ABSTRACT
The experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests that, unless regime change is followed by successful stabilisation, the resulting conditions can be as bad as, if not worse than, those that preceded the campaign. During post-conflict operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US and its allies struggled to align ends, ways and means for stabilisation, reconstruction and efforts to achieve the political progress crucial to their strategic objectives. A comprehensive counter-insurgency campaign reversed the decline in security, particularly through the United States’ 2007 surge of additional troops into Iraq and co-option of Sunni tribes willing to fight al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, the initial defeat of the Taliban was followed by inadequate efforts to build state capacity. Military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were ‘among the people’, in urban areas of both countries and in Afghanistan’s densely populated Helmand and Kandahar provinces.
