A Bureaucratic Politics Analysis Of The US Adoption Of The Light Footprint Approach In Afghanistan In 2002

The Afghanistan war has been dragging on for more than 18 years.The light footprint approach the US initially adopted in Afghanistan after removing the Taliban from power is sometimes blamed for resulting in the current state of the war,yet the reason why the approach was adopted has not received adequate attention.Actually,even if this decision was not partially responsible for the current state of the war,merely being the earliest strategic decision the US made for its role in the post-Taliban Afghanistan war is enough to make it a topic worthy of exploring,as it sheds light on the decision-making mechanism inside the Bush administration regarding the Afghanistan war.The limited scholarship that touches upon the topic generally explains it away as a means to an end—a reasonably choice to achieve certain objective.Apparently those explanations were structured under the framework of the rational actor theory of’decision-making.The author found those explanations far from satisfactory as they leave questions unanswered.Therefore,the author decided to approach the issue from another angleIn order to understand the US decision to go light footprint in Afghanistan in 2002.the paper looks at the issue through a bureaucratic politics lens.The bureaucratic politics model the paper establishes inherits the analytical framework of Allison’s bureaucratic politics model which revolves around four focuses:decision-makers in the decision-making process,their stances,their power,and how the process unfolds that leads to the final decision.It also retains Allison’s model’s emphasis on parochialism.However,it rejects the institutional determinism that is easily associated with the bureaucratic politics analysis and instead highlights the human element at work in the decision-making process,specifically the individual agency decision-makers possess in making the decision.What’s more,it also refines the bureaucratic politics analysis by incorporating president-advisor analysis into the bureaucratic politics framework.From the perspective of the bureaucratic politics,the paper finds that the US decision to adopt the light footprint approach as its strategy in the post-Taliban Afghanistan in 2002 was more of the result of the bureaucratic bargaining games that happened inside the Bush administration than a value-maximizing alternative as the rational actor theory suggests;and that personal factors play a role as significant as systemic factors in delivering the result.Under the influence of both institutional preference and personal preference resulting from past experience and personal beliefs,the respective stance key decision-makers,namely Powell,Rumsfeld,and Rice,picked was to be expected,though the degree of each decision-maker’s autonomy varies,and depends on the(non-)existence of institutional consensus and their personality.Backed by their power mainly endowed on them by their positions,they were engaged in a series of case-oriented debates that would eventually lead to the determination of the light footprint approach as the US strategy in the post-Taliban Afghanistan.It should be noted that their power can also be affected by their willingness to make the best use of their bargaining advantage and their counterparts’perception of their advantage and the effectiveness of their usage of advantage.Among all related debates,the paper specifically examines the debates about the US response to the ISAF expansion and the Pacha Khan Challenge.The light footprint approach was largely decided in favor of Rumsfeld,mainly because he possessed better bargaining chips and he was a willful power wielder.But even Rumsfeld had to make concessions to reach the deal.In the whole process,personal factors like personality,past experience and personal beliefs are as important as systemic factors like institutional preference and the rules of the game in delivering the decisionHopefully the paper would first,by highlighting the individual agency in the analysis,develop the bureaucratic politics analysis in a way that it could better explain the decision-making process;and second,provide a fresh perspective to understand the Afghanistan war and the US foreign policy decision-making mechanism.