The very mention of Afghanistan conjures images of war, international power politics, the opium trade, and widespread corruption. Yet the untold story of Afghanistan’s seemingly endless misfortune is the disruptive impact that prolonged conflict has had on ordinary rural Afghans, their culture, and the timeless relationship they share with their land and animals. In rural Afghanistan, when animals die, livelihoods are lost, families and communities suffer, and people may perish. That Sheep May Safely Graze details a determined effort, in the midst of war, to bring essential veterinary services to an agrarian society that depends day in and day out on the well-being and productivity of its animals, but which, because of decades of war and the disintegration of civil society, had no reliable access to even the most basic animal health care. The book describes how, in the face of many obstacles, a dedicated group of Afghan and expatriate veterinarians working for a small nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Kabul was able to create a national network of over 400 veterinary field units staffed by over 600 veterinary paraprofessionals. These paravets were selected by their own communities and then trained and outfitted by the NGO so that nearly every district in the country that needed basic veterinary services now has reliable access to such services. Most notably, over a decade after its inception and with Afghanistan still in free fall, this private sector, district-based animal health program remains vitally active. The community-based veterinary paraprofessionals continue to provide quality services to farmers and herders, protecting their animals from the ravages of disease and improving their livelihoods, despite the political upheavals and instability that continue to plague the country. The elements contributing to this sustainability and their application to programs for improved veterinary service delivery in developing countries beyond Afghanistan are described in the narrative.

This publication is the second in a series of lessons learned reports which examine how the U.S. government and Departments of Defense, State, and Justice carried out reconstruction programs in Afghanistan. In particular, the report analyzes security sector assistance (SSA) programs to create, train and advise the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) between 2002 and 2016. This publication concludes that the effort to train the ANDSF needs to continue, and provides recommendations for the SSA programs to be improved, based on lessons learned from careful analysis of real reconstruction situations in Afghanistan. The publication states that the United States was never prepared to help create Afghan police and military forces capable of protecting that country from internal and external threats. It is the hope of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), John F. Sopko, that this publication, and other SIGAR reports will create a body of work that can help provide reasonable solutions to help United States agencies and military forces improve reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. Related items: Counterterrorism publications can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/counterterrorism Counterinsurgency publications can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/counterinsurgency Warfare & Military Strategy publications can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/warfare-military-strategy Afghanistan War publications can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/afghanistan-war

Post-conflict economic reconstruction is a critical part of the political economy of peacetime and one of the most important challenges in any peace-building or state-building strategy. After wars end, countries must negotiate a multi-pronged transition to peace: Violence must give way to public security; lawlessness, political exclusion, and violation of human rights must give way to the rule of law and participatory government; ethnic, religious, ideological, or class/caste confrontation must give way to national reconciliation; and ravaged and mismanaged war economies must be reconstructed and transformed into functioning market economies that enable people to earn a decent living. Yet, how can these vitally important tasks each be successfully managed? How should we go about rehabilitating basic services and physical and human infrastructure? Which policies and institutions are necessary to reactivate the economy in the short run and ensure sustainable development in the long run? What steps should countries take to bring about national reconciliation and the consolidation of peace? In all of these cases, unless the political objectives of peacetime prevail at all times, peace will be ephemeral, while policies that pursue purely economic objectives can have tragic consequences. This book argues that any strategy for post-conflict economic reconstruction must be based on five premises and examines specific post-conflict reconstruction experiences to identify not only where these premises have been disregarded, but also where policies have worked, and the specific conditions that have influenced their success and failure.

Douglas Grindle provides a firsthand account of how the war in Afghanistan was won in a rural district south of Kandahar City and how the newly created peace slipped away when vital resources failed to materialize and the United States headed for the exit. By placing the reader at the heart of the American counterinsurgency effort, Grindle reveals little-known incidents, including the failure of expensive aid programs to target local needs, the slow throttling of local government as official funds failed to reach the districts, and the United States’ inexplicable failure to empower the Afghan local officials even after they succeeded in bringing the people onto their side. Grindle presents the side of the hard-working Afghans who won the war and expresses what they really thought of the U.S. military and its decisions. Written by a former field officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, this story of dashed hopes and missed opportunities details how America’s desire to leave the war behind ultimately overshadowed its desire to sustain victory.

A Washington Post Best Book of 2021 ​The #1 New York Times bestselling investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America’s longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock. Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military become mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains “fast-paced and vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground. Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn’t want to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” The Afghanistan Papers is a “searing indictment of the deceit, blunders, and hubris of senior military and civilian officials” (Tom Bowman, NRP Pentagon Correspondent) that will supercharge a long-overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.

cancer n. any malignant tumor . . . Metastasis may occur via the bloodstream or the lymphatic channels or across body cavities . . . setting up secondary tumors . . . Each individual primary tumor has its own pattern . . . There are probably many causative factors . . . Treatment. . . depends on the type of tumor, the site of the primary tumor and the extent of the spread. (Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary 1996, 97) Let us begin by stating the obvious. Acts of organized violence are not necessarily of human nature, but they are endogenous events arising within the an intrinsic part evolution of complex systems of social interaction. To be sure, all wars have features in common - people are killed and property is destroyed - but in their origin wars are likely to be at least as different as the social structures from which they arise. Consequently, it is unlikely that there can be a simple theory of the causes of war or the maintenance of peace. The fact that wars are historical events need not discourage us. On the contrary, we should focus our understanding of the dimensions of each conflict, or classes of conflict, on the conjuncture of causes at hand. It follows that the study of conflict must be an interdisciplinary one. It is or a penchant for eclecticism that leads to that conclusion, but the not humility multi-dimensionality of war itself.