Testing Obama's Withdrawal Timeline Hypothesis in Afghanistan
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Michael Koprowski
The Obama Administration argued that a publicly announced withdrawal timeline would help further U.S. counterinsurgency (COIN) objectives in Afghanistan by incentivizing better behavior from the Karzai government and the Afghan people. In this article, I test the “Obama timeline hypothesis” to determine whether it is likely to produce the positive change that the Administration claims. By utilizing a mix of consistent historical predictors, deductive logic based on contemporary COIN theory, and currently available evidence, I conclude that the withdrawal timeline has not produced, and likely will not produce, these results and that, on the whole, it has likely engendered perverse incentives that run contrary to America’s COIN objectives. More broadly, the Afghan case should make U.S. policymakers deeply skeptical of assertions that withdrawal timelines can serve as an effective policy tool for changing the behaviors of key regional actors.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Historical Analogies, Military Surges, (and Economic Crises): Who Should be Consulted?
- It's the Financial Crisis, Stupid! How Framing and Competency Signals Altered the Economic Vote in the US and Germany
- Going off the Rails on a Crazy Train: The Causes and Consequences of Congressional Infamy
- Unhyphenated Americans in the 2010 U.S. House Election
- Candidate Obama and the Dilemmas of Political Time
- Obama to Blame? African American Surge Voters and the Ban on Same-Sex Marriage in Florida
- The Behavioral Political Economy of Budget Deficits: How Starve the Beast Policies Feed the Machine
- Publius and Proofiness: Is Using Sampling with the Census for Apportioning Representatives Constitutional?
- Testing Obama's Withdrawal Timeline Hypothesis in Afghanistan
- The Practicing Politics Working Group of the American Political Science Association: Bridging the Policy-Research Divide from the Practitioner's Point of View
- Response to Quirk's "Polarized Populism: Masses, Elites, and Partisan Conflict"
- Review
- A House Dividing: Understanding Polarization
- Review of Treaty Politics and the Rise of Executive Agreements: International Commitments in a System of Shared Powers
