This assignment was by far me the hardest assignment I was given this semester as it was a new form of writing that I’ve never done before. Combine that with my short attention span during class, and my lack of effort it was almost a sealed faith for me to fail. My main issue with the assignment wasn’t time management or not knowing what to do, it was the lack of effort. I attempted to complete an assignment that required me to read four sources, then critically think about them and how they influenced my opinion on the subject. I thought I can do this all without actually reading the four sources and get away with it, not only that I just accepted the information given to me by the author to the point where I basically said that America won the Vietnam war. Even though we lost to an insurgent cell, then the author attempted to explain how American leadership should adopt the same tactics used in a war where we lost. It wasn’t clarified to me till I sat down with the professor and actually listened, to what he had to say after I sent my revisions multiple times because I attempted to spot fix some grammar rather than focus on the major issues that were prominent in my paper. One of which was plagiarism, where I didn’t include quotations around an academic source that I found online about the state of Afghanistan which I attempted to skim through last moment before handing in my assignment. I was very narrow with my thinking as I assumed that all writers had some sort of bias that was extreme, but when I visited during office hours it broadened my way of thinking. Such as with the Marine Infantryman and his article about the Taliban destroying cell towers, and I could only think about how the author could be writing about it negatively rather than the positives. As well as generalizations about the target audience, and the purpose of the author. All of which I attempted to fix in the final version of the assignment.
Revised Assignment
Faris Mahrouss
Professor Grover
FIQWS 10003
23 September 2019
War, Factionalism, and the State in Afghanistan discusses the “interference of foreign powers in Afghanistan’s internal affairs, the failure of Afghanistan to produce a strong state because of ethnic factionalism, and an internal moral incoherence inherent to Afghan culture”(Shahrani,715) The purpose of the article is to view the events that led to the failure of Afghanistan’s Government and why Afghanistan’s Government is continuing to fail after the September 11thAttacks. The Author uses foreign interference as a line of reasoning to why the Afghanistan’s Government fails, such as the United States arming insurgents in the country, and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union; Which threw this country in a repeated cycle of failure as every leader would inherit a broken system in an unviable state to operate by itself. Nazif uses descriptions such as frail, collapsed, abusive, and weakened to describe the state of the Afghani Government which is impressionist on the formation of the reader’s opinion of the Afghani Government. The audience of the article is extremely narrow, as this article isn’t published in massive publications such as the New York Times which have daily issues.
Stephan B. Young wrote the article Why America Lost in Afghanistan with the purpose of informing the audience of the mistakes of the United States in its conflicts overseas during the modern post-9/11 era, while drawing comparisons from the previous Vietnam conflict during the 1960s to convince the reader to look unfavorably on the war in Afghanistan. Published using the internet as its medium for an audience primarily interested in modern conflict and US Foreign Policy, the article categorized in the post-9/11 genre it uses a passive authoritative tone, in which the author lists multiple facts to establish authority as an expert in the field, to allow the reader to trust the author and passively accept the information given to them. Which then makes the reader make the reader to concisely decide that the Afghanistan war has been drawn out too long without any sufficient progress. The author quotes the Commander-In-Chief Donald J. Trump in the article as a means of authority “You can talk about our generals. I gave our generals all the money they wanted. They didn’t do such a great job in Afghanistan. They’ve been fighting in Afghanistan for 19 years. … I want results.”. Expressing the success of CORDS in Vietnam brings up the question of the factual integrity of the article. Stephan essentially claims that American Policy put an end to the Viet Cong as an effective insurgency despite the Viet Cong defeating the United States in Vietnam, to a point where it later directly influenced the structural integrity of the United States Military; such where the United States look for personal, effectively changing how the draft lottery system works.
A more recent article To Disrupt Elections, Taliban Turn to an Old Tactic: Destroying Cell Towers published on October 3rd, 2019 in the New York Times written by Thomas Gibbons-Neff a former United States Marine Infantryman summarizing the tactics evoked by the Taliban in Afghanistan to disturb presidential elections throughout the country. Gibbons-Neff a former Martine writes this article to inform typically a large audience within the New York Metropolitan area; while the older demographic are more likely to have read the printed version of the article, even though it is published online which makes it more presentable to the younger more left leaning demographic of people aged 18-29. The author because he was a Marine could portray a bias in the character of the Afghani people, making assumptions without really providing sufficient evidence to support their claims since it’s anecdotal it’s easy for information to get distorted since it’s being relayed person to person. The stance of the author seems to be against the actions of the Taliban while criticizing the Afghani Government for their lack of action against the Taliban. While the tone of the author is written with a serious persuasive tone to adhere to the audience on informing them on the actions of the Taliban subconsciously making the reader to condemn their actions. All in the purpose of the article was to mainly inform the reader of the actions of the Taliban to distribute the Afghani presidential elections while having them subconsciously create an opinion on the media their selves.
The Alternate History Hub a YouTube Channel that’s been popularized by creating alternate scenarios in a “what if?” question format, all based upon his imagination even though it is based factually. The Video The Decision That Ruined the Middle East takes a different approach to his regular trend and provides a factually based argument on what ruined the Middle East blaming European Imperialism on redrawing the lines. The audience of this channel is a wide population and could be anyone from any group, with 1,633,610 views it’s hard to pinpoint an exact group that is viewing the video, but it’s safe to say that the author is targeting people that have an interest in History pertaining the middle east. The author’s purpose of the video is entertainment but also informative on the subject matter. While the tone of the author is prevalent as a funny semi-serious tone, due to the entertainment purpose of the video. The video pushes a narrative on the viewer as to vilify the British and French Empires, as creating a system that would later lead onto the enormous problems that result in the Middle East later in the modern era.
Work Cited
Gibbons-Neff Thomas To Disrupt Elections, Taliban Turn to an Old Tactic: Destroying Cell Towers The New York Times, October 2nd 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-cell-towers.html, Accessed October 12th 2019.
Shahrani, Nazif M. War, Factionalism, and the State in Afghanistan. American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3, 2002, pp. 715–722. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3567249.
Young, Stephen B. Why America Lost In Afghanistan. Foreign Policy, February 2nd 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/05/why-america-lost-in-afghanistan-counterinsurgency-cords-vietnam/. Accessed September 23rd, 2019.
Alternate History Hub. “The Decision That Ruined the Middle East” YouTube, uploaded by Alternate History Hub, 20 March 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaPWlKv7n0Y
