Following the example of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for the past year France has been testing a method of mitigating the insidious effects of combat stress on its servicemen returning from Afghanistan. At the end of their six-month tour of duty, servicemen have a two-day stay at a seaside tourist hotel. The ‘Cyprus decompression chamber’, as the Ministry of Defence calls it, helps the soldiers with their difficult re-adaptation to ordinary (and family) life. It has long been known that certain combatants suffer from painful and persistent trauma caused by war; but what does this ‘decompression’ mean, and what sort of barrier does it really put in place? What is it that these soldiers are trying to leave behind them when they return from Kandahar or Kabul? Is it a crisis, a war, or the experience of barbarism?

As seen from Western Europe, in our imagination and our experience the figures of the Afghan and his Persian ancestors are enough to make us question the nature of the war. For centuries the Afghan has been the embodiment of the foreigner for us, at one and the same time fascinating and repulsive, similar but different, close and barbarian. Though it is barely ended, the twentieth century (which was more warlike than ever) brought us back into armed confrontation with a secular and redoubtable Persia; this has once again made us ponder the key question of the nature of war. It does, however, seem that we haven’t learned much from a furious and murderous century which was notable for every aspect of warfare. In spite of the linked development of general war and the social sciences, the latter have remained singularly hamstrung in their difficulties of trying to describe and understand the phenomenon of war.

The Afghan situation is an opportunity to revisit a depiction of war that is confusing.