Afghanistan: Reconstruction Challenges and Dilemmas

This paper outlines the general context of reconstruction endeavours, identifies some of the specific roles that international actors have come to play, and concludes by discussing some of the challenges and dilemmas that the Afghanistan case has highlighted. If there is a key lesson for civil-military interaction from this case, it is surely that there is a huge difference between abstract commitment to ‘coordination’ as a good, and the practical achievement of coordination in an environment populated by a range of actors with diverse histories, interests, and time horizons.