War In Afghanistan Research Articles

Postdeployment mental health concerns and family functioning in veteran men and women.

Despite growing numbers of veteran women, it is unclear whether the impact of common postdeployment mental health concerns on key aspects of family functioning varies by gender. We examined whether associations between PTSD, depression, and problematic alcohol use and intimate relationship quality and parenting self-efficacy differed among men and women in a large, gender-balanced sample of post-9/11 veterans. Participants included 2,348 veterans (51.49% women) of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who were part of a larger study of gender differences in effects of wartime deployment. Veterans who were married or in a relationship (n = 1,536, 49.09% women) reported overall relationship quality. Veterans with children under age 18 (n = 1,049; 51.57% women) self-reported on their sense of efficacy as parents. All participants reported symptoms of PTSD, depression, and problematic alcohol use. We used a series of hierarchical linear regressions to test gender as a moderator of each postdeployment mental health concern and the family functioning constructs of interest. Each postdeployment mental health concern was associated with reduced relationship quality and parenting self-efficacy, and these associations were largely consistent across gender. However, links between reduced parenting self-efficacy and increased PTSD and depressive symptoms were stronger in women compared with men. Postdeployment mental health concerns are associated with impairment in key family relationships for both veteran men and women. This impact may be particularly profound for parenting self-efficacy among female veterans, highlighting the potential importance of targeted interventions in this domain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Thoughts Construction of President Donald Trump in Making Foreign Policy to End the War between the US and Taliban

The war between the US and the Taliban began after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. President Bush immediately sent US military troops to Afghanistan to capture the leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist group, Osama bin Laden. It is known that President Obama was sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. During the Obama’s administration, bin Laden was successfully killed in 2011. The war between the US and the Taliban will continue until President Trump’s leadership. He considers that the goals of this war have been realized, targeting Al-Qaida leaders and that nothing is profitable for the US in continuing the war. According to Trump’s thinking, in 2020 there will be a peace agreement between the US and the Taliban. To answer this fact, this article will use constructivist theory to explain the construction of Bush's thoughts, the result of which is the United States' political policy towards the war in Afghanistan. Therefore, this journal will discuss the construction of Trump’s thoughts on ending the long war between the US and the Taliban. So that this paper can see how Trump's thought construction can end the war and what the real impact is for the US. From this, it can be concluded that the result of Trump’s thought construction is to protect US citizens and interests in the economic and military fields.

Analyzing the Consequences of Long-Run Civil War on Unemployment Rate: Empirical Evidence from Afghanistan

This article aims to uncover the asymmetric labor-market consequences of the long-run civil war in Afghanistan by employing a non-linear autoregressive distributed lags (NARDL) model and an asymmetric causality technique over the period from 2004Q3 to 2020Q4. The findings from the NARDL model reveal that the positive asymmetric shocks from the cost of war, GDP growth, final government expenditure, foreign direct investment, and the rule of law significantly decrease the unemployment rate, while their negative asymmetric shocks increase the unemployment rate in the short and long runs. Innovatively, the composite financial inclusion index has been incorporated into the model, which provides interesting results. It demonstrates that enhancing the outreach of financial services plays an important role in reducing the unemployment rate during wartime in Afghanistan, while its exclusion is found to increase the unemployment rate both in the short and long runs. Moreover, the results of the asymmetric causality test reveal that an asymmetric causality runs from both the positive and negative components of the cost of war, the composite financial inclusion index, GDP growth, foreign direct investment, inflation rate, population growth, and the rule of law to the unemployment rate, while no evidence is found to support a causality nexus between the unemployment rate, final government expenditure, and the secondary school enrollment rate. The results entail several policy implications that are discussed.

Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Change-Point Detection

Detecting change-points in multivariate settings is usually carried out by analyzing all marginals either independently, via univariate methods, or jointly, through multivariate approaches. The former discards any inherent dependencies between different marginals and the latter may suffer from domination/masking among different change-points of distinct marginals. As a remedy, we propose an approach which groups marginals with similar temporal behaviors, and then performs group-wise multivariate change-point detection. Our approach groups marginals based on hierarchical clustering using distances which adjust for inherent dependencies. Through a simulation study we show that our approach, by preventing domination/masking, significantly enhances the general performance of the employed multivariate change-point detection method. Finally, we apply our approach to two datasets: (i) Land Surface Temperature in Spain, during the years 2000–2021, and (ii) The WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary data.

