War weariness and change in strategy in US policy on Afghanistan

Peter Rudolf

No 31/2011, SWP Comments from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Abstract: Increasing war weariness on the part of the American public and in Congress has madeit politically possible for President Obama to move away from the costly civil-militarycounterinsurgency strategy, without needing to fear criticism from the Republicans.The creeping transition to what is known as a counterterrorism strategy widens thescope for troop reduction. Militarily, this strategy hardly entails much more than theelimination of as many insurgents as possible by kill or capture operations - whetherin the hope of forcing the opponent's leaders to negotiate, or in the expectation thatthis will put stronger Afghan security forces in a better position to manage the remainingdanger. As part of this counterterrorism strategy, the US would like to maintain amilitary presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/256169/1/2011C31.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:swpcom:312011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SWP Comments from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).