar challenges in Afghanistan. The strategic behaviour of these cases is analysed through the lens of strategic theory from which the framework of analysis was developed. The study found that the three states’ interpretations of ISAF’s aims were remarkably different and that this impacted their strategies significantly. The study also found that as the lesser coalition partners’ purpose behind joining the coalition was only indirectly linked to the complex conflict of Afghanistan itself, the lesser members struggled to generate the political involvement that is crucial to the development of a clear and relevant strategy. Further, the study also found that this lack of political involvement had its main source in the lack of proper strategic institutions and procedures in each state’s civil-military relations structure, but was also clearly impacted by the states’ strategic thinking. The study challenges certain elements of traditional and contemporary theory on strategy and civil-military relations with respect to the lack of realism in strategic theory and an over-emphasis on structures in current civil-military relations theory.

Commanders in Control examines the four internationally-funded disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2014. It argues that although on paper they were part of Western powers’ ambitious state building project, in reality they served the U.S.-led military campaign against the Taliban as one of the mechanisms through which foreign support to armed groups was either given or withheld. By targeting different groups in different ways and at different times, DDR programmes were shaped by the wider political context – namely the fight against the Taliban and the movement’s continued political exclusion. By examining the programmes’ impact on individual commanders in four provinces – two in the northeast and two in the southwest – this study shows that the programmes deepened this pattern of exclusion. Local allies of international troops used them to reinforce their own position and target rivals. Those targeted often sought alternative ways of remaining armed, including by joining the insurgency. Thus, DDR – which was largely used to strengthen those winning and demobilise those losing – promoted not peace, as some foreign donors expected, but war. The main lesson from the Afghan experience is that DDR amidst war can generate instability and violence. This is especially the case when significant armed groups are excluded and portrayed as irreconcilable even when representing communities’ genuine grievances – the case in Afghanistan and other countries on the sharp end of the War on Terror like Iraq and Somalia. The state in these places is too weak to permanently exclude large groups, even with international military support. This means that to gain more control over the use of force – which is usually the objective of DDR – it must find a way to accommodate, not exclude, the main militarised patronage networks. In Afghanistan this means including the Taliban.

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The two most visible representations of Afghanistan are arguably Steve McCurry’s ‘Afghan Girl’ on the cover of National Geographic (June 1985) and Khaled Hosseini’s award-wining novel 'The Kite Runner' (2004). These two products laid the basic premise that images and ideas about Afghanistan have been circulated and commodified worldwide, especially qualities of the exotic, oppressed, and weak. Since print photography and literary works belong to the culture industry, this research seeks to enquire if performing arts, more specifically theatre, projected Afghanistan in similar ways. More precisely, this research asks how Afghan cultures and identities have been represented in the post-9/11 period. Borrowing the circuit of culture model (1997) from Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, this research then examines ten specific theatre performances within Afghanistan and outside Afghanistan in a spatio-temporal framework illustrating dynamic tensions from, and beyond, Kabul. Case studies from Kabul illustrate that Afghan cultures can be owned and regulated by competing stakeholders, including the Taliban, within its geopolitical boundaries. Case studies from/beyond Kabul show the export of Afghan cultures and performances outside Afghanistan, underscoring tropes of impoverishment and suffering while inviting or inciting international interventions and conciliations. Case studies beyond Kabul tend to imagine ‘Afghanistan’ by offering an ambivalent, and sometimes, contradictory response to the war on terror. This thesis argues that projective closure – the act of filling in absences and gaps to make sense of an Afghan narrative – often circulates and entrenches Afghans in victimhood tropes. Because there are constant fluctuations and contestations at what ‘Afghanistan’ was, is, and should be, Afghanistan as an imagined entity – or a global cultural commodity – becomes more evident. Derek Gregory was right to observe in 'The Colonial Present' (2004) that Afghanistan has been an object of international geopolitical manoeuvrings since the nineteenth century, and, as this thesis will show, even early twenty-first century. But the claw of the “colonial present” does not stem from hostilities enacted by imperial power, but a series of intimate engagements with non-government organisations, government agencies, embassies, foreign theatre directors, and even global audiences who uncritically celebrate narratives of Afghan heroism. This is further complicated by the readiness of local Afghan practitioners to consume and project themselves as victims of war who are in ‘need’ of foreign help. As such, the value that is being demanded and supplied in the global culture industry is still victimhood. Afghan cultures and identities are deeply embedded in contexts – situational, cultural, global – and unless these contexts are collocated and layered upon each other to add nuance to interrogate cultural practices, cultural workers and theatre practitioners continue to run the risks of reproducing conflicts, even if they are beyond the geographical space of Kabul – because the locations of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ are becoming increasingly intertwined.

