Security, Development, and Violence in Afghanistan provides a unique insight into the lived realities of the international intervention in Afghanistan and highlights the diversity, relationships, and interdependence of various groups including both external actors and Afghan communities. Analysis of the international intervention in Afghanistan following the post 9/11 invasion in 2001, one of the largest and most expensive in history, tends to focus on the perspective of organisational dynamics and policies or external actors. Drawing on the author’s five years of experience living, researching and working in Afghanistan, this book uses ethnographic methodologies to explore the micro-level interactions between different actors, showing how communities, local leaders, aid workers, UN officials, military and others navigated shifting security, development, and conflict dynamics. Starting with a contextual introduction to the intervention and the key debates surrounding it, this book goes on to explore the stories of security, development, and violence as constructed through official policy discourse, and then through the lived experiences of interveners and local actors. The book weaves a compelling narrative which links local and global issues and focuses on the everyday practices, relationships and acts of resistance which take place in two provinces of Afghanistan. Finally, the author highlights what this book’s findings mean both for what we know about Afghanistan and for how we understand international interventions and the everyday dynamics between actors who live and work in spaces of conflict. Security, Development, and Violence in Afghanistan: Everyday Stories of Intervention will be of considerable interest to scholars and professionals with an interest in Afghanistan, aid work, humanitarian intervention, development studies, and peace and conflict studies.

By the middle of 2007, Afghans had become increasingly disillusioned with a state-building process that had failed to deliver the peace dividend that they were promised. For many Afghans, the most noticeable change in their lives since the fall of the Taliban has been an acute deterioration in security conditions. Whether it is predatory warlords, the Taliban-led insurgency, the burgeoning narcotics trade or general criminality, the threats to the security and stability of Afghanistan are manifold. The response to those threats, both in terms of the international military intervention and the donor-supported process to rebuild the security architecture of the Afghan state, known as security-sector reform (SSR), has been largely insufficient to address the task at hand. NATO has struggled to find the troops and equipment it requires to complete its Afghan mission and the SSR process, from its outset, has been severely under-resourced and poorly directed. Compounding these problems, rampant corruption and factionalism in the Afghan government, particularly in the security institutions, have served as major impediments to reform and a driver of insecurity. This paper charts the evolution of the security environment in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, assessing both the causes of insecurity and the responses to them. Through this analysis, it offers some suggestions on how to tackle Afghanistan’s growing security crisis.

This book employs the concept of human security to show what the term means from the perspective of women in Afghanistan. It engages with a well-established debate in academic and policy-making contexts regarding the utility of human security as a framework for understanding and redressing conflict. The book argues that this concept allows the possibility of articulating the substantive experiences of violence and marginalisation experienced by people in local settings as well as their own struggles towards a secure and happy life. In this regard, it goes a long way to making sense of the complex dynamics of conflict which have confounded Western policy-makers in their ongoing state-building mission in Afghanistan. However, despite this inherent potential, the idea of human security still needs refinement. Crucially, it has benefitted from critical feminist and critical social theories which provide the conceptual and methodological depth necessary to apprehend what a progressive ethical program of security looks like and how it can be furthered. Using this framework, the work provides a critical reconstruction of the effect of the US-led Western Intervention on women’s experiences of (in)security in the three provincial contexts of Nangarhar, Bamiyan and Kabul. This reconstruction is drawn from a wealth of historical and contemporary sociological research alongside original fieldwork undertaken in Delhi, India, during 2011 with women and men from the country’s different communities. This book will be of much interest to students of human security, state-building, gender politics, war and conflict studies and IR in general.

The authors describe possible regional security structures and bilateral U.S. relationships with Iraq and Afghanistan. They recommend that the United States offer a wide range of security cooperation activities to compatible future governments in Kabul and Baghdad but should also plan to hedge against less-favorable contingencies. They emphasize that the U.S. Air Force should expect to remain heavily tasked for the foreseeable future.

This book provides a comprehensive assessment of small arms and security-related issues in post-9/11 Afghanistan.

Developing capable Afghan National Army (ANA) forces is a key element of the U.S. and NATO-led coalition effort to counter the insurgency and create sustainable security in Afghanistan. The DoD leads U.S. efforts to train and equip the ANA. U.S. agencies have allocated about $20 billion in support of the ANA since 2002 and have requested $7.5 billion more for fiscal year 2011. This report examined: (1) the extent of progress made and challenges faced in expanding the size of the ANA; (2) the extent of progress made and challenges faced in developing ANA capability; and (3) how much estimated future funding will be needed to sustain and further grow the ANA. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find publication.

Since 2002, the U.S. has worked to develop the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). The U.S. Dept. of Defense, through its Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, directs U.S. efforts to develop the Afghan National Army (ANA) and, in conjunction with the Dept. of State, the Afghan National Police (ANP). To follow up on recommendations from a 2005 report on the ANSF, this report analyzed the extent to which U.S. plans for the ANSF contain criteria that was previously recommended. The author also examined progress made and challenges faced in developing the ANA and ANP. Includes recommendations. Charts and tables.