| Summary/Abstract |
The ‘war on terror’ produced discourses, which elevated terrorism as a primary threat to international peace and security and justified the overthrow of regimes that were suspected of supporting terrorism. After two decades, the United States (US) seeks to wind down the war, including through negotiations with groups that it once regarded as terrorist or complicit in terrorism. This article takes a critical approach to examine these shifts in US policy in relation to the Taliban in Afghanistan. It conceives the Taliban as a networked movement that consisted of local roots, transnational jihadist ties and connections to Pakistan’s proxy war in Afghanistan. The article then identifies and problematises key assumptions of American discourses by assessing them against local patterns of terrorism and (in)security and the Taliban’s violent tactics. Drawing on US sources, it finds that the US discourses shifted over time between various aspects of the Taliban movement as signifiers of its identity to justify shifting Washington’s priorities in Afghanistan. These discursive shifts, which reflected US policy priorities, introduced uncertainties and contradictions that contributed to the failure of the war efforts in Afghanistan.
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