Quotes About Afghanistan

I was thinking about Afghanistan's future, Afghanistan's next generation, what we have next. These children who learn how to kill people, how to do jihad, how to behead, how to fire, this would be Afghanistan.

Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the president's advisers said, "This is probably not going to work." A lot of people in the military said, "This is probably not going to work." If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that George W.Bush lied about mass destruction weapons, the thumbnail version of Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.

We do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We see no military - we seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can.

It would be very hard to bring a wife to Afghanistan. In America, I'd have no problem with her doing whatever she wanted, but in Afghanistan, that's not the case.

Afghanistan has moved forward and Afghanistan will defend itself. And the progress that we have achieved, the Afghan people will not allow it to be put back or reversed.

There is a direct line relationship between what happened in Afghanistan in the work up to 11 September 2001 and what we're doing in Afghanistan today.

In Afghanistan, there have been a lot of teachers assassinated, schools are being blown up, girls are harassed and in some cases, attacked on their way to school. Even if the girls are able to get an education, they can dream big, they can think about how they want to become a member of parliament because they are now women members of parliament in Afghanistan, nobody is really sure how long everything is going to last.

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

Baba dropped the stack of food stamps on her desk. "Thank you but I don't want," Baba said. "I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dobbins, but I don't like it free money."...Baba walked out of the welfare office like a man cured of a tumor.

I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.

Every time I visit Iraq or Afghanistan I am blown away.

More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

For me, it's an honor for the military to ask me to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, or GITMO. I'm happy to go.

In countries like Afghanistan, the corruption is in your face. In Nigeria, I heard of judges making sex the bargaining chip rather than money. Now let's put that in the context of an honor-based society. Imagine that you're the brother of a woman who got raped by a judge to have her case heard in court. What do you want to do? You want to kill the judge. So here is an insurgent movement that hands you a gun. You have rage, and they give you an outlet for your rage.

It costs us $1 million for every troop[soldier] in Afghanistan.

You could get a cheer by saying: 'Let's withdraw from Afghanistan', but I don't think that's where the public's at. It wouldn't be responsible.

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval.

I think what happened with 9/11 is that people sort of felt that it came from nowhere. Whereas I think now we understand the roots are very deep. I say it's like revolutionary Communism, something that is going to have to be knocked out over a very long period of time. This strain of extremism continues to be very strong, whether it's in Afghanistan, or Somalia or Yemen, or any of these places.

Americans have eliminated Iran's worst enemies, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam [Hussein]. I occasionally threatened my Iranian counterpart in Kabul that one day I would send him a big bill for what we did. But, seriously, Iran is pursuing a dual strategy in Iraq. On the one hand, the Iranians, after decades of hostility, are now interested in good relations. On the other hand, they want to keep the country weak and dominate the region.

Despite 18 years as a non-partisan public servant, my deeper "tribal" affinity has always been Tory. The Afghanistan file has given me an additional reason to cleave to that side of the spectrum. Canadian Conservatives have generally been more comfortable and confident with hard security issues.

The events of September 11 and what has happened since have made people understand that even a small, distant and far away country like Afghanistan cannot be left to break up into anarchy and chaos without consequences for the whole world.

I think within a year or so, perhaps, if 9/11 had not happened, in Afghanistan would have been a very broad-based general uprising against the Taliban.

A child who had been introduced to misery in Saudi Arabia, a teenager who went to wage jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a deeply devout Muslim who had graduated with honors in medicine, a man who had fed a stranger to wild dogs in Damascus, a zealot who had dosed three foreigners with smallpox and watched them die in agony, gave thanks to Allah for the blessings that had been bestowed upon him.

ISIS is going to devolve from physical political emirate, into what Al Qaeda was, which is a covert organization which will go completely underground. But to communicate and to keep propagating their propaganda, after everyone is dead, all their fanboys and whatever surviving leadership that has been operating outside the war or operates in Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, they will form what we call a "ghost caliphate."

As the daughter of a 25-year veteran of the armed forces, I am incredibly thankful for the sacrifices our women and men have made in Iraq, and continue to make in Afghanistan.

