Friday, November 20, 2026, 9:00 PM, “Kabul, Where the West Died”
with Domenico Quirico, editorialist for “La Stampa”. He was head of the Foreign Service and correspondent from Paris. As a war correspondent from the world's most dangerous fronts, he covered the major conflicts of our time and African events of the last twenty years, particularly the Arab Spring. He was a prisoner of al-Qaeda in Syria and of Gaddafi's militiamen in Libya. He has won prestigious journalism awards. In 2024 he won the International Flaiano Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Journalism section. He is the author of numerous publications, including the latest “Kalashnikov” (2024) and “The Four Jihads. The Clash between Islam and the West from Napoleon to Hamas” (2025). His latest book on Afghanistan and the End of the West will be released in a few days.
Situated at the crossroads of Central, South, and West Asia, Afghanistan, a land of great conquests, was already in the interests of England in the 19th century, which, through the British Empire and the East India Company, attempted to subjugate and control it. A protracted conflict went down in history as the "Great Game ," a heated geopolitical rivalry between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia for supremacy in Central Asia. Afghanistan was then invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. With the resistance of the mujahideen, supported by the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, the Soviets withdrew in 1989, and in 1996, the Taliban took control of Kabul after a civil war. Following the September 11, 2001, attacks and the refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden, the Taliban regime was overthrown by a US-led coalition that established a presidential republic, but in August 2021, with the withdrawal of NATO troops, the Taliban regained control of the country.
For Domenico Quirico, the withdrawal from Kabul and the Taliban's return to power represent the triumph of militant Islam over a weary and empty Western civilization. Not a simple tactical mishap, but the definitive symbol of the West's political, moral, and cultural decline.
"You Westerners have the clocks, we have the time," a famous Afghan adage that Quirico often summarizes to say that while the West thinks in terms of electoral cycles, immediate economics, and polls, radical Islam, by contrast, thinks in millenarian, religious, and community terms. Against the idea of belonging and the spirit of Islamic martyrdom, cutting-edge technology and billions of dollars spent by the West are worthless.
The idea of transforming Afghanistan into a liberal democracy through drones and bureaucracy was thus a colonial illusion by the West, which created a corrupt puppet government in Kabul completely alien to the culture of a population governed by archaic tribal and religious logic. As soon as NATO troops withdrew, everything collapsed within hours, precisely because it lacked popular roots.
For Domenico Quirico, the West's real defeat is moral in nature because it has abandoned millions of Afghans (especially women) to their fate after having deluded them for twenty years with rights and freedoms, women and men thrown away by the West when the operation no longer proved advantageous.
No longer believing in anything but material well-being, the West has nothing left to counter the strength of those who possess absolute faith, a sense of sacred belonging, and a communal destiny.
For Quirico, the victory of the Taliban's Islam played a role in the current global disorder of wars, exterminations, and nationalisms, with a cultural and spiritual capitulation of the West, too weak to fully defend its ideas.
