Ashraf, the father, was the country’s last president. A trained anthropologist, he believed in books, and the power of the ideas within them to move the world. His wife, Rula, a student in Paris in 1968, said she believed in women. Mariam, their daughter, became a filmmaker — she believed in Art. Their son, Tarek, believed in his father. His two-decade career in American academia and philanthropy is an echo of Ashraf’s own cloudless trajectory through blue-chip universities, the World Bank and think tanks. It was a tribute.

For half a century, Afghanistan was simultaneously obscure and at the centre of world events. It had swallowed the fading comet tail of the USSR and absorbed the late afternoon light of American Empire. It had been a hideaway for renegades and a bazaar of ideologies. From Hippie free love to political Islamism, from Marxist-Leninism to market democracy — all had been hawked and bartered over in Afghanistan.

Whether it was itself a “real” country at all, or simply a vast outdoor laboratory worked by imperial meddlers and narco-criminals was hard to say. But every force and idea that acted on Afghanistan acted on the Ghanis too. They were both the victims of events and the instigators of them. They had been exiles, then leaders; they had been scattered across the globe and enthroned in Kabul. The family was Pashtun, and prominent, with a history of political influence. The Ghanis first left in 1977, as the communists began their takeover.

Ashraf Ghani fled again this week. Mariam posted about it — “I’m pretty burned out” — on Instagram from her home in New York. Tarek and Rula have so far remained silent. This time it was widely reported that Ashraf had attempted to upholster four cars and a helicopter with millions of stolen dollars. This was surely — hopefully — untrue, and not because the source was a Russian news agency.

By Afghan standards the Ghanis were not that corrupt. It was for other politicians to mainline America’s billions into lavish compounds, or to be apprehended in Dubai’s airport with $52 million in cash. Ashraf did not believe in money. He believed in books.

When he became President, in 2014, after a fraught and nervous election, he indulged his obsession. Like all Afghan presidents, Ghani moved to the Arg — a labyrinth of palaces within a 19^th-century fortress in central Kabul. But unlike his predecessor, he immediately set about restoring the ruined royal library, with all its decaying antique volumes. His personal library was his most valuable asset, according to a New Yorker profile. He owned seven thousand books. Every day he woke up before the sun rose and read them under his favourite chinar tree. He would have taken his volumes, not cash, when he fled on Sunday, wouldn’t he?

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Ghani didn’t just read books — he wrote them. With his collaborator, the British human rights lawyer Claire Lockhart, he published Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World (2008). “Novel strategies” were needed, they argued, to stabilise failed states that were contaminating “our fully globalised world” with anarchy.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, these chaotic zones were spreading. Ghani believed he had the ideas — a “sovereignty index” to be annually published by the UN, and a “citizens-based approach” to state-building — that could mop away the disorder. Fixing Failed States offered, according to a small review in Foreign Affairs, “a surprisingly hopeful vision”.

The vision was delivered as a TED talk in 2007. Ghani’s manner is cerebral, candid, impish, shrilly excitable — theory excites him. His voice is as squeaky as an old floorboard being stepped on. The TED stage suited a pedagogue like Ghani. It was not so different from the lecture halls and seminar rooms of John Hopkins, where he’d spent the 1980s teaching. He never looks uncomfortable.

America was comfortable enough for the Ghanis. It was their main chance, as it was for other exiled Afghans. It gave Ashraf, Rula and Tarek the opportunity to collect the academic prizes that are today’s proof of intelligence and moral worth. It allowed Mariam to transform herself from the child of exiles to an artist; not merely an artist working in “installation, performance, photography, text and video”, but, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, an “activist, archivist, writer and lecturer”.

A 2015 New York Times profile found Mariam in her loft apartment in Clinton Hill, worrying about being “a Brooklyn cliche”. The Times sketched her “as well-versed in the politics of extraordinary rendition as she is in the very Brooklyn pursuit of homemade chile-passion-fruit sorbet”.

Mariam’s work was exhibited at Tate Modern in London, and the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York. One exhibit, “Afghanistan: A Lexicon”, was made in collaboration with Ashraf over Skype. Over 72 panels of text and photos created by the Ghanis, the history of Afghanistan is shown to be cyclical — an endless rotation of invasion, revolt, reform, collapse and recovery. A country cruelly frozen in dynamism.

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She made films about the discovery of oil in Norway, and the melancholy difficulties of translation. She was born in New York, but identified “most with the border”. What Edward Said called the “essential sadness” of exile was there in Mariam, and in all her family. Perhaps that’s why the “Lexicon” had one telling absence from its story — the Ghanis themselves.

