Difficult Choices of United States in Afghanistan: Compromise or Isolation

while "Afghanistan's violent project" is becoming one of the long wars in the history, understanding its processes and events is considered as a fundamental cornerstone to the oncoming future in this field. In this context, the key question is understanding the nature of US activism based on its withdrawal and presence continuation in Afghanistan and the way of their realization. The purpose of this paper is providing a response based on the scene's realities and its actor's overt and covert actions. Understanding the US behavioral logic, which has been based on "American peace image" and US dominance on the peace resulted from it in many times and places, has been chosen as a conceptual framework for US behavior. Also based on it, US strategic goals and intentions in Afghanistan and the conditions governing the battlefield have been reexamined. Relying on these methods and principles, there are several options before United States in Afghanistan: "short term presence of combat troops and continuation of long term presence of other forces in the form of military bases on Afghanistan soil", "agreement and reconciliation with the Taliban and power division with moderate spectra", "expansion of the war to peripheral regions in Afghanistan", "accepting defeat and full withdrawal from Afghanistan and beginning of the civil war" and so on.