Review: The Afghanistan Challenge <i>Hard Realities and Strategic Choices</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE AFGHANISTAN CHALLENGE Hard Realities and Strategic Choices Hans-Georg Ehrhart and Charles C. Pentland, editors Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 250PP, $39.95 paper ISBN 978-1553392415At this critical time for with the internationally supported state-building process teetering on the edge of collapse, there strong demand for thoughtful analysis of what has gone wrong. This book joins a number of recent edited volumes (including J. Alexander Their's Future of Robert I. Rotberg's Building a New and Afghanistan: Transition under Threat, by Geoffrey Hayes and the present reviewer) that have sought to deepen our understanding of the current Afghan predicament and contribute to the seemingly unbroken stream of policy reassessments that governments have undertaken over the past two or three years. This collection diverges from the others in its focus on Germany and Canada as two vital members ofthe military mission and wider donor assistance effort.The product of an international conference on NATO and the international engagement in Afghanistan, held in December 2007 with the support ofthe Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg and the Centre for International Relations at Queen's University in Kingston, this Canadian-German dialogue, the editors write, is a bilateral distillation ofthe larger debate, both operational and existential, within the (2). division of into two tiers - those who engage in active combat and those who don't - one of the emerging legacies ofthe engagement. Given that Germany and Canada occupy opposing places in the divided alliance - Canada in the former tier and Germany in the latter - deconstructing their divergent policies and approaches could illuminate what this split means for the future of the mission and itself. However, the book's content does not live up to this promise.The collection features two sections. first breaks down various facets of the situation in while the second addresses individual Canadian and German policies and perspectives. Section one, the larger of the two, features some excellent chapters by world-class specialists. Conrad Schetter and Rainer Glassner's contribution on The changing face of warlordism in Afghanistan deserves particular mention. It rightly questions the caricatured image of the Afghan warlord and shows that rather than being a uniform, static, and monolithic entity in Afghan society, these powerbrokers take on widely different roles in the multiplicity of local security architectures that exist in Afghanistan.Janet Kursawe offers a concise and insightful analysis of an oft-overlooked issue, the Afghan- Iranian relationship. She astutely points out that a number of divergent interests shape Iran's attitude towards with the result that Tehran's policy multifaceted and often Janus-faced. Lara Olson and Andrea Charron challenge prevailing misconceptions about the role of nongovernmental organizations in Afghanistan. Although NGOs are indispensable in delivering services, they have only minimal input into policymaking.Despite the strength of some individual essays, there no unifying argument or framework to bind the first section. Some ofthe chapters take an academic approach to the subject, while others are more policy-oriented. And while some offer broad journalistic overviews, others focus on detailed case studies. As a consequence, the chapters do not hang together especially well. By attempting to cover a wide array of dilemmas facing instead of themes specific to Canada or Germany, the book overlooks some key issues. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".