There are countries that are difficult to understand when you start by looking at their borders. Afghanistan is one of them. For me, you have to start with the mountains. With the passes. With the valleys. With the tribes. With this extraordinary geography that has placed this territory for centuries between worlds seeking to connect, to trade, to monitor each other, or to clash.

Before being a state in the Western sense of the term, Afghanistan is a geography. And this geography has a particularity that almost all empires have ended up learning the hard way: it is much easier to enter Afghanistan than to leave victorious.

That is why the expression "cemetery of empires" has always interested me.

This obviously doesn't mean that no one has ever conquered Afghanistan. Quite the opposite is fascinating. Powers enter the country. They occupy it. They establish power. They sometimes announce victory. Then time begins to work against them.

The mountain resumes its role: the valleys, the tribal solidarities, the fighters, the porous borders, the sanctuaries, the supplies. And above all, this extraordinary ability to wait longer than someone who came from the outside. I painted this story in The Abode of Chaos. And I understand now that if you remove this plastic element from my analysis, the chapter becomes incomplete. I didn't discover Afghanistan to write these pages. For years, I chose the faces of those who embodied its fault lines.

Ahmed Shah Massoud, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Pashtun figures, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, Tora Bora, the bombings: for years, I chose the faces and signs that embodied these fault lines.

Western leaders came and went, each announcing a new phase of the war. The Abode of Chaos kept the players together while History continued to reshape their roles.

Massoud is obviously a key figure.

The Lion of Panchir.

I painted him because he embodied something that simplified Western readings of Afghanistan have always struggled to understand: in this country, resistance can never be reduced to a binary opposition between a government and a guerrilla.

There are valleys, peoples, commanders, loyalties, rivalries. These are stories that predate the war that the West would temporarily wage there.

Massoud had fought the Red Army.

Then the Taliban.

And his death, on September 9, 2001, retrospectively possesses an extraordinary historical power.

Two days before 9/11.

His assassination is itself a scene in this new war where the image becomes a weapon. Men present themselves as journalists. They come with a camera. The attack is concealed within the apparatus specifically designed to create an image.

This scene has always struck me. The camera, which should be recording reality, becomes the vehicle of its destruction.

Two days later, the planes flying through the World Trade Center towers produced in turn one of the most powerful images in contemporary history.

We have already entered a war where the image no longer comes only after the event. The image is part of the weapon.

That is precisely why Massoud had his place in the Abode of Chaos. His face does not only tell the story of Afghanistan. It belongs to the genealogy of 9/11.

Then there is Abdul Rashid Dostum. Another face. Another Afghanistan. A warlord.

A man whose life story is enough to destroy the overly simplistic moral categories with which we sometimes try to interpret these conflicts. Dostum transcends alliances, regimes, and wars. He belongs to that Afghan history where yesterday's enemy can become tomorrow's ally because political survival is built within a shifting architecture of local, ethnic, tribal, and international forces.

His name is associated with extreme violence and in particular with accusations concerning the treatment of Taliban prisoners after the fall of the regime in 2001. I painted him precisely because I wanted to preserve this type of character.

Not just presidents. Not just those whom Western diplomacy considers acceptable. Those who actually own a piece of the pie. That's one of the rules of my geopolitical work.

Official power is never enough. I seek effective power: that which controls a valley, a militia, a tribe, a sanctuary, a road, a border, a religious network, a population.

This also explains the presence of Pashtun figures in this map. We cannot understand the Taliban if we consider them solely as an ideological organization external to Afghan sociology.

It is equally incomprehensible to try to portray the Pashtuns as a homogenous bloc in Afghanistan. This is precisely what the eventual collapse of the Western system will demonstrate with extraordinary force.

For twenty years, we had built maps, institutions, an army, administrations, programs.

Billions of dollars had been spent. Then came 2021. And everything contracted in a matter of weeks.

