In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.

I'd like to come back to the West eventually. In the end abroad I am always a stranger, active politics in particular is not accessible to me and although people are generous, I can never be on the inside of a culture that relies a great deal on the private space and the family.

I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.

The world isnt one way or another. Things can be changed very, very rapidly by someone with sufficient confidence, sufficient knowledge and sufficient authority.

This idea that failure is not an option: It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable.

Despite the dubious statistics … democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting.

The question shouldn't be what we ought to do, but what we can do.