Contemporary Afghanistan

A country of incomprehensible intricacy and unremitting crisis, it is sometimes trendy to describe today's Afghanistan as a post-conflict country. This is misleading, because, for centuries, Afghanistan has been suffering from a variety of domestic and international conflicts at different levels and varying intensity and there are no signs of this trend waning away. Afghanistan is a conflict-prone state, conflict being endemic to the Afghan society. The book explores the state of Afghanistan from a political and historical perspective to find out why and how Afghanistan has remained a conflict-prone country. It highlights the comprehensiveness of the destruction in Afghanistan through different phases and establishes the interconnectivity of the social, political and economic consequences. More often than not, Afghan conflicts are researched with a zealous emphasis on the involvement of the external actors. The study attempts to establish that conflicts are endemic to the traditional Afghan system with external actors acting as catalyst to this potential, exacerbating them beyond means of conflict. Further, by studying the foreign intervention in the country from 9/11 leading up to the Bonn Agreement, the book attempts to highlight the challenges the country now faces in terms of peace and stability. Because a stable Afghanistan is important to the region and the globe, strategies to address the Afghan conflict and evolving an effective peace-building strategy becomes an important purpose of academic pursuit. It analyses the progress and pitfalls of the process under the theoretical framework of peace-building thereby suggesting workable responses to the problem.