The main theatre of the war in Afghanistan is in its borderlands to Pakistan. There the Taliban strongholds never ceased and its local population seem to affiliate with the enemy. December 1 2009 President Barack Obama presented a new “comprehensive” strategy concerning the mission in Afghanistan. This was a strategy highly dominated by counterinsurgency – or in other words to change the main focus from the enemy to the population. The study’s aim was to analyse the assessment of the borderlands in the new Afghanistan counterinsurgency mission. This was done with the tools of critical discourse analysis and also in identifying ideal types in the counterinsurgency theory. The goal was to understand how the borderlands were assessed in the mission and if the concepts of regional aspects, external support, winning hearts and minds and securing the population were addressed. The results show that the borderlands were assessed well in accordance to counterinsurgency theory, but the specific cultural aspects of Afghanistan were given little attention. The situation in the borderlands is still to this day very unstable.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-320748 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Karlsson, Julia |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Statsvetenskapliga institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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