Zugl.: Hamburg, Univ., Diss.

Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Middle East, South Asia, Sub-Saharan))--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2010. / Thesis Advisor(s): Kapur, S. Paul ; Khan, Feroz Hassan. "March 2010." Description based on title screen as viewed on April 21, 2010. Author(s) subject terms: Baloch, Baluch, Balochi, Baluchi, Balochistan, Baluchistan, Pakistan, Islamabad, Insurgency, Afghanistan, India. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-86). Also available in print.

Theses (Ph. D.)--Duke University, 1988. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [335]-353).

Thesis (M.S. in Defense Analysis)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2006. / "June 2006." AD-A451 756. Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-59). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Begreppet Counterinsurgency har fått stor uppmärksamhet, speciellt efter NATOs operationer i Afghanistan och Irak. Sedan den svenska Försvarsmakten ingått som medlem i NATOsamarbetet PFP (Partnership for Peace) är även Sverige sedan en tid tillbaka involverade i konflikten i Afghanistan. Mycket av det doktrinära arbetet i länder, involverade i dessa konflikter, har varit inriktat mot irreguljära konflikter och Counterinsurgency-operationer. Stora mängder forskning görs inom ämnet bland annat av den franska COIN-teoretikern David Galula. Galula utkom 1964 med sin bok Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, och är internationellt erkänd som ett av de stora namnen inom COIN-teorin. Den sovjetiska invasionen av Afghanistan är en av modern tids största militära operationer. Stora delar av de moderna COIN-teorierna kan tillämpas på konflikten, både ur en analyssynpunkt samt ett lessons learned perspektiv. Konflikten, tillsammans med Vietnam gav ett nyvaknande inom COIN i västvärlden. Metoden som använts är en kvalitativ historisk textanalys. Resultatet visar att de sovjetiska metoderna och de sovjetiska enheterna hade bristande förmåga att anpassa sig till en ny typ av uppror, och att bara delar av Galulas teorier går att spåra i de sovjetiska metoderna, ibland i en annan tillämpning än vad Galula rekommenderar.

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.

Globally, research has shown that media coverage of illicit drug issues can play an important role in influencing public opinion and shaping drug policies. However, in Afghanistan, the world’s largest opium producer, very little is known about the media coverage of illicit drug issues. Afghan media, especially radio and television have developed dramatically during the past 11 years. Using the theories of agenda setting and framing, this study explored what drug-related topics were covered in the Afghan news media; how were these topics covered; how were the health and social consequences of drug abuse depicted in the media; and how much time was devoted to drug related topics in the media. Employing content analysis, the study examined primetime news coverage of the two leading media outlets: Azadi Radio and Tolo Television from 1st March 2011 until 31st July 2011. This thesis found the following types of imbalances in Afghan media reporting on illicit drug issues: 1) media reports on drug issues were heavily focused on supply reduction issues (81%) while paying considerably less attention to drug demand reduction issues (19%); 2) media predominantly framed illicit drugs as a law enforcement issue (83%) with only 15% of the paragraphs in the sample framing illicit drug as a public health problem; 3) media reporting on illicit drugs heavily relied on official sources (79%) lacking voices of the public health practitioners and drug addicts; 4) media coverage of illicit drug issues was heavily centered in Kabul (56%) with considerably less reporting from southern Afghanistan, which is the largest opium producing region. This study, which is presumably the first of its kind, provides media organizations, policy makers, and public health officials with a broad picture on the drug-related information available to the public on the leading Afghan news outlets. In addition, it serves as a basis for future research on media coverage of illicit drug issues in Afghanistan.

Traditional analyses of operational effectiveness often lack consideration of civil-military relations. However, in operations with complex and ambitious political aims, such as democratization, stabilization and reconstruction, economic development, and respect for human rights, taking a comprehensive approach (the co-ordination of military, diplomatic, and development efforts) is essential. The creation of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan aimed to essentially operationalize the comprehensive approach but was largely viewed as ineffective. The aim of this thesis is to increase the understanding of why the comprehensive approach in PRTs failed to live up to its potential and increase operational effectiveness through a comparative case study of US and Canada PRTs. As often is the case with complex peace operations, the mandates given to both military and civilian leaders are usually broad with little detail and thus are open for interpretation. As such, leadership has significant leeway as to how to conduct the operation, and many leaders have different ways of doing everyday things based on their own dispositions. The current theorizing of civil-military relations largely relies on rationalist and positivist assumptions which cannot readily capture the everyday experiences and dispositions of interveners and are less than insightful when it comes to describing and explaining the nuances of civil-military relations. By using a practice theory lens (specifically Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field, capital, and hysteresis), allows one to move away from models of actions based on realist assumptions and analyze civil-military relations as the result of different processes, practices, and systems of knowledge. The principal argument of this thesis is that because the habitus of the US and Canada were so misaligned with the field, actual operationalization (or embodiment) of the comprehensive approach was very sporadic and was largely dependent on leadership personality, which negatively effected effectiveness. Without understanding the systems of knowledge and sense-making (the habitus) that underlie decision-making processes one cannot assume that leadership will change its everyday practices to better embody the comprehensive approach. Without this understanding, it is necessary to put in place standard practices, such as training and clearer mandates, to help mitigate hysteresis (or the lag between generating practices that are in line with the new conditions).

Large scale destruction and surfeit chaos that accompany civil wars have provided a platform to several insurgencies operating in the setting to compete in a struggle for increased power and territorial occupation against their depraved regimes and each other. It is during this power struggle that several insurgencies make a jump from a purely nationalistic agenda of the civil war to a larger religious goal by complying with jihadist organisations thriving in the region. Although the topic of civil war and religious radicalisation has been on the international agenda as well as the academic community for many years now, proselytizing and hijacking of national agenda of insurgencies by religious extremists is also of growing concern. Thus, this research will seek to find if jihadisation of insurgencies is a direct consequence of civil wars by using the Afghanistan and the Syrian Civil wars as case studies. The approach adopted here is to dwell into the factors behind the adoption of jihadist ideologies by insurgencies in war zones. These factors would then be applied to both the case studies. The paper will incorporate insights from previous qualitative studies conducted on geo-referenced terror, the role of religion, and ideologies in civil wars in the aforementioned countries to arrive at the...