A Reluctance Acceptance: the USA and the Hague Convention of 1954

ABSTRACT Fifty-five years and after waging wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, to name only a few, the United States ratified the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of 1954 (the 1954 Hague Convention) in 2009. Although the U.S. has promoted itself as a strong proponent for world peace and human rights, the treaty ran counter to American military doctrine— ‘that it is necessary to destroy a city or town in order to save it.’ However, the negative effects on cultural property in historic places in Afghanistan and Iraq, compelled the U.S. Military to reconsider the treatment of cultural monuments during armed conflict and began to monitor impacts on these places to mitigate avoidable destruction. Today, the U.S. has implemented a Cultural Property Protection Program (CPP) through a joint initiative between the Department of Defence, the Department of State, and the Smithsonian Institute Cultural Rescue Initiative to prevent cultural heritage destruction and to monitor military strategy by Russia and China in areas of conflict in Ukraine and Taiwan. In this article, I explain how the U.S. has regarded the 1954 Hague Convention and how it is approaching CPP in current armed conflicts.

The Nature of Operations of Modern Armies: Lessons and Conclusions From the War in Afghanistan (2001-2021)

The Nature of Operations of Modern Armies: Lessons and Conclusions From the War in Afghanistan (2001-2021)

The Nature of Operations of Modern Armies: Lessons and Conclusions From the War in Afghanistan (2001-2021)

The Nature of Operations of Modern Armies: Lessons and Conclusions From the War in Afghanistan (2001-2021)

The Dynamic of the United States Political Elites Construction on Taliban in Afghanistan. Case Study of the Us Presidents’ Throughts on Terrorism Policies, from President Josh W. Bush to President Joe Biden (2001-2021)

This study aims to find out and analyze how the thought construction of the president of the United States can influence policies on eradicating terrorism and the war between the US and the Taliban that has been going on for 20 years. The US government began to focus more on terrorism after September 11, 2001, or the so-called 9/11 tragedy, which caused the two symbols of the United States, the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon, to become targets for attacks by Al-Qaeda. The leader of Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, is known to be hiding in Afghanistan, the territory of the Taliban. The US considered the Taliban to be protecting Osama, so it immediately sent military troops to Afghanistan, and war broke out between the US and the Taliban. During these two decades, the United States has been led by four presidents with different constructions of thought in providing policies, particularly on the issues of terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. Based on this, the authors analyze the thought construction of each president to see the impact of the US Presidential Policy in fighting terrorism and the war between US and Taliban in Afghanistan

Impact of Select National and International Incidents on Gold and Silver Prices in India

In this paper an attempt is made to know the impact of select national and international incidents such as Russia and Ukraine War, Afghanistan War, 1st Lockdown in India, US and Iraq Civil war and Surgical Strike in India on gold and silver prices from 2019 to 2022. The study used t-test: Paired Two Sample for Means and correlation to know the volatility and relationship between gold, silver prices with the value of Indian currency. The study finds the significance difference between gold prices, silver prices and value of Indian currency before and after the incidents. The study also finds whether there is any relationship between the gold prices, silver prices with Indian currency and how they are related to each other.

Pakistan: A Client in Search of Patronizing Ummah

As a new nation-state in 1947, Pakistan’s relations with the larger Arab world were fraught with many tensions and contradictions. Ever since, many readjustments have taken place on both sides. These rearrangements derive from such tectonic shifts as the ebbing away of Arab nationalism 1967 onwards, petro-dollar rush in the 1970s, Iranian revolution in 1979, end of Third worldism, Afghan war, unipolarity post–Berlin Wall, 9/11 besides labour migrations, military alliances and domestic imperatives of various states and polities. Presently, Pakistan is tied to the Middle East in a three-pronged manner. Economically, it is dependent on petro-dollar rich Gulf Sheikhdoms. This relationship can be described as pure clientelism. Next, geographical proximity and Cold War compulsions have implied an unavoidable Iranian nexus. Finally, with the rather recent rise of Turkey as a subimperial power in the Middle East, Pakistan has also tilted towards Turkey of late. However, beyond geopolitics and economy, Pakistan’s embrace of the larger Muslim world has ideological connotations as well. Imagined as a Muslim Zion, commissars at the helm of ideological state apparatuses in Pakistan have always imagined Pakistan as an integral part of the larger Muslim community, numerous contradictions notwithstanding. Hence, informed by the theories of clientelism and subimperialism, this study argues that Pakistan’s relations with the Middle East are anchored in economics, geopolitics and identity.

Perspectives on the Afghanistan War: Commentaries on a Misadventure

This article introduces the Symposium on the Afghanistan War. During and after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, emotions ran high. This special issue responds to public calls for further in-depth study of the Afghanistan War. We assembled an international array of interdisciplinary scholars who address reasons the mission became a misadventure. Additional papers focus on the consequences borne by the people who served and the institutions that fought America’s longest war.

