1
The Road to War
The road to war in Afghanistan was not a straight one. There is by
now a vast and sophisticated modern literature on the causes of
war (see, for example, Waltz, 1959; Aron, 1966; Blainey, 1973;
Holsti, 1996; Doyle, 1997; Black, 1998), building on the insights
of such classical theorists as Thucydides, Hobbes, Rousseau, and
Kant, which points to the potential roles of individuals, state struc-
tures, and anarchical interstate orders in contributing to the out-
break of war. There is also a very useful body of work on the role
of perception and misperception in the shaping of policy (Jervis,
1976; Vertzberger, 1990). Making proper use of this material is
always a challenge. On the one hand, it is perilous to become fix-
ated with any single factor which the literature identifies. As the
late Bernard Brodie once shrewdly observed, ‘any theory of the
causes of war in general or of any war in particular that is not
inherently eclectic and comprehensive, that is, which does not take
into account at the outset the relevance of all sorts of diverse fac-
tors, is bound for that very reason to be wrong’ (Brodie, 1973:
339). At the same time, to explore all the insights which these
writings can offer to those interested in the causes of the
Afghanistan War would rapidly exhaust the patience of the reader.
My hope is rather that echoes from these magisterial analyses will
be audible at many different points in the pages which follow.
Interstate wars rarely occur without warning, and even when
they are preceded by only a short crisis, as was the case with the
Franco–Prussian War (Richardson, 1994: 161), they are typically