I watched it without being truly surprised by the principle itself. The speed, however, was spectacular. Western assessments still anticipated a delay before Kabul fell. Then the Taliban advanced at a speed that stunned almost everyone. And, above all, they didn't always follow the trajectory that had been envisioned.

They obtain surrenders.

Arrangements. Passages. Local alliances.

They are also advancing from the North.

Territories that a simplified reading naturally imagined as anti-Taliban strongholds are giving way.

For what?

Because an ethnic map is never enough to understand a power dynamic. A man belongs to a tribe. But he also has a family.

An interest. A memory. A fear. A local adversary. A debt. An assessment of the future.

When the central state begins to lose its credibility, everyone recalculates their position. This is where geopolitics becomes almost anthropological.

The West counted the battalions. The Afghans sometimes simply looked at who would still be there tomorrow. And the Taliban had understood something fundamental: they didn't need to defeat every unit militarily. They had to convince enough men that the other side was going to disappear.

Time then becomes a weapon. That is probably the great lesson of Afghanistan.

The empire owns the planes.

Satellites.

Drones.

Special forces.

Billions.

The local fighter sometimes possesses something the empire cannot buy: he is at home. He can wait.

That's exactly what happened to the British. Then to the Soviets. And, in a different form, to the Americans and their allies.

That's where the Great Game comes in.

The expression dates back to the 19th century and the rivalry between the British Empire and the Russian Empire over Central Asia. But the concept goes far beyond this period.

Afghanistan is a transit and buffer zone.

Towards India, Central Asia, Iran, the Chinese world and the subcontinent.

The powers look at the map and see a position. The Afghans look at the powers and see visitors. This temporal asymmetry explains a great deal. The empire thinks in terms of mandates. In operations. In budgets. In electoral deadlines.

The local fighter can think in terms of generations. That's why I never believed the premature declarations of victory in Afghanistan. I knew the history too well.

And then there's Tora Bora.

Here again, the image is extraordinary. I worked on it because it produces an almost mythological confrontation between two architectural styles.

On one side, New York. The towers of the World Trade Center. The vertical summit of Western economic power.

The glass.

Steel.

Finance.

The networks.

Trading floors.

Telecommunications.

Verticality.

Two towers that seem to say: we have reached the pinnacle of modern power. And facing them, almost immediately in the global imagination: A mountain. A cave. A man.

Osama bin Laden.

I found this visual confrontation absolutely insane. It could have been invented by a science fiction screenwriter and we would have found it too symbolic.

On one side, the greatest technological sophistication. On the other, the myth of the cave. And in the cave, a man who was clearly not a poor shepherd cut off from the world.

Bin Laden belonged to one of the great Saudi construction families. He was familiar with modernity. He knew the networks. He knew about image. And he specifically chose to present himself from a setting that referred to another time period.

A weapon. A rock face. A recorded message.

The mountain.

This image was extraordinarily constructed. The man, emerging from a modern industrial world, portrayed himself as a caveman. Western financial power became a burning tower.

Two mythologies were in dialogue with each other.

I painted them. Because the Abode of Chaos had to preserve this clash of architectures. The World Trade Center and Tora Bora are not just two places. They are two representations of power.

The tower says: — I dominate by virtue of my height.

The cave responds: — I will survive through depth.

And suddenly, the entire story of the graveyard of empires is almost entirely contained within this opposition. Visible power versus buried resistance. Technology versus geography. Speed versus time. The satellite versus the mountain. The empire versus the sanctuary. It would obviously be too simplistic to limit ourselves to this poetic opposition. The Taliban used modern technologies. The Americans worked with local forces. Pakistan pursued its own agenda. The Gulf monarchies, Iran, Russia, China, and the Central Asian states all had their own interests.

Afghanistan has never been isolated.

But the power of the image allows us to understand something that military paintings show poorly: technological superiority never eliminates geography.

This is a lesson that the West periodically relearns.

We invent a more precise weapon, a more powerful sensor, a drone, a satellite, a surveillance system. And we end up believing that total information will allow total control.

