| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The presented article conceptualises the issue of over- and under-contribution in coalition operations; that of how and why members of complex coalitions may be punching above and below their weight, respectively. The first section presents a parsimonious baseline assumption regarding what variables may fundamentally inform coalition burden-sharing, to subsequently discuss how much each of these are found to play a role in the context of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) mission in Afghanistan. The second section elaborates on this by assessing the perception and the interpretation of threats by coalition members countries, related to Afghanistan. The third and fourth sections then proceed to examine and further enrich the existing literature on coalition burden-sharing, and provide further insights regarding the ISAF operation,. Preliminary findings are presented in the fifth section where we offer raw evidence of the relevance of our baseline assumptions. In the sixth section, we present integrated models of the key variables that play a role in shaping coalition contributions, and here two key periods form the focus of this study. On the one hand, we focus on the period of ISAF's cross-country involvement in Afghanistan, following ISAF's expansion of its operations to the south of Afghanistan in mid- 2006, up to mid-2011. Subsequently, we draw conclusions as to how the distribution of countries with different approaches or "commitment postures" may have affected Afghanistan strategy and developments on the ground in the context of the ongoing insurgencies. In the final section, we refine our initial baseline assumptions and the hypothesised country profiles which were based on the latter, with reference to a recently published collection of country case studies by a team of scholars.
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