The Past Speaks

I would like to bring your attention to “Afghanistan’s armies, past and present“, a paper by Stephanie Cronin recently published on the History and Policy website. In a History and Policy paper, historians with appropiate expertise boil down their research into a short paper that provides a “take-home” lesson for people in government and the media.

Stephanie Cronin is Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.  She writes:

There have been many attempts at army reform in Afghanistan since the early nineteenth century. They all unquestioningly adopted a Western model for military reform for which neither the fiscal nor the human resources were available, and no consideration was given to the viability of this model in the absence of national administrative structures or economic development.