Afghanistan Elections

Afghanistan and the elections 20

Index

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………...3

2. Scenario Tree………………………………………………………………………5

3. Analysis…………………………………………………………………………….6

1. Escalation………………………………………………………………………6

2. Status Quo……….……………………………………………………………10

3. De-escalation………………………………………………………………….13

4. Discussion and Conclusion………………………………………………….…....17

5. Bibliography………………………………………………………………………19

1. Introduction

Looking at Afghanistan’s history, one may say that this central-Asian country is “one of the world’s most conflict-ridden states”.[1] During the last three decades it has experienced several regime changes, most of them combined with a considerable number of social and armed conflicts.[2]

In the following, this paper examines Afghanistan’s future by creating a scenario of political and social possibilities of development during the next years, starting with the re-election of Hamid Karzai as the president in October 2009. By doing so, the paper starts out with briefly describing the background and current context of the ongoing conflict before it moves to analyze three different possibilities of development – escalation, status-quo and de-escalation – and finally discusses which of them seems to be the most likely to happen.

To gain an understanding of the extreme complex and intertwined background of the Afghanistan conflict, it seems appropriate to divide it into three different stages.[3] The first phase can be identified from 1979 up to 1992 and contains the invasion of the Soviet troops and the installation of a communist regime.[4] It is followed by the second phase from 1992 up to 1996 when several Mujahedin groups started to fight the communist regime, which finally led to a civil war between them and the Taliban. From 1996-2001 the Taliban took over the control of approximately 90% of the country and introduced Sharia-law to “defend the integrity and Islamic character of...