NATIONAL INTERNAL SECURITY POLICY: AN ASSESSMENT

For the last few years, Pakistan has faced many traditional and nontraditional security threats. Among them, the fatal threat is terrorism and extremism in the country, which has largely been connected with the Afghan war. After 9/11, terrorism and extremism got triggered in Pakistan, in which the country faced heavy consequences in terms of economy, loss of life, and destruction of infrastructure. This grave situation compelled the government to develop a comprehensive national security policy to address the growing threats. In 2014, the government enacted the first NISP 20142018. The focus was to initiate military operations in FATA areas to eliminate the terrorist’s hold, which achieved some positive outcomes in the short run. In 2018, prior to the general elections, the previous government announced another NISP 2018-2023. The implementation of that newly announced security policy was handed over to the new government. It was observed that the policy could not achieve the desired outcomes, as there were certain loopholes in the formulation and implementation of these stages. In this regard, the focus of the current research is, to critically analyze the drawbacks of NISP for the period of 2018-2023.
 Keywords: extremism, NAP, NACTA, NISP, security, terrorism

SRAD Director's Corner: Afghanistan: The Logic of Failing, Fast and Slow

In the fifth installment of the SRAD Director’s Corner, “Afghanistan: The Logic of Failing, Fast and Slow,” George Shatzer focuses on the failure of the US-led war and reconstruction campaign in Afghanistan. He reviews The Forty-year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold by Tariq Ali and The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman. He brings personal experience to bear in his review, painting a picture of why the United States failed in Afghanistan and posing these failures as lessons that must be learned before the next war. The books also provide insights for strategists attempting to plan for security in the region.

Returning Home After War: Representations of Romanian Veterans in a Contemporary War Novel (Schije/Shrapnel)

Military homecoming is commonly viewed as a distressing experience. However, the novel Schije (Shrapnel, in English) tells a Romanian paratrooper's (Toma) positive story of returning home from the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021). By exploring spaces, emotions, and relationships that help Toma to recover, this article makes a two-fold contribution to the existing literature. Firstly, it shows that homes play a restorative role in veterans’ life. Secondly, the experiences of Romanian veterans and their families illustrate the changing nature of civil-military relations in Romania after 1989, thereby shedding light on the intersections of neoliberalism, postsocialism, and militarism in contemporary warfare. Overall, this article deepens and broadens the role of cultural representations in shaping understandings of war, military service, and veterans.

The Bleeding Wound: The Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Collapse of the Soviet System by Yaacov Ro’i

This author’s prolific scholarship combines nuanced argumentation with an encylopedic knowledge of late-socialist Soviet society, notably in the realms of foreign relations, nationalities policy, and religion. In this exhaustively researched book, Ro’i turns his attention to the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989), a conflict that Eduard Shevardnadze, the USSR’s last foreign minister, termed “a sin” in a 1990 speech to the Supreme Soviet (115). Although a number of excellent monographs on the subject have been published in recent years, Ro’i offers something new. In 1992/3, when a conflict that killed at least 15,000 Soviet soldiers and more than a million Afghans was recent news, he and a small team of interviewers conducted surveys and interviews with hundreds of former Soviet citizens, most of them war veterans, across eleven Soviet republics and among emigrés in Israel. Incorporating elements of qualitative and quantitative data and analysis, the result is a source base rich and unique in its combination of detail and raw emotion.The Bleeding Wound is a magisterial survey of the war’s intersection with important trends in the Soviet 1980s. The assessment of Russian political scientist Dmitrii Ol’shanskii whom Ro’i quotes at the outset summarizes the book’s argument: “The truth about Afghanistan emerges only in a polyphony of varying points of view grounded in authentic knowledge” (5). Ro’i seeks to study “the ways that the war encompassed various aspects of late Soviet government and society” through the lens of “a number of topics that were of paramount importance in the 1980s” (306)—official (civilian and military) attitudes toward the various stages of the war, the behavior and treatment of Soviet soldiers, ethnic relations in the Red Army, Soviet popular culture, veterans (afgantsy), and glasnost’. The book is organized according to ten thematic chapters, two providing a detailed chronology, three focusing on the military, and two engaging with media and public opinion. The final three chapters analyze the challenges confronting returning afgantsy, the position of Central Asian Muslims in the Red Army, and the political activity of afgantsy during and after the Soviet collapse.One area in which the book breaks new ground concerns its focus on Central Asian Muslims. Historically speaking, the Central Asian republics and Afghanistan hold much in common. The long-standing conventional wisdom is that the Soviet leadership sought to capitalize on these affinities by deploying Central Asian soldiers in the initial part of the war, only to pull them back because they were too sympathetic to locals, too Muslim, or insufficiently “internationalist.” Ro’i’s interviews and survey data allow him to paint a more complex picture. For example, his Central Asian respondents rated the need to intervene in Afghanistan much higher than did Russians, other Slavs, and Muslims from Russia and the Caucasus. In the early part of the war, 56 percent of Central Asian subjects affirmed the USSR’s “need” to intervene, compared to 31 percent of Russians (169). By contrast, in the same period, Central Asians scored lowest on the “moral right” to intervene compared to the same groups (173). Results like this one lead Ro’i to highlight the limitations of such surveys, and to rely instead on interviews with forty-four veterans and fifty civilians from the region. He identifies racism and Islamophobia as reasons behind doubt (in the USSR and Washington) about the Central Asians’ patriotism (260): “Careful scrutiny of the evidence demands that we refrain from drawing conclusions about widespread Central Asian disloyalty to the Soviet Union (261).” Rather than making sweeping generalizations, Ro’i brings his Central Asian informants to life by skillfully deploying colorful vignettes, such as one about a Tajik soldier who met Afghans who had known his parents. These and other accounts help to lighten the mood of a work that can make for harrowing reading (260).Jam-packed as it is with data and dense analysis, The Bleeding Wound may intimidate non-specialist readers. But Ro’i’s gift for weaving a galaxy of sources, and many different methodologies, into one elegant narrative, makes this book unique. It is both an excellent introduction for the more intrepid general reader and, more obviously, a key reference work about the Afghan War and the Soviet 1980s.