Ashraf had returned to the country with Rula in 2002 almost as soon as the Taliban were banished. First a finance minister under Hamid Karzai, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in 2009, and then the winner of that disputed election in 2014.

Afghanistan was a problem for the family in a way that America — where they had flourished — was not. America only needed Ashraf’s theories in the classroom. Afghanistan, Ashraf believed, could be saved by his theories. It was all in his book, and his TED talk. Opium farmers would make t-shirts. Embroiders in Kandahar would partner with Versace. Guns would become ploughshares. One day the daughters of Afghanistan would be like his own, free to study in America; free to make jam in Brooklyn; free to exhibit their work in Berlin.

Afghans were not fools. They only needed jobs. The people, Ghani said in 2005, were internationalist by temperament — “they’re much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans.” Well, perhaps.

Becoming President gave Ghani the chance to govern the country that shone in his mind. Afghans would learn about sheep raising from New Zealand, and hydroelectricity from the Swiss. Afghanistan was a blank slate. Ghani began to doodle his beautiful diagrams on it.

Sigmund Freud once said there were two “impossible professions”: education and government. Ghani was a wonderful educator. He proved to be an impossible President. He micromanaged his illusions and his staff. He took anger management classes.

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Why was he so angry? Was it the pressure — grinding and invidious — of watching his theories of the state become exposed as just another exile’s hopeless fictions?

Either way, he grew ever more solitary behind the blast walls, barbed wire, and checkpoints of the Arg. The library was his succour and support — one journalist described Ghani’s office, filled with open books on every surface, marked neatly with pencil annotations. This is what most intellectuals (quite rightly) do in a crisis. They retreat, like Michel de Montaigne did during the 16th century French wars of religion, to brood in their towers and libraries, hoping that solitude will yield new ideas. Montaigne, though, only advised the king of France, he had no pretensions to power itself; Ghani was supposed to be something like the king of Afghanistan.

At least, as everyone said, he was not corrupt. That was a blessing in a country where the MPs alone ritualistically stole over a billion dollars a year. But there was the rest of the family. Ashraf’s brother, Hashmat, and his nephew Sultan.

Hashmat will be remembered, not for driving a bulletproof Mercedes Limousine, or the 23,000 square feet of his Kabul home, but for the SOSi scandal. It was extraordinarily complicated; it involved hugely valuable rights to mineral deposits in Kunar province, illegal links between US special forces and militias — and the Ghani family. It was Hashmat who owned significant shares in the US company that wanted to buy the rights to the minerals, and it was President Ghani who signed off on the deal. Was it corrupt? “If there was a colour redder than red, that’s what colour this red flag would be,” said one American expert in procurement law.

Sultan, meanwhile, styled himself the President of ‘The Ghani Group’ on LinkedIn, and the co-founder of ‘The Institute for Afghan Women’ on his website.  As the country started to tremble a few weeks ago, he shared photos of himself on Instagram walking towards a Learjet 75 Liberty.

Ashraf had promised to clean up grift when he first ran for President, but if it flourished in his immediate family, what hope did Afghanistan have?

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When Ghani fled on Sunday he left behind half the population in poverty, a third of the population facing emergency levels of food insecurity, stagnant GDP, a massive trade deficit, a restive and furious countryside, and, in the words of one report, “a largely lawless, weak, and dysfunctional state”. Now the Taliban control it, down to the very last bumper car.

A few days before, Mariam Ghani’s latest film had its theatrical release in the United States. It’s title? What We Left Unfinished. For Ashraf — intellectual and politician, then, at last, a corrupted idealist — it was all unfinished.

How shocked, how distressed he looked, when he surfaced this week in the UAE, exiled once more. When his security team extracted him, he said, he was “in a condition where I couldn’t even put on my shoes”. Did Ashraf Ghani realise that the things he put his faith in, the codes by which he lived his life — ideas and books, globalisation and rational governance — had been diminished? That if the reports were true, and he really had left the country, not with his library, but with $169 million dollars, that he had maimed his life’s work, as well as Afghanistan?

Maybe he knew. All year, until almost the very end, he had promised his army could hold out against the Taliban, “forever“. But there was lucidity amidst the delusion.

“The future will be determined by the people of Afghanistan,” he told the BBC in February, “not by somebody sitting behind the desk, dreaming.”

He was wrong about the people of Afghanistan. Whether they stayed or fled, they would still be dragged into the conflicts of others. But he was right about the dreamer behind the desk. Ashraf Ghani, unable to determine Afghanistan’s future, was describing himself.

The experiment succeeded beyond Gavotti’s wildest dreams: the concept proven, aerial bombing would dominate the warfare of the ensuing century, levelling Europe’s cities in the following decades, and later the historic trading cities of the Levant in the Arab Spring wars. 