The difficulties faced by the United Kingdom in realising its stabilisation objectives in the War in Afghanistan (2001-2014) have precipitated a change in rhetorical approach by successive British Governments, from one based on liberal normative principles to one that emphasises traditional, rationalist precepts of ‘national security interests’. This transformation of ‘narrative’ is identified in this work as chronologically analogous with the institutionalisation of ‘strategic communication’ practices and doctrine emanating from the defence establishment of the British state. In this work, I argue that changes in narrative approach and the emergence of strategic communication can be understood as a consequence of an overburdened British state attempting to free itself from a ‘transnational dilemma’ (King 2010): that is, to find a means of appealing coherently and succinctly to the benefits of participation in collective security whilst avoiding threatening the viability of collective security membership by acknowledging its costs. This transnational dilemma has been exacerbated by intra-state competition over the material and ideational aspects of British strategy in Helmand, and is traceable by close empirical analysis of three competing ‘policy narratives’ for Afghanistan: stabilisation, counter-narcotics, and counter-terrorism, respectively. Intra-state competition can, in turn, be conceptualised as the result of embedded inter-state relationships of political obligation and military cooperation referred to by Edmunds (2010) as the ‘transnationalisation’ of defence policy. UK policy in Afghanistan has been guided by transnational issues, specifically the maintenance of NATO as a collective security apparatus and of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, through which Britain secures and projects its national interest. I argue that the UK’s grand strategic commitment to transnationalisation underscores an ‘unstatable’ ultimate policy of meeting the expectations of the United States and NATO, and that the development of various policies and narratives for Afghanistan can be understood primarily in such terms. In Afghanistan, transnationalisation and the concordant pursuit of satisfying American and NATO expectations has come at the cost of a significant divestment of strategic autonomy, which has uprooted traditional, nationally-based concepts of strategy and policy to the transnational level and resulted in a strategic vacuum wherein intra-state competition has flourished. This, I argue, has compromised the ability for Britain to link policy to operations (to ‘do’ strategy)d in Afghanistan, a point which can be empirically measured by reference to the discordant and contradictory aspects of aforementioned policy narratives, which have been rooted in the institutional interests of various elements of the state. Strategic communication has arisen out of this situation as a means for the state to overcome the transnational dilemma by promoting a unified ‘strategic narrative’ for Afghanistan that has reconfigured the narrative for the conflict to one that emphasises the conflict not in terms of collective security but in ‘national’ terms. This work concludes by arguing that, in sidestepping rather than confronting the core dilemmas of British strategy, the emergence of strategic communication can be seen as posing as many problems as solutions for the UK state.

