Afghanistan: the Tale of a Failure Foretold

When and for what reasons did the international coalition fail?

Reconstructing the various phases of the international community’s action in Afghanistan is a complex exercise: years of storytelling by the United States and NATO have distorted the reality of our engagement, strategies and results in Afghanistan. The myth of victory, the sometimes misleading explanations for our presence in the country and the rewriting of the history of the mission of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and of the conditions on the ground have combined — with vast quantities of statistics, charts and PowerPoint presentations — to convince public opinion of the success of the mission and to justify the human and financial resources deployed. And, over time, the gap between the official discourse and the reality on the ground has widened…