ISAS Working Papers

In April 2013 the Defence Select Committee of the British Parliament published a report on Securing the Future of Afghanistan which concluded that civil war in Afghanistan is likely when the international forces there leave in 2014. One wonders what the Committee thought had been going on in Afghanistan over the past 35 years. The war between the Western forces and the Taliban is part and parcel of the Afghan civil war which began in 1979 between the Communists and their enemies and, after the collapse of the Communist regime in 1992, developed into a conflict between different factions of Mujahedin. Since 2001 the war has expanded to include conflict with the Western forces. What happened in 1979, and again 2001, was that foreign superpowers intervened on one side of a civil war, violently tipping the balance in favour of that side ÔÇô for a while. The question, therefore, is: Will this protracted civil war continue after the planned departure of American and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in 2014 or are alternative scenarios possible or likely?