ABSTRACT
Afghanistan attracted considerable Western attention and engagement. The military operation was the largest ever deployed by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and the various civilian efforts were manifold and many-layered. This chapter shows that an analysis of identity processes can help us to understand how the various intervening actors acted the way they did, and why coherence between them was so difficult to achieve. The three identities (military, humanitarian and state-building) share one feature: the actors saw the need for them to be in Afghanistan, and with a role for themselves. Thus, ‘Afghanistan’ constitutes something outside of them – a place where one intervenes or enters, doing something that legitimizes the activity: it serves as the Other for the intervening Self. The military in Afghanistan was by far the most dominant group of interveners. It involved the greatest number of people and was the most powerful in terms of force on the ground.