Exactly one hundred years after Gavotti’s fateful flight, protestors in the eastern city of Benghazi rose up against the dictator Muammar al-Gadhafi and the current Libyan war began. Nato intervened, winning UN approval for a humanitarian intervention to protect Benghazi and its lightly armed rebels from Gadhafi’s vengeful army, whose tanks were just entering the city’s outskirts when they were incinerated from the sky by the high-tech descendants of Gavotti’s experiment. It is safe to say, at this point, that the results of the Nato intervention were not as intended. 

The dreams of an Arab world breaking off the shackles of authoritarianism and joining Europe and America in liberal democratic harmony were shattered by the chaos that followed. Russia’s displeasure at the humanitarian intervention it had reluctantly acceded to escalating into regime change led directly to Putin’s refusal to countenance Western airstrikes against the Syrian government, and to Russia’s own, brutal and — so far — successful aerial intervention to prop up Assad’s rule. Even Benghazi’s Italianate architecture, its unique glory, has been destroyed, not by Gadhafi’s tanks but by the bitter fighting which ravaged the city in the decade since the Western alliance declared victory.

The Nato intervention promised at the time to herald a new wave of military campaigns for humanitarian ends, and to give the Atlantic alliance a cause to justify its continued existence long after the end of the Cold War. Instead, allies are now locked in a naval standoff off Libya’s coast which threatens to break the alliance apart, and to drag European militaries into the ever-widening chaos of the Arab Spring wars. 

The current Libyan conflict derives from longstanding regional rivalries within the country, but has become subject to the antagonisms destabilising the region as a whole, sucked into the Middle East Cold War now playing out from the Red Sea to Italy’s shores. 

The Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, along with its financial backer Qatar saw the Arab Spring as an opportunity to promote revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood governance projects across the Arab world. It also supports the Tripoli administration of Fayez al-Sarraj, which nominally leads an unstable coalition of Islamist groups, regional autonomists from the coastal city of Misrata and from the western Amazigh Berber minority, and urban militias indistinguishable from organised crime cartels.

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On the opposing side, the counterrevolutionary Gulf kingdoms of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, along with their local client Egypt, back the would-be strongman Khalifa Haftar and Libya’s rival government in the eastern city of Tobruk. The Libyan National Army forces there are composed of Cyrenaican tribesmen and quietist Salafist militias, along with mercenaries from Sudan and Chad.

Having taken control of almost all the country, Haftar’s LNA forces, heavily-armed and lavishly equipped through the largesse of the UAE, launched a push to seize the capital last April. It precipitated an intensified Turkish intervention to prop up the Tripoli government. Erdogan flooded the battle space with Bayraktar drones, armoured vehicles, Turkish military advisors and thousands of Syrian mercenaries from Turkey’s proxy militias, still notionally referred to as Syrian rebels.

The Turkish intervention changed the course of the war, with Haftar’s forces retreating from Tripoli in disarray, harried by drone strikes from the air and artillery on the ground. Last week, Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and spy chief Hakan Fidan visited Tripoli in triumph, promising a new era of strategic and economic cooperation between Erdogan’s government and its Libyan client.

It is the expansionist nature of this cooperation that most alarms European officials. Earlier this year, shortly before intervening in force in Libya, the Turkish government signed a memorandum of understanding with Sarraj’s besieged Tripoli administration, dividing up much of the Eastern Mediterranean, and its plentiful undersea deposits of oil and gas, between them. This MoU, which saw Turkey claim for itself Greek waters up to the coast of Crete, immediately drew condemnation from the European Union and the United States. 

The discovery of petroleum deposits beneath the Eastern Mediterranean had already drawn the region into a Cold War of sorts, with Greece and Cyprus assembling a regional defence and energy coalition including Israel and Egypt to box Turkey in and divide the potential oil wealth between them. The United States backs the alliance, seeing a future Eastern Mediterranean oil pipeline as a rival to Russia’s petroleum exports to the EU, diminishing the diplomatic leverage Putin’s market dominance holds over Germany and central Europe.

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Turkish threats to send drill ships into Greek and Cypriot waters, along with Erdogan’s alternating requests for Greece to demilitarise its eastern islands and threats to invade them, already risk an incident in the Eastern Mediterranean escalating into a war between the two notional Nato allies. France, increasingly hostile to Turkey and a major strategic player in the Eastern Mediterranean for the first time since the mid-19th century, has stepped in as Greece’s military patron, conducting joint naval and aerial drills, and deploying frigates and an aircraft carrier to ward off Turkish encroachment in Greek and Cypriot water. The defence partnership has been derided by the Turkish foriegn ministry as the “axis of malice”. 

