ISAS Working Papers

Mullah Omar’s face bore no resemblance to that of the celestial beauty, Helen of Troy. Yet it too was one that caused the launch of a thousand ships, airships to be more precise, as Helen’s had done. Like Troy, the besieged city of the past in Homer’s epic tale of ‘IIIiad’, Afghanistan of the present, was swarmed by invaders, by those whom some see as the modern counterpart of the Greeks – the Americans and their allies. As in the Trojan War, ten years down the line, the war council (NATO Summit, in this case) met, as it must have also in Mycenae of ancient Greece, in Chicago in the United States, home of the modern-day mighty Agamemnon, President Barack Obama. In Chicago, as it also had happened in the epic tale, after ten years of unwinnable and unrewarding warring, the invaders finally decided to call it a day. In “line” with a “firm commitment to a sovereign, secure and democratic Afghanistan”, it was decided at the gathering of NATO leaders that the allies’ “mission will be concluded by 2014”. True to his words, Obama had no intention of staying around to build a “Jeffersonian democracy” (in those parts).