...As benchmarks within political, military, and economic lines of effort were achieved in Iraq, the Bush administration felt it was making progress. This chapter shows how assessing progress within bureaucratic silos allowed the Bush administration to remain overly optimistic about a favorable...

... Counterinsurgency Patron-client relationship Wartime negotiations Civil-military relations Bureaucratic silos This book has examined post-9/11 interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in detail and provided a brief overview of the Vietnam War. The most obvious implication for the scholarship is the extent...

... Lakhdar Dobbins Ambassador James “Jim ” Malkasian Carter Northern Alliance Abdullah Foreign Minister Abdullah Bonn process Bureaucratic silos Lead Nation Concept Afghan Army Taliban Historian Russell Weigley famously characterized the American way of war as the use of industrial mobilization...

... General Karl Maples Lieutenant General Michael D Afghan National Army ANA Afghanistan Taliban Confirmation bias Bureaucratic silos Measuring success Predatory kleptocracy As the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, why did the United States cling stubbornly to bad strategies? Confirmation bias...

... Helmand province Afghanistan Afghanistan Bureaucratic silos Surge Strategy Financial columnist Gillian Tett reported extensively on the 2008 financial crisis. The more she learned about organizational behavior, the more she wondered why smart and capable people working in modern institutions...