The Mughals, British and Soviets all failed to subjugate Afghanistan, failures which offer valuable lessons for today. Taking a long historical perspective from 1520 to 2012, this volume examines the Mughal, British, Soviet and NATO efforts in Afghanistan, drawing on new archives and a synthesis of previous counter-insurgency experiences. Special emphasis is given to ecology, terrain and logistics to explain sub-conventional operations and state-building in Afghanistan.
War and State-Building in Modern Afghanistan provides an overall synthesis of British, Russian, American and NATO military activities in Afghanistan, which directly links past experiences to the current challenges. These timely essays are particularly relevant to contemporary debates about NATO's role in Afghanistan; do the war and state-building policies currently employed by NATO forces undercut or enhance a political solution?
The essays in this volume introduce new historical perspectives on this debate, and will prove illuminating reading for students and scholars interested in military history, the history of warfare, international relations and comparative politics.
At the beginning of this innovative analysis of conflict in Afghanistan, Scott Gates and Kaushik Roy ask why another book on Afghanistan? The answer is self-evident: Afghanistan remains poorly understood, and the character of conflict in Afghanistan also remains poorly understood. In this wide-ranging analysis of some six hundred years of conflict in Afghanistan, Gates and Roy, along with a host of experts in Afghan military history, examine why repeated efforts - from the Muhgals to Western forces in the form of ISAF - have failed to subdue the country. In so doing, they explore conflict in new ways, in terms that will be familiar to practitioners, but rarely explained in such an engaging form. They do so by deploying a resource frequently overlooked by practitioners and political analysts alike: the diverse and bloody history of one of the world's most fought over lands. This is history at its most relevant.
