IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cposxx/v43y2022i6p1216-1234.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Strategic ambiguity: the U.S. grand strategy initiative in Afghanistan

Author

Listed:
  • James D. Boys

Abstract

A cacophony of protest greeted President Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan following a 20-year deployment, implemented and overseen by four different administrations, both Republican and Democrat. For all the criticism of the final withdrawal’s implementation, however, strategic ambivalence was always present in U.S. operations in Afghanistan. The bi-partisan decisions that defined the Afghan mission can best be seen in the National Security Strategy documents produced by successive administrations as they sought to address the evolving situation on the ground and the perceived level of threat to the United States. The utilization of discourse analysis to examine these official policy documents allows for an understanding of the comparable attention that was paid to Afghanistan by successive administrations, as well as for an appreciation of the tone and language used regarding the nation. Doing so reveals that despite the duration of the mission and the associated costs, a deep-seated strategic ambiguity existed towards Afghanistan, as it languished as a sideshow for U.S. grand strategy.

Suggested Citation

  • James D. Boys, 2022. "Strategic ambiguity: the U.S. grand strategy initiative in Afghanistan," Policy Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(6), pages 1216-1234, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:cposxx:v:43:y:2022:i:6:p:1216-1234
    DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2022.2057461
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01442872.2022.2057461
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01442872.2022.2057461?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wang Xudong, 2024. "A Critical Discourse Analysis of Online News Reports on the Withdrawal of US Troops from Afghanistan," International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS), vol. 8(3), pages 2977-2981, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cposxx:v:43:y:2022:i:6:p:1216-1234. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cpos .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.