Former CCW Visiting Research Fellow and Member of CCW, Dr Todd Greentree, has published a new article in the The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters.

The article in entitled “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan” and was published in Volume 51, Issue no. 4 (2021). Click here to read the article.

“Critics of the Afghan war have claimed it was always unwinnable. This article argues the war was unwinnable the way it was fought and posits an alternative based on the Afghan way of war and the US approach to counterinsurgency in El Salvador during the final decade of the Cold War. Respecting the political and military dictates of strategy could have made America’s longest foreign war unnecessary and is a warning for the wars we will fight in the future.”

Dr Todd Greentree is a former US foreign service officer, who served as a political-military officer in five conflicts, including El Salvador (1980–84) and Afghanistan (2008–12). He is a member of the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University and teaches in the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. His publications include Crossroads of Intervention: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Lessons from Central America (2008) and numerous articles on Afghanistan published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, War on the Rocks, and elsewhere.