This thesis assesses institutional-learning by the European Union (EU) in Afghanistan. The assessment is carried out by delineating the developments and changes in relevant EU policies through the years 1993-2010 using process tracing. The analysis is based on an extensive review of EU documents, regulations, statements, publications and interviews together with third party evaluations and a survey of the relevant academic literature. The research question which the thesis addresses is to assess whether a policy change in EU state-building efforts is discernible and whether this change can be attributed to institutional-learning or to other causes. It also provides evidence that the state-building efforts by the EU form part of an institutional process of development by the EU to establish itself as a global actor. The assessment therefore focusses around four components: the EU, institutional-learning, state-building and Afghanistan. The aim of the thesis is to analyse the nexus between the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and EU-led state-building in fragile and/or post-conflict countries outside of the Union's enlargement sphere while taking into account the change in actorness on the part of the EU. This analysis is grounded on two interlocking frameworks. By using data and developments in the Afghanistan country study, elements of the state-building Framework are scrutinised for evidence of the different categories of institutional-learning and adaptation derived from the institutional-learning Framework. By pinpointing the learning processes within the EU as an organisation and in its state-building policies, and by analysing the limitations of its approach to these, the thesis concludes with a recommendation of how to make EU-led post-conflict state-building in forthcoming cases of fragile states more effective.

This is an integrative paper aiming to encapsulate the themes of my previously published work upon which this PhD is being assessed. This work; encompassing several papers and various chapters of my book are attached behind this essay. The research question, examines the effect of Western support to warlords on political legitimacy in the post 9/11 Afghan war. I contextualise the research question in terms of my critical engagement with the literature of strategists in Afghanistan during this time. Subsequently, I draw out themes in relation to the available literature on warlords, politics and security in Afghanistan. I highlight the value of thinking about these questions conceptually in terms of legitimacy. I then introduce the published work, summarising the focus of each paper or book chapter. Later, a ‘findings’ section addresses how the policy of supporting warlords has affected legitimacy through its impact on security and stability, the political settlement and ultimately whether Afghans choose to accept the Western-backed project in Afghanistan, or not. I argue that this issue is important as it has security implications not just in the immediate region, but increasingly, throughout the Middle East and possibly further.

This submission includes two studies, based primarily on the use of historical archives, of the Afghan wars from 1978 and the Iraq War from 2003. Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism (2011) is a study of various layers of the Afghan conflict: the 1978 communist coup; the 1979 Soviet invasion and America’s proxy war against the Soviet occupying forces in the 1980s; and the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s. It shows how Islamist groups allied to the West against Soviet and Afghan communism turned into enemies of the United States, with consequences including the September 11, 2001 attacks, President George W. Bush’s retaliation against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq. Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan (2010) is an analysis of the George W. Bush presidency in terms of its “war on terror.” The books thus study the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts in the context of United States foreign policy, with particular emphasis on the interests, actions and motives of actors in the conflicts and the interactions between internal and external actors. The central argument is that these factors contributed to the development of a “culture of violence,” defined as that “condition in which violence permeates all levels of society and becomes part of human thinking, behavior and way of life,” and how this provided space for “terrorist” groups to operate.

Sangin District, in Helmand Province, was once described by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates as “the most dangerous not only in Afghanistan but maybe the whole world.” Nevertheless, Afghan Government officials received a written offer of peace from the principal local grouping aligned to the Taliban on the 29th May 2010, before NATO’s surge, or Sangin’s handover from U.K. to U.S. forces. This offer evolved into the local negotiated agreement known as the Sangin Accord, announced in January 2011. This is the first academic study of that agreement. This work also considers relationships between motivations for negotiation at the local level, and international policy and actions: military power, stabilisation activities, and reconciliation (including the co-option and legitimation of enemies). It compares explanations for negotiated agreements from academic theory and military doctrine, especially I. William Zartman’s ripeness theory and its evolutions, and offers suggestions for other local reintegration or reconciliation scenarios. The conclusions offer observations on applying Ripeness theory when intervening to seek political reconciliation in a local area removed from centralised authority, and without a permanent military advantage – which I term ‘fringe areas’. It highlights the impact of history (both received and remembered), and traumatic experiences, on memory, perception and rationality; vital factors for Ripeness theory. Finally, it explores the paradox between policymakers’ desire to negotiate from a position of strength, and Ripeness theory’s contradictory requirement for a mutually perceived hurting stalemate – simultaneously alongside a political Way Out – as essential preconditions to genuine negotiation.