Inescapable Entrapments?

For a long time, scholars and practitioners have been reluctant to examine how the armed forces shape foreign policy. This book addresses that question directly, looking at how the military influences decisions about where a state sends its forces, without trying to formulate general principles or make broad predictions. The author reconstructs, step by step, the chain of choices made by a group of senior British and Dutch civilian and military decision-makers that led to their troops being deployed to the Afghan provinces of Helmand and Uruzgan, and compares the two national cases side by side.

A central finding is that military initiatives themselves played a powerful part in shaping that sequence of decisions, so that political deliberations often followed a path set by earlier steps. According to the study, the British and Dutch commitment to southern Afghanistan grew out of a situation that largely developed on its own momentum.