Liberia is not at the center of a massive geopolitical game. Afghanistan is and has always been. The history is dramatic, the politics are dramatic, the landscape is incredibly dramatic.

The strategy for peace-building in Afghanistan is economic aid, reconstruction, international security forces. On those lines, the U.S. has been extremely slow. And it has even blocked expanding security forces from Kabul to other cities.

There is Pakistan's relationship with Afghanistan which will also be a very tricky issue in the coming years. Then there is a large part of Pakistan which is being torn apart from American drone attacks. The country is being invaded constantly by a terrorist superpower. Again, this is not a small problem.

The al-Qaida cell broken up near Buffalo, N.Y., contains some citizens who also found themselves in Afghanistan, training for the Great All-Around Satan Smiting. Treason? Oh, of course not. They were on a religious pilgrimage and got lost. Happens all the time. I knew a kid who went to Lutheran Bible Camp and turned up six years later in a Christian Identity compound with a shaved head and a Hitler mustache.

My opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week than even (sic) the two-and-a-half years before that. It's only now dawning upon the world the magnitude of the action that the Soviets undertook in invading Afghanistan.

A day in Afghanistan is like a week at home.

Afghanistan is more than the 'graveyard of empires.' It's the mother of vicious circles.

The behavior of the Taliban as well as their extremist attitudes do not correspond in any way with a tolerant Islam. We have always been opposed to extremist tendencies of Islam and we still are. We have not stopped insisting on defending an Islam of tolerance which would be profitable to every Muslim, in Afghanistan and in the whole world, and we will always defend it.

We continue to stand united with Germany and our NATO allies in our ongoing efforts to build peace and stability in Afghanistan.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

I would be quite happy to see the Northern Alliance steam across northern Afghanistan and take Kabul.

Now, here we are, and we have Obama in office, and he has drawn down forces in Iraq - which is a plan that was on Bush's desk the day that he left office. The forces in Afghanistan, he's going to draw down, too. But at the same time, Obama has also expanded a lot of the more unsavory, covert aspects of the wars, with the drone strikes and some of the night-raid missions.

I believed Afghanistan was always going to be hard. It's the fifth poorest country in the world. And when you fly over it, you realize that there's not much there. And, of course, it has the problem, too, of being on that border with Pakistan in basically an ungoverned region that has given the terrorists a staging ground. So it's a very difficult place. But I do believe that the mission there can succeed if success is defined as helping the Afghans to prevent the Taliban from being an existential threat to the Afghan government.

You have these crops of poppies that supply something like 90% of the heroin sold in Europe and actually represents more than half of the Afghanistan's GDP.

But you are absolutely right that when the international community decides to help in a meaningful manner a country like Afghanistan, then coordination between the various actors that are involved in these processes is very, very difficult indeed.

OK, so $1 trillion is what it costs to run the federal government for one year. So this money's going to run through September of 2016. Half of the trillion dollars goes to defense spending and the Pentagon. The other half goes to domestic spending - everything from prisons to parks. So there's also about 74 billion in there that goes to the military operations that we have ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria.

Despite failing to get bin Laden, the U.S. government and media portrayed the early Afghanistan war as a great victory.

Clinton has more important things to worry about. He not only risks being destroyed historically, like Afghanistan's Buddha statues; he also could end up going to jail.

There's an 800 kilometer border between Iran and Afghanistan.

We believe that introducing surface-to-air missiles in Syria is going to change the balance of power on the ground. It will allow the moderate opposition to be able to neutralize the helicopters and aircraft that are dropping chemicals and have been carpet-bombing them, just like surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan were able to change the balance of power there.

The art of coalition command - whether it is here in Afghanistan, whether it was in Iraq or in Bosnia or in Haiti - is to take the resources you are provided with, understand what the strengths and weaknesses are and to employ them to the best overall effect.

Anyone who is contemplating going to Afghanistan does need to think very carefully about the consequences, both to them and their families in terms of the grief they may suffer, as well as contemplate the legal action that might follow on their return, if they were to return.

I applaud President Obamas decision to begin a partial withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan. However, I believe that we must go further and have a full withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops.