Longest War Research Articles

Human costs of the Afghanistan war

The war in Afghanistan has been the longest war in United States history. This article argues that from the beginning of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, the US conduct of the war posed great dangers for Afghan civilians. It distinguishes between three phases, each of which held distinct risks for civilians. The first phase, from late 2001 to 2009, was marked by the fight against al Qaeda and insurgent forces; the second phase, from 2009- 2010, by counterinsurgency; and the third phase by the transition of security responsibilities from NATO to Afghan security forces. While risk transfer clearly marked the first and third phases, civilians also suffered during the second phase, when the US put a primacy on civilian protection. We argue that neglecting civilian protection has not only been morally problematic but also risks undermining the Western goal of ensuring that Afghanistan will no longer pose a threat to international security.

Canadian Military Intelligence in Afghanistan

Canada was at war in Afghanistan for eleven years, making it the longest war in Canadian history. It began with a modest contribution to Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF)—the counter-terrorism campa...

What Use Overwhelming Air Superiority? A Tale of Two Campaigns

Longer wars between mismatched opponents often end with the militarily weaker side showing unexpected strengths. This article tests this tendency in two short wars in which overwhelming force superiority was applied in massive air attacks. Operation Enduring Freedom (the 2001 American campaign in Afghanistan) and Operation Cast Lead (the 2008–2009 Israeli campaign in Gaza) both began with air offensives that shifted to air-supported ground combat, but Enduring Freedom (a Type A operation) gave priority to aerial attack, while in Cast Lead (Type B) air operations primarily paved the way for ground combat. Neither campaign was fully decisive, suggesting that the residual capabilities of weaker combatants apply to short as well as protracted hostilities. The Type A attack was decisive against the Taliban, but not against al Qaeda. The more intensive Type B case, Cast Lead, did not lead to greater decisiveness than its counterpart, with Israel emphasizing force demonstration to enhance deterrence of attack, yet not seeking to destroy Hamas's residual military capability. The problem of translating large military superiority into decisive war results is also evident recently in more common, stretched out, and restrained airpower use supporting higher-priority ground combat, as in NATO's 2011 intervention in Libya and the aerial drone campaign in Pakistan supporting NATO war making in Afghanistan.

Contested Election Laws: Representation, Elections, and Party Building in Pennsylvania, 1788–1794

In preparation for the 2012 presidential election, members of the Pennsylvania GOP have been considering changing the way the state awards its electoral votes. Under the current system, the candidate who wins the greatest number of votes statewide receives all twenty of the state’s votes in the Electoral College. In recent years, heavy Democratic voting in urban areas such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh has offset Republican victories in rural parts of the state. In order to build on their strength in the less-populated areas, Republicans are considering having Pennsylvania award electors based on a district method. While this approach is technically constitutional, political commentators have been quick to condemn the proposal as unethical and potentially dangerous. This is not, however, the first time a political party has attempted to change election laws to their advantage. The manipulation of election law dates back to the first elections under the Constitution.

When and how many: The effects of third party joining on casualties and duration in interstate wars

What makes some wars longer and more severe than others is an important question in international relations scholarship. One underexplored answer to this question is the role that third party joiners play in lengthening conflicts, especially those states that intervene militarily after a war’s initial stages. This article argues that late joining complicates bargaining by adding new issues to the war and increases uncertainty about the relative balance of forces. Thus, more information will be needed to resolve the bargaining impasse. This means additional fighting and a longer war. This lengthening in turn increases the number of casualties. This is a distinct process from simply having more participants in a war from the outset as those participants would not add uncertainty in the same way that late joiners do since questions about how those participants affect the relative balances of forces would be answered just as quickly as if there were only two participants at the outset. These claims are supported by a non-proportional hazards model regression, a Cox proportional hazards regression, and an ordinary least squares regression using the Correlates of War interstate war dataset.

Transitional Justice and Civil War: Exploring New Pathways, Challenging Old Guideposts

Transitional justice has shifted from its primary use in addressing past atrocities of authoritarian regimes to those acts of violence committed during civil wars. Yet the use of transitional justice mechanisms in this new context is not well understood. Drawing from the existing transitional justice literature, this article generates a set of testable hypotheses to explore which factors influence the use of particular mechanisms during and after conflict. It then tests those hypotheses in 151 cases of civil war by using a cross-national data base of all countries in the world and their adoption of transitional justice 1 The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript; but any errors are of course our own. 1 Reiter et al.: Transitional Justice and Civil War Published by Scholarship@Western, 2013 138 Transitional Justice and Civil War Transitional Justice Review, Vol.1, Iss.1, 2012, 137-169 processes from 1970-2007. This article further provides a preliminary analysis of the success of those mechanisms in obtaining and securing peace. The article concludes that amnesties remain more prevalent than trials during and after conflict, particularly in Africa and Asia. During conflict, higher death tolls are associated with the use of trials and amnesties, and longer wars with the use of all types of mechanisms. After conflict ends, however, longer wars and higher death tolls are associated with accountability, and the presence of international peacekeepers is associated with all types of mechanisms. Finally, we find that transitional justice—regardless of the particular form it takes—does not jeopardize the peace process, and that amnesties may be an effective tool to help end conflict.

Being Here—PAJ at 100

As I write this preface to the 100th issue of PAJ, Occupy Wall Street has already been influential enough for the movement to spread across the U.S., violently at times, as more and more citizens are drawn into its message of social justice. Similar interventions have broken out in cities on several continents, protesting the corruption of democracy by powerful financial interests. Someone dressed as Jesus, holding a sign that declared, “I Threw The Money Lenders Out for a Reason,” was seen demonstrating in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, in a throwback to what used to be called guerrilla theatre, adding a moral dimension to the outrage. In the cradle of civilization, our biblical garden of Eden, the U.S. is mired in the longest wars and occupations of its history. By now several months have passed since the “Arab Spring” has brought massive upheaval to the Middle East, its revolution streamed by the new social networks that horizontalize the globe. On the continent the Euro crisis threatens the long-held dream of a European Union.

Digging in the Sand Pit: America's New Longest War

Digging in the Sand Pit: America's New Longest War

Viewing the reconstruction of primary schooling in Southern Sudan through education data, 2006–2009

After one of the longest wars in the history of Africa, Southern Sudan accomplished one of the world’s quickest education reconstruction programmes. Once the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed in 2005, the international donor community and the government and people of Southern Sudan united under a common goal: to increase access to education for both children and adults. Southern Sudan’s experience leads to three lessons. First, countries entering a post-conflict situation should anticipate and plan for the possibility of a large and rapid influx of new students immediately after hostilities end. Second, after a prolonged conflict, an alternative education system is critical to allow children, and the young adults who were previously deprived of education, the opportunity to acquire the skills they need to earn a living. Finally, donors must respond rapidly, demonstrate considerable flexibility, forgo extensive planning and documentation before acting, and be willing to make a multi-year commitment.

Doubting the Global War on Terror

Soon after Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration described its new grand strategy: the "Global War on Terror". This article examines the 'two-track' process that US neoconservatives and 'echo chamber' media used, to promote the GWOT grand strategy. It re-examines why many experts and institutions expressed doubt about specific claims the Bush Administration made to support the 2003 Iraq War. Historical counterfactuals suggest that the Bush Administration's Global War on Terror could have evolved very differently . . . or not occurred at all.

George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975

George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the questions of identity, territory and political destiny of the indigenous Nuba of the Sudan

ABSTRACT The Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005 was successful in ending the longest war in contemporary Africa. However, its implementation has been below the expectations of several communities, particularly in the war-torn regions of the Nuba Mountains, the Southern Blue Nile and the Abyei Area, widely referred to as ‘contested’, ‘marginalised’, ‘transitional’ areas or ‘border territories’. While many interwoven causes were behind the eruption of the protracted civil wars in the Sudan (Elnur 2009; Johnson 2006; Khalid 1987), the political question of sub-national identities and their intrinsic link with specific territories (Murphy 1991; William and Smith 1993) is hypothesised here as a prime factor in extending the civil war into these three areas. Taking the Nuba and their claimed territory of the Nuba Mountains as an example, this article will, first, trace the political striving of the Nuba people and their shift from peaceful political movement to armed struggle; second, it will examine their political status during the peace negotiation process; and third, it will analyse their political responses to the outcome of the CPA and its impact on their future political choices in view of the April 2010 election results, and the projected right to self-determination for the people of Southern Sudan, to be exercised through the referenda in 2011.

Duration of Peace and Recurring Civil Wars in Southeast Asia and the Pacific

Civil wars in Southeast Asia and the Pacific are perhaps the most intractable in the world and thus merit special attention. We adopt a regional approach for our analysis of the duration of peace after civil war terminations. Our contribution is three-fold: First, we capture all dyads (rebel versus government) rather than lumping multiple dyads into one war. This is appropriate in a region where there are multiple conflicts in a country at any one time. Second, we test a new conflict termination dataset developed at Uppsala University. These data allow us to offer a fine-grained analysis not normally found in the civil war literature. Third, we employ a method specifically suited to recurring data in a duration setting. The results generally support our hypotheses that wars in the region are intractable in the face of negotiated settlements and longer wars increase the duration of the subsequent peace. Also, there is a tendency for the peace to become longer with each recurrence. The impact of longer wars is obscured unless repeated events are carefully treated as non-independent events.

Beyond the Cold War: Approaching American Intervention in Vietnam

Why did U.S. policymakers decide to intervene in Vietnam in the 1960s? Until quite recently, this central question surrounding the American war in Vietnam appeared to have been answered: “The Cold War made them do it.” As George C. Herring argued in his influential America's Longest War, “The United States intervened to block the apparent march of a Soviet-dominated communism across Asia … and eventually made Vietnam a test of its determination to uphold world order.” U.S policy toward Vietnam, Herring wrote, was the logical “outgrowth of a world view and a policy, the policy of containment, which Americans in and out of government accepted without question for more than two decades.”1 Given the apparent hegemony and ubiquity of the Cold War lens, and the incremental but foundational American decisions of the 1950s to support the French war against the Vietnamese Communists and in its aftermath to create a non-Communist South Vietnamese state, the decisions of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to escalate the war in the 1960s came to be seen by many historians of the American war as an almost inescapable, if fundamentally flawed, outcome.

Women and War in the Works of Two Female Afghanistani Writers

Afghanistan has been torn apart by one of the longest wars (from 1978 to the present) in modern history. The war has destroyed the social, cultural and economic institutions of the country. The des...

Lutherans and the Longest War: Adrift on a Sea of Doubt about the Cold and Vietnam Wars, 1964–1975. By David E. Settje. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. x + 222 pp. $55.00 cloth; $25.95 paper.

Lutherans and the Longest War: Adrift on a Sea of Doubt about the Cold and Vietnam Wars, 1964–1975. By David E. Settje. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. x + 222 pp. 25.95 paper. - Volume 76 Issue 4

Lutherans and the longest war: adrift on a sea of doubt about the Cold and Vietnam Wars, 1964-1975

Lutherans and the longest war: adrift on a sea of doubt about the Cold and Vietnam Wars, 1964-1975

So You Want to be a Soldier? The U.S. Army, The Soviet Threat, and The Transition to the All-volunteer Force, 1970–1975

With the process of “Vietnamization” beginning in 1969, the U.S. Army began its long, painful disengagement from the war in Vietnam. Though total withdrawal from America's “longest war” did not occ...

American policy orientalized

America's Miracle Man in Vietnam presents a prime example of the controversial new cultural trend in U.S. diplomatic history. On the surface, the author's depiction of the process whereby Ngo Dinh Diem became America's candidate to head the new country of South Vietnam is familiar (see, for instance, George Herring, America's Longest War, Temple University Press, 1986, 50–69). Echoing others, Jacobs argues that the U.S. promotion of Diem ultimately led to severe setbacks in Southeast Asia. So blatant were Diem's flaws, Jacobs insists, virtually any prescient observer could have predicted his unsuitability to lead nascent South Vietnam. Diem had no political base, was “undeniably an autocrat,” and appeared to be an eccentric loner by virtually all accounts (38). Once in office, Diem predictably launched his “reign of terror and error,” alienating legions of his countrymen and strengthening his opposition, which emerged officially as the National Liberation Front in 1960 (17).

Sudan: End of the longest war?

Sudan: End of the longest war?