Why do Wars become so Difficult to End?: An Analysis of the Wars in Afghanistan

Wars are often easier to start than to finish. This is a product of multiple cascading internal and external factors, which shift the incentives from ending a conflict to prolonging the conflict. Afghanistan offers one of the clearest examples: over nearly five decades, foreign interventions, civil conflict, shifting alliances, and competing political objectives repeatedly transformed limited interventions into prolonged wars. This book does not attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the history of Afghanistan; instead, it focuses on drawing causal mechanisms behind prolonged conflict. Through the Soviet-Afghan War and the later American intervention, it explores misperception, political instability, military power, internationalization, and the institutional machinery of war, and how decisions made at one stage of a conflict can create the conditions for the next.