Browsing by Subject "Afghanistan"

The Obama Administration argued that a publicly announced withdrawal timeline would help further US counterinsurgency (COIN) objectives in Afghanistan by incentivizing better behavior from the Karzai government and the Afghan people. An endless troop commitment, the Administration believed, fostered a dependency that allowed, and possibly even encouraged, poor governance and rampant corruption to persist - a timeline, it claimed, would sever the continual dependency by signaling that US commitment would not last forever, serving to focus, energize, and quicken the Karzai government's efforts to build a secure, durable, self-sufficient state. Moreover, it argued, a timeline would send a message of urgency to the Afghan people to take charge of their own affairs and to consent to their government's rule in greater numbers. In this essay, I test the "Obama timeline hypothesis" in order to determine whether it is truly likely to produce the positive change that the Administration claims it will. By utilizing a mix of consistent historical predictors, deductive logic based on contemporary COIN theory, and currently available evidence, I conclude that the withdrawal timeline has not produced, and likely will not produce, the results that the Administration claimed it would and that, on the whole, it has likely engendered perverse incentives for the Karzai government and the Afghan people that run contrary to America's desired COIN objectives. More broadly, the Afghan case, along with America's recent experience in Iraq, should make US policymakers deeply skeptical of assertions that withdrawal timelines can serve as an effective policy tool for changing the behaviors of key regional actors.

Troy in America: Soldier Suicide in American War Literature attempts to illuminate how a war mentality forces an acceptance of mortality that not only brings out the irrationality of life itself, but also makes suicide more thinkable. This dissertation is therefore about the different reasons soldiers and veterans depicted in literature choose to die by suicide, but also those who consider it and choose not to. Troy in America draws on examples of suicide found in Ancient Greek literature to contextualize similar genres of suicide depicted in American war literature. Four Ancient Greek warriors suffer from different forms of suicidal behavior: Achilles’s grief, Odysseus’s despair, Ajax’s honor, and Philoctetes’s pain. Each hero’s suicidality is characterized by unique features that forms a discrete archetype that endures and informs characters found in literature about the American Civil War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The authors of the texts analyzed in Troy in America appear to be in substantial agreement that the experience of combat can be so troubling that, for some of its participants and veterans, suicide seems to be an answer. For many survivors, the end of war does not mark the end of their suffering. War removes its participants from society in an effort to preserve it. War thus becomes, in effect, a trip to the Underworld; a liminal experience where the social order becomes available for inspection. As a result, coming home can be as difficult emotionally as combat. After experiencing the irrationality of war and gaining insight into the irrationality of life, the warrior must change in order to return to society. But some do not change; instead, they choose to end their lives.