Western Military Intervention and Ethno-Religious Conflicts: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Former Yugoslavia

And yet the West has played a part in fanning the nationalism it has roundly condemned. This chapter contends that the most significant cases of western military intervention since the end of the cold war-in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia-have actually led to the increased salience of ethnic and religious divisions in these countries.3 The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 led almost immediately to the rise of hitherto dormant ethnic and religious movements, most of which are now fueled by militant anti-Americanism. Following U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, the importance of the country’s ethnic and regional warlords to consolidating central authority increased. In the Balkans in the 1990s, military intervention led by the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) seemed, for a time, only to accelerate Serb efforts at ethnic cleansing. Greater Serb ambitions were subsequently dashed by the creation of independent states in Bosnia and Kosovo-two shaky countries carved out of historic Serb lands-but only an uneasy ethnic peace prevails in much of the region.