Exploring the trajectory and correlates of social isolation for veterans across a 6-month period during COVID-19.

Social isolation is a relevant problem for veterans who are at risk for disengaging from others as a function of transition stress from military life to civilian life, and given high rates of exposure to trauma and psychological distress. Few researchers have examined social isolation in veterans over time, particularly during COVID-19 that led to significant barriers and restrictions on social interactions. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to assess veterans' experience of social isolation and its mental health and social functioning correlates during a 6-month period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were 188 United States veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A total of four assessments were administered: one every two months for a total duration of six months. The average number of completed assessments across all participants was 3.70 (SD = 0.75) with 159 participants (84.13%) completing all four timepoints. Surveys included measures of global mental health and social functioning as indicated by perceived emotional support, quality of marriage, and couple satisfaction. Multilevel modeling was used to assess 1) growth models to determine whether social isolation changed over time and the trajectory of that change (i.e., linear or quadratic); and 2) whether social isolation was related to both concurrent and prospective indicators of mental health and social functioning. All analyses included person mean centered and grand mean centered isolation to assess for within-and between-person effects. Veterans reported a quadratic trajectory in social isolation that decreased slightly and stabilized over time. Findings indicate that higher social isolation, at both the within- and between-person level, was negatively associated with concurrent emotional support, mental health, quality of marriage, and couple satisfaction. However, all prospective effects were nonsignificant at the within-person level. Results suggest although isolation may decrease over time, veterans report worse mental health and social functioning during times when they report higher levels of social isolation compared to themselves and others. Future work is needed to determine if interventions can be applied during those times to prevent or target those negative associations.

U.S. Foreign Policy and the War in Ukraine

This essay assesses the impact of the war in Ukraine on American foreign policy. The thesis provided here is that the war in Ukraine must be viewed as a painful but maybe necessary shock therapy that has helped to relieve the residual hangover from America’s two-decade-long, ill-advised war on terror and the lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In parallel, the war has served as a vehicle for the reinvigoration of national grand strategy and the foreign policy that provides the vital connective tissue between ends, ways, and means. In this trinity, the foreign policy represents an instrumental tool to connect the assumptions that undergird grand strategy to the practical, real-world of international politics.

An Analysis of Afghanistan's Postwar Condition and How to Use AI Technology to Address It

In August 2021, President Biden announced the withdrawal of the US army from Afghanistan. As the final armed force withdrew on August 30th, 2021, the long-term direct interference of the US army in Afghanistan ended. Since the Afghanistan War in 2001, US-led forces have sought to eliminate insurgencies and reestablish social and political orders. In the past 20 years, the US has spent considerable effort and funds to assist in the recovery and development of Afghanistan. The reappearance of the Taliban in power in Afghanistan and the retreat of US forces from the nation revealed that all the efforts the US had previously made did not meet the expectation they should have. Thus, the inefficiency of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan could be a sign that the currently existing methods might not be able to provide an effective solution for the situation in Afghanistan. Inspired by the development of novel technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, this article argues that the current usage and development of such technologies can foreshadow possible solutions to Afghanistan's various problems.

