For our final assignment of the term, two essays, each worth 100 points. With respect to length, you should aim for between 750 and 1250 words per essay. You can use the same short reference methods that we have used all term for anything that has been assigned for class (e.g.: (Gopal, 279). So long as it is clear what you have used to someone familiar with the readings, you’re fine however you cite the readings.
Second, those materials will give you more than enough evidence to argue your case. If you decide to use something that has not been assigned (not at all necessary or even helpful, especially if you just run an internet search looking for an answer), please give us a complete reference.
At the risk of repetition: these questions are not generic but rather are framed around the themes, topics, and issues we have been looking all term. You should address those issues in your essays. Just writing an essay about the wars in Afghanistan will not meet basic expectations; rather we expect you to engage with the arguments, issues, and readings that we have been using in this class.
Essay topic 1: The wars in Afghanistan
The general theme for this essay is the failure of both the USSR and the US to achieve their broad strategic objectives in Afghanistan. In addressing this question, you should keep in mind something I said in one of the videos, that most accounts will emphasize either the political or the military dimensions of those wars, but that no complete account of them can afford to ignore either of those dimensions. In other words, you want to say something about both the political and the military dimensions of those wars. In addition, you might find it useful, at least in organizing your thoughts, to distinguish between strategic aims and military operations and tactics. The central issue, of course, is that in neither case did military operations lead to the realization of political objectives. But was that because the strategic aims were unrealistic or flawed, or because the military operations conducted by the US and/or the USSR were not suited to the strategic aims or otherwise flawed, either in design or execution? Note that any answer to this question presupposes some analysis of Afghan society and politics: don’t just look at the sides with the biggest weapons. The entire point is that having the biggest weapons does not guarantee victory. To cite one of the concepts I’ve been employing, in a war amongst the people, the people have a vote. So, you want to think about how the wars in Afghanistan that basic idea and what evidence from our readings you want to use to illustrate the point.
Essay topic 2: Wars amongst the people: an adequate or useful concept for understanding the recent (that is, since WWII) history of warfare?
The framing device we have used all term is the idea, borrowed from General Rupert Smith, of a paradigm shift in the nature of war over the last seven decades from war “as a massive deciding event … a battle in a field between men and machinery” to “war amongst the people.”
The topic for this essay is, to what extent do the wars that we’ve looked at this term (Chinese civil war, Korean War, Cold war, Vietnam war, Afghanistan, and Ukraine war) conform to Smith’s thesis? And to what extent does the emphasis on “war amongst the people” help to identify some of characteristic feature of the wars in our contemporary world? Those questions of course imply the other side of the coin: what does Smith’s thesis miss or what might it lead us to under-emphasize or overlook in the warfare of the last several decades?
I would suggest examining both sides of the question (that is, that the idea that trend toward “wars amongst the people” is both useful but that it also elides certain aspects of contemporary warfare) and placing your “minor” thesis (that is, what you think is less important) in the first half of your essay; and your “major” thesis in the second half.
Remember that we are concluding this term with the war in Ukraine: what appears at first sight to be a “conventional” war. And yet maybe not. What does that war suggest about the validity of Smith’s thesis?
Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (2010)
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/reader.action?docID=887204
Barnett Rubin, “Saving Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, 86:1 (Jan-Feb, 2007): 57-74
https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=88933484-7feb-48e6-ab3d-6d7758fa9161%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=23521761&db=aph
Bruce Riedel, What We Won (Brookings, 2014)
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/reader.action?docID=1700050
Afghanistan 1979: The War That Changed the World
https://docuseek2.com/cart/product/856
Harold Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/reader.action?docID=2084364