Introduction: Shaping societies for war: Strategic narratives and public opinion

How do western governments endeavor to build and maintain public support for costly military interventions that are generally perceived as “wars-of-choice?” What types of arguments and interpretive frameworks do they employ? How do the public respond to elite attempts to generate popular backing for drawn-out military interventions? And to what extent can policy-makers actually influence the public’s war perceptions by the use of carefully designed storylines? These are the main questions addressed in this book. Specifically, the volume examines how various western states contributing to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF ) in Afghanistan have “marketed” the armed intervention to largely reluctant voters and taxpayers. We choose this NATO-led security mission since it was a military intervention involving several countries, sanctioned by NATO and the UN, where public opinion support was crucial. Moreover, since the war has lasted more than a decade now, it provides a sound case study to really flesh out the waxing and waning of political and public support over a substantial number of years in many countries synchronically. How, in other words, have the contributing nations tried to sell the war in Afghanistan? We answer this question through the theoretical prism of strategic narratives. Our point of departure is that in contemporary wars, public opinion has decisive effects on outcomes. At heart, the book serves three major purposes: it investigates the arguments and explanatory frameworks utilized by different ISAF governments when “arguing Afghanistan” – i.e., their strategic narratives; it describes how the public in those countries reacted to different strategic narratives as well as to actual developments taking place on the ground in Afghanistan; and, finally, the book probes the extent to which the official depictions and representations of the armed intervention had a causal effect on public support for the war. In other words: did strong and consistent strategic narratives translate into wide-ranging public support, and vice versa?