U.S. COUNTERINSURGENCY EFFORTS AGAINST THE “TALIBAN” IN AFGHANISTAN: POLITICAL ANALYSIS AND ASSESSMENT

Abstract

The U.S. fought its history’s longest war to defeat the “Taliban” insurgency, one strategy for doing so involved winning the “hearts and minds” of Afghans. However, the U.S it failed in its stated objectives. The United State could have done more to try to defeat the insurgency and counter terrorist groups in Afghanistan as well as to achieve state building and peace building objectives if they could have convinced the region, especially Pakistan to cooperate towards these aims Afghan problem. The poor governance, vast corruption, lack of regional cohesion in defeating “Taliban’s” insurgency especially Pakistan’s frequent negative interference in Afghanistan and lack of legitimacy of the Afghan Government has undermined the United States counterinsurgency efforts in past two decades in Afghanistan.

To elaborate on the failure of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign, it is important to understand the essence of theory and practice. D.Galula’s theory of “counterinsurgency” is a mixture of military, political and social actions under the resilient control of a single authority. This observation leads us to one of the critical hypotheses of this research which is that by ignoring Indigenous government– as one the most significant precondition for winning counterinsurgency – resulted in the return of the “Taliban” insurgency and prolongation of the Afghan conflict. Using the interventionist theory, this paper briefly analyses the cause and consequences of the U.S. counterinsurgency efforts and its peace and state-building failure in Afghanistan.