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After Evaluations, Bush Shifts Afghanistan ‘CT’ Strategy to COIN
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By Dr Sharifullah Dorani* ‘Afghanistan ‘is slipping toward failure. The Taliban is back, violence is up, drug production is booming and the Afghans are losing faith in their government. All the legs of strategy ─ security, counternarcotics efforts, reconstruction and governance ─ have gone wobbly. If we should have had a surge anywhere, it…
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Why President Bush’s Light Footprint Strategy Failed in Afghanistan
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By Dr Sharifullah Dorani* ‘If some later contended that we never had a plan for full-fledged nation building or that we under-resource such a plan, they were certainly correct. We didn’t go there to try to bring prosperity to every corner of Afghanistan. I believe…that such a goal would have amounted to a fool’s…
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The Role of NATO in America’s Afghanistan War
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By Dr Sharifullah Dorani* Introduction After ‘liberating Afghanistan’, the George W Bush Administration assumed that ‘the coalition of the willing’, and later North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), would shoulder responsibility[1] for the post-Taliban Afghanistan, as the US military role was assumed to win wars, not engage in peacekeeping, policing or building nations. This article…
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Bush vs Obama: Decision-Making Styles and Groupthink
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By Dr Sharifullah Dorani* Introduction In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States embarked on a ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) that would define a new era of American foreign policy. This period offers a compelling case study in presidential decision-making and its impact on international affairs. While both Presidents George…
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How the 2002 NSC Defined America’s Afghan Strategy
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By Dr Sharifullah Dorani* Introduction After the Taliban was defeated and al Qaeda was on the run, the National Security Council (NSC) of the George W Bush Administration held a meeting in February 2002 in the White House Situation Room to discuss their Afghan strategy. The meeting resulted in the making of the counterterrorism…
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Iraq War’s Impact on Afghanistan and Bush War Cabinet
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By Dr Sharifullah Dorani* ‘I have a real concern that given our preoccupation in Iraq, we’ve not devoted sufficient troops and funding to Afghanistan to ensure success in that mission….Afghanistan has been the forgotten war.’ President George W Bush[1] Introduction As studied in my other article,[2] the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which the…