Bayesian Inferences for Counterterrorism Policy: A Retrospective Case Study of the U.S. War in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT This study employs hierarchical Bayesian analysis of terrorist attacks to provide a retrospective analysis of the war in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2018. We examine the relationship between U.S. troop levels, target type, and the severity of attacks in terms of the number killed or wounded. We find that although some targets might have become better fortified after enduring attacks (such as police departments), terrorists would subsequently succeed in either attacking other targets (such as educational institutions) or even those same targets in subsequent years. Our analysis also finds that increases in U.S. troop levels throughout much of the conflict did not seem to quell violence, although explanations of this phenomenon are considerably more nuanced after taking expert opinion into account. We hope our analysis provides a useful retrospective analysis of the U.S. War in Afghanistan for policymakers to assess how or if security measures in the country could have been improved over the course of the conflict. Our modeling framework, however, is easily generalizable to other conflicts worldwide and thus provides a useful statistical tool for analyzing terrorism in many other settings as well.

Le développement du discours des personnes blessées psychiques : de l’indicible à la métaphore

BackgroundDespite a growing societal interest and a progressive enrichment of the semiological description of post-traumatic psychic disorders in the contemporary English and French-speaking literatures, under-diagnosis and late diagnosis, at the stage of intense suffering, remain numerous. Indeed, the post-traumatic origins of the disorders are most often kept silent, due to their clinical characteristics which are often understood as “unspeakable” as the literature says. How to talk about one's trauma? Is it really possible? Objectives, materials and methodsAfter clarifying the linguistic data of interest concerning normal verbal production, we study the accounts of traumatic events produced by survivors of the Paris attacks (Bataclan attack) and by military personnel suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (war in Afghanistan) in order to authenticate their language dysfluencies (pauses, repetitions, incomplete utterances) compared to a control group.We specify the strategies spontaneously used by the patients to overcome the difficulties in describing their traumatic experience (use of periphrases, metaphors, generic words). ResultsRegarding dysfluencies, our hypothesis was partially verified: the traumatic narratives contained significantly more repetitions and incomplete utterances than the control narratives, but no difference was observed with respect to silent or filled pauses. Regarding adaptive strategies, the trauma narratives contained more periphrases and metaphors, while the use of generic words was not greater than in the control narratives. DiscussionThe non-significance of the data concerning pauses could be consequential to the size of our corpus because an increase in the number of occurrences of each dysfluency studied is gradually sensitized from control to psychically injured people of attacks, then of war, following gradually: incomplete statements, repetitions, silent pauses, and finally filled pauses. This increase can be explained by the chronicisation of the symptoms of the acute stress disorder corresponding to the “Bataclan” corpus, up to a chronic post-traumatic psychic disorder present for several years as in the military interviewed. We can therefore hypothesize a typology of dysfluencies according to the degree of chronicity of the traumatic repetitive syndrome. With regard to palliative strategies, many metaphors used by psychically injured patients remain metaphors in the linguistic sense of the term, without necessarily becoming metaphors in the psychological sense of full access to the second degree, to symbolization, to the association of dimensions initially dissociated by the trauma. However, in the discourse of certain patients, a gradient of metaphorization, from the literal traumatic image to the symbolic construction, seems to exist, as a path towards healing. Metaphorization appears to be a tool for overcoming trauma re-experiencing. It is not so much the theme of the metaphor that is psychotherapeutically important but the process itself of its formation. ConclusionFrom defusing to debriefing to subsequent care when necessary, the principles classically promoted by the psychotherapies work towards a common goal: the symbolization of the trauma. The psycholinguistic study appears here as a heuristic research space in order to clarify the etiopathogeny, the clinical forms and the efficient care offered to patients suffering from post-traumatic psychic disorders. While the traumatic psycholinguistic syndrome (SPLIT) reflects the damage to language that is constitutive of the trauma, conversely, it is language rebuilt during psychotherapy that allows one to escape from the intrusions. At a time when different “schools” of psychotherapy (behavioral and cognitive protocols, hypnosis treatments, eye movement therapies, narrative therapies, etc.) are competing with each other, the analysis of language restoration could unify a specific conception of the alleviation of traumatic consequences while defining linguistic markers that would allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of the recommended treatments.