Afghanistan is a stark reminder that knowing a territory and governing a territory are two different things. You can see a valley from space. That doesn't mean you own it.

You can identify a fighter. That doesn't mean you've eliminated the human network that replaces him.

You can kill one leader. Another one appears.

You can take Kabul. The mountain awaits.

That's what the Soviets had learned.

The Soviet Union entered Afghanistan in 1979. It possessed a gigantic military power.

Armored vehicles. Helicopters.

An army capable, in theory, of crushing any local resistance. Then the war changes in nature.

The mujahideen are organizing in the valleys, external support is pouring in, Pakistan is becoming a relay, American weapons are entering the equation and Cold War rivalries are superimposed on the conflict. And finally comes the withdrawal.

The empire is not militarily destroyed in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan contributes to its exhaustion.

A few years later, the Soviet Union itself disappeared. The image is terrible.

Then America arrives after 9/11.

This time, the technological disparity is even greater.

The Taliban regime fell quickly. And that's precisely where the trap begins. Because toppling a regime is not the same as building a lasting political order.

A war can be won in a few weeks. Peace can be lost over twenty years. It is this difference that empires forget.

They know how to get in.

They know how to strike.

They know how to turn things around.

They are much less likely to be able to answer the question: What should live here when we are gone?

Twenty years later, August 2021 provides the answer. The images of Kabul airport in turn become geopolitical works even before the artist intervenes.

Men are clinging to a plane.

A world power leaves a country amid scenes of chaos that instantly become global.

Once again, the image.

Once again, cognitive warfare.

Once again, the symbolism counts almost as much as the military event. The Taliban didn't just retake Kabul. They created the image of the West leaving. And that image will be seen in Moscow.

This image will be viewed in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, in the Gulf, in Africa, everywhere the true duration of an American commitment is measured.

This is why Afghanistan transcends Afghanistan infinitely. The graveyard of empires produces messages for subsequent empires.

And the Abode of Chaos preserves these messages.

Massoud. Dostum. Bin Laden. The Taliban. The bombings.

Tora Bora. The leaders. The fighters. The dead.

Images of power. Images of downfall.

Once again, I am not building a gallery. I am building a constellation. When the visitor encounters these faces, they do not necessarily possess the whole story.

But the relationships are there.

The connections are there: the Lion of Panjshir assassinated two days before 9/11, Bin Laden in the cave, the towers in New York, the American bombings, the warlords, the Taliban.

Then, twenty years later, the return of those whom the world's largest military coalition had driven out in a matter of weeks.

Everything is contained within this temporality. That's what interests me in The Abode of Chaos. It allows time to work on the artwork. A portrait painted in 2002 no longer means exactly the same thing in 2021. The man on the wall hasn't changed. The History surrounding him has.

And suddenly the work acquires an additional layer.

That is why I reject the idea of a fixed geopolitical work. It continues to produce meaning because events continue.

The Abode of Chaos is becoming an active memory. And that is precisely what fascinates international journalists.

They recognize a face. Then they realize that this face was painted sometimes twenty years earlier.

The question immediately arises: Why that one? Why at that moment?

That's where my work begins. I don't claim to predict the future. I look for the knots. The people around whom several forces begin to intersect. Sometimes History confirms their importance.

Sometimes not.

That's the risk.

But this is also what distinguishes a seismograph from a retrospective album. The seismograph must record while the earth is moving, not when the historian already knows the magnitude of the earthquake. Afghanistan was for me one of those constant upheavals. And it contains a lesson that I consider fundamental to all geopolitics: never confuse power with mastery of time.

An empire can be infinitely more powerful than its adversary. If it must win in two years and the other can wait twenty years, the real balance of power is no longer that indicated by military budgets.

The British have learned this.

The Soviets learned this.

The Americans have learned this.

The mountain, however, was still there.

Perhaps that is what I've been painting all these years. Not just Afghanistan.

The patience of geography in the face of the arrogance of empires.