Obama and Afghanistan: a constructivist approach to shifting policy narrative and practices

What is it about?

This article adopts a constructivist approach to explain how and why the Obama administration shifted its policy narrative and practices towards Afghanistan from 2011 onwards. It recognizes that the ‘Global War on Terror’ narrative helped pave the way for a set of institutionalized militarized practices and collectively held beliefs that have structured the post-9/11 world. At the same time, the article argues that the Obama administration’s ‘selling’ of its Afghan policy provided the space for an evolving approach. This policy narrative involved the ‘existential threat’ of transnational militant actors operating out of an Afghanistan–Pakistan ungoverned space being downgraded to a ‘containable’ one. Three key factors prompted this change: the administration’s discursive decoupling of the Taliban and al-Qaeda; the changing perception that the threat posed by ‘al-Qaeda and its affiliates’ was a decentralized one; and the United States’ changed conception of Afghanistan as a ‘safe haven’ for transnational terrorists.

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