‘What the devil did they think they were going to do in that mess?’ That quotation from Molière aptly describes NATO’s commitment in Afghanistan. Inherited by stages after 2003 from the American superpower,⁽¹⁾ the Afghan millstone is already weighing heavily around the neck of an organisation not designed to carry it. With the Islamic guerrilla war reborn in its Pathan sanctuaries, the West, clumsy as ever on Asian soil, could follow in the USSR’s footsteps by biting the dust of the Hindu Kush. Current developments in the Afghan revolt, the steady increase in NATO manpower and materiel,⁽²⁾ but also the growing isolation of the coalition troops in their fortified camps, are a reminder of the ‘limited Soviet contingent’. Once more, after four or five years of ‘wait and see’, Afghan society is beginning to be irritated by the foreign presence, and that is a very bad sign.

This state of affairs is not imputable to the quality of the 35,000 troops of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force).⁽³⁾ Those professional soldiers are doing their best in the circumstances. But in this distant theatre, expensive and difficult, they are employed hesitantly or parsimoniously. This is understandable, since the war of liberation that the US Army, initially well received, might have waged from the beginning has, through a progressive accumulation of mistakes, become a dangerous war of occupation, opportunely passed on to NATO, which is adapting to it as best it can.

Nearly all the experts agree: if the current strategy is maintained, the Afghan ship is heading for the rocks. This is, therefore, a good moment to examine the causes of the current difficulties, to assess the scale of the Taliban revolt, and to analyse Western impotence. This will lead, in a second article entitled ‘What is to be done?’, to the presentation of three scenarios: maintenance of the intervention, a NATO withdrawal for the protection of Central Asia, and the perception of the Afghan problem by its neighbours.