Indeed, Emmanuel Macron has now emerged as Erdogan’s fiercest critic within the Nato, accusing the Turkish government of supporting ISIS in Syria, of destabilising the region by launching wars against America’s Syrian Kurdish allies, and of accelerating the “brain death” of the Western alliance. Quietly backing Haftar, France now finds itself working alongside Russia in Libya, with the wartorn country emerging as the testing ground for Macron’s rapprochement with Nato’s eastern rival.

Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group, perhaps paid for by the UAE, are now deployed against the Tripoli government and its Turkish and Syrian mercenary allies on the battlefields of Libya. Advanced Russian fighter jets, perhaps also piloted by mercenaries, have been flown to Libya to counteract Turkey’s aerial superiority in the conflict, as each escalation leads to counter-escalation on the part of the rival factions’ external patrons. As Haftar’s forces pull back towards the east of the country, neighbouring Egypt, another American client state at odds with Turkey since its military ruler Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew his predecessor Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in 2014, has threatened to intervene directly. With the possibility of outright victory likely to elude each side, a division of the country into two warring entities, each a proxy of rival regional powers, is emerging on Europe’s southern doorstep.

For the European Union, Libya’s growing chaos is a strategic disaster. With the country both a training hub for terrorism and the central launching ground for the migrant boats upending the continent’s politics, EU officials had hoped that Libya would become the trial run for the continental bloc’s new policy of strategic autonomy. After all, a Turkish government that so vigorously uses migrants as a diplomatic weapon against the EU’s eastern borders will surely not be a reliable partner controlling migration from the south.

Similarly, Turkey’s indulgent attitude to jihadist fighters in Syria does not bode well for its role in Libya, or in the wider Sahel where French and European forces are already struggling to control a growing jihadist insurgency. “It’s a danger to ourselves,” French defence minister Yves Le Drian told Le Figaro last week, “an unacceptable strategic risk, because it’s 200 km from the Italian coast.”

Yet the EU’s Irini naval operation, which sees French and Greek warships join German reconnaissance aircraft in a mission to enforce the UN arms embargo on the warring factions, was slow to begin and controversial from the start. By focusing on shipments by sea, Irini has no mandate to monitor or intercept weapons shipments to Haftar’s LNA forces from the UAE and Egypt, validating Turkish claims that the mission is biased against its own intervention. Yet by fusing the separate disputes over the Eastern Mediterranean’s oilfields, the Syrian war and the battle for control of Libya into one interwoven and escalating conflict, Erdogan’s Turkey has created an intractable mess almost impossible to de-escalate, with the risk of open warfare between Nato members growing every day. 

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Only last week, France accused Turkish warships of locking their missile-launching radar onto the French frigate Courbet, an “aggressive act” designed to deter the French navy from intercepting arms shipments to Tripoli. “The Turks are behaving in an unacceptable manner and are exploiting NATO,” a French official told the press, “France cannot just stand by.” Turkey’s foreign ministry responded with a statement claiming that “the support France has provided to the putschist and pirate Haftar … has exacerbated the crisis in Libya.  What should actually be a cause for concern are France’s dark ties. It is unacceptable for a NATO ally to behave this way.”

Similarly, Greece’s defence minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos warned this month that Greece is ready for war with Turkey, telling journalists that “we are preparing for any scenarios. Among these possibilities is also military intervention. We do not want to go there, but we want to make it clear that we will do whatever it takes to defend our sovereign rights to the fullest extent possible.” 

The Nato intervention in Libya almost a decade ago was surely the high water mark of American hegemony and its post-Cold War justifying ideology of liberal interventionism. America and its European allies were able to overthrow a brutal dictator, but soon found themselves entirely powerless to influence what replaced him. Now the United States finds itself a backseat spectator to the region’s spiralling chaos, the security of its European allies threatened by the jostling for position America’s growing weakness has unleashed, and the future of the Nato alliance itself threatened by the fruits of its own poorly-conceived campaign. 

The EU, equally, had long hoped to be a new kind of superpower, where soft power and the assumed appeal of the European way of life would obviate the need to sully itself with the rough business of force. Yet as the escalating crisis in the Mediterranean shows, Europe’s inability to project hard power leaves the continent’s security at the mercy of smaller but more forceful actors. European states who had hoped to export democracy to Libya instead find themselves importing terrorism from the country, as shown by Saturday’s lethal attack in Reading.

In a reversal of Gavotti’s historic experiment, it is Turkey and other Middle Eastern states who are now the expansionist military innovators in Libya and the wider region and European governments who are passive spectators to history, defensive and fearful of what is coming next.