JOURNAL OF DEFENCE STUDIES

War and State-Building in Afghanistan: Historical and Modern Perspectives, edited by Scott Gates and Kaushik Roy

Manas Dutta is Assistant Professor, Department of History, Kazi Nazrul University,West Bengal, India.
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Email
  • Whatsapp
  • Linkedin
  • Print
  • April 2016
    Volume: 
    10
    Issue: 
    2
    Book Review

    War and State-Building in Afghanistan deals with one of South Asia’s most turbulent states, Afghanistan, and its socio-political and military conditions. This book also traces the processes that have shaped the geopolitics of Afghanistan. Afghanistan has been occupied by the Mughals, British, Soviets, Americans and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The book looks at their efforts at counter-insurgency (COIN) operations in the last five centuries ranging from 1520 to 2012. During the Cold War era, Afghanistan was a centre of conflict of the great/big powers of the world, and that instigated the profit mechanism of these great powers to show their calibre in international power politics. Unlike most of the recently published military histories of Afghanistan, the present volume consists of a political and military narrative of Afghanistan’s conventional and unconventional warfare, which has continued over the last five centuries. The editors along with a host of experts in Afghan studies, by applying wide-ranging sources, examine why repeated initiatives have failed to remove instability in the country (p. 17).

    AttachmentSize
    Download Complete [PDF]114.06 KB

    Top