Quotes About Afghanistan

We know definitively that Al-Qaida isn't all over Afghanistan anymore. According to CIA estimates, there are less than a hundred Al-Qaida members in the entire country. Most of them are in Pakistan. So, it's hard for me to understand why we're still fighting there and sending in more and more troops. I would get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible.

The biggest mistake Barack Obama could have made is to change quite a few things in his Afghanistan policy. He increased the number of troops and at the same time set the US withdrawal date to 2014. Now the United States has to ensure that Afghanistan does not immediately collapse after being left to itself in 2014.

Swapping Bergdahl for illegal enemy combatants (terrorists, in common parlance) signaled unmistakably to Taliban and al Qaeda that Obama is determined to withdraw from Afghanistan no matter what the cost to the United States or those in Afghanistan fighting to remain free.

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.

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.

NATO is in our national security interests. And, yes, we pay a lot for it, but, when we had Afghanistan, NATO troops were by our side from almost all of the NATO members. And they put their life and treasure on the line for us.

Maybe we should hold the next [Olympic] games in Afghanistan and hope the Soviets pull out of that one too.

By releasing these five top Taliban commanders, the U.S. is demonstrating that it is throwing in the towel in the long struggle against the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies in Afghanistan.

My favorite is when you go to Afghanistan and you meet the special forces guys, and they look like these heavily armed surfers. These guys are the best. You see guys dressed as full Afghans, but then wearing a Yankees hat.

One of the things about landays is that they thrive in a modern context. Early on I went to this incredible Pashtun novelist, Mustafa Salik, who is a bestselling novelist in Afghanistan and works for the BBC in Pashto. With the question of the sanctity of the poems in mind, I asked him, "Aren't you worried? They've been posted on Facebook and such." And he said, "Just the opposite. This is a folk form; they survive and thrive as people share them."

We got the Iran sanctions done. We got an agreement by Russia to allow us to use Afghanistan to transit supplies for our forces. We got a Security Council resolution on Libya. We got Russia into the WTO to bring in to it a rules-based trading system. All of those things were in our interest. The point is not whether we should work with Russia. The point is whether we should sacrifice other important interests to do so.

The humanitarian argument is so selective I find it difficult to swallow. It's not even so much about the choice as to where we should get involved and where we shouldn't. The minute you start arming people in these conflict zones, like Iraq and Afghanistan, things don't go as expected.

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.

What is meant by: "We mustn't give in to the terrorists"? We gave in to them the moment the first bombs fell on Afghanistan.

We are particularly interested in the mental health programs and policies that support our troops and their families before, during, and after deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The United States has been essentially engaged in an ongoing war that most people date from 2001. That war has taken us to Afghanistan, to Iraq, in a lesser way to other countries - Libya, Somalia, Yemen.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.

think that the external situation has also changed somewhat. The reduction of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has, in a sense, reduced how inflamed the situation on the Pakistani border regions was and is.

According to what we've been seeing recently in the area where the terrorists control, where they ban people from going to schools, ban young men from shaving their beards, and women have to be covered from head to toe, and let's say in brief they live the Taliban style in Afghanistan, completely the same style.

I think indeed our response on counterinsurgency needs to be finely tuned to the needs of Afghanistan. This is not Iraq. We don't have a Sons of Iraq here. We don't have the same divisions here that we had between Sunni and Shia.

Without women taking an active role in Afghan society, rebuilding Afghanistan is going to be very difficult.

Something that is completely unwinnable. I mean, it becomes unwinnable if we decide to leave [Afghanistan].

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Not at all a factor, Just an employee of the country's real masters. Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama, Just another talkin' head tellin' lies on teleprompters. If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic: Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gaddafi? We invaded sovereign soil, goin' after oil Takin' countries as a hobby paid for by the oil lobby, Same as Iraq and Afghanistan. And Ahmadinejad sayin' they comin' for Iran.

Afghanistan has always been sort of a fractured nation, very tribal, where the countryside and the distant provinces have been run by custom, by tribal law and by tribal leaders rather than edicts from the central government in Kabul.

You know, NATO as a military alliance has something called Article 5, and basically it says this: An attack on one is an attack on all. And you know the only time it's ever been invoked? After 9/11, when the 28 nations of NATO said that they would go to Afghanistan with us to fight terrorism, something that they still are doing by our side.

American troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so she [Hillary Clinton] is saying we're not going to go back down that road, which is what the American people want. They don't want us putting more troops.

It is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called 'Islamic regimes' such as Saudi Arabia, Iran - and the worst case was the Taliban in Afghanistan - they are pretty authoritarian. No doubt about that.

America has survived and grown stronger through September 11th and subsequent wars with Afghanistan and Iraq and those who seek to do us harm. We have faced - and met - tremendous challenges ramping up a public health and safety system to protect Americans from future threats.

I hope (the United States) will change and they will now focus entirely on helping and building a stronger, better Afghanistan.

[Afghanistan and Iraq] are still countries that are fragile enough that we're gonna have to partner with them in some way.

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.

It still puts burden on some troops of ours who are there [in Afghanistan and Iraq] as advisors and facilitators.

I am proud that for the first time in the history of Afghanistan, I am raising the flag of such a people, who are producing all material and immaterial equipment necessary for the life in this country and who make all efforts for prosperity and serendipity of the society. This glorious and magnificent red flag is the symbol of the greatness and pride of these people.

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.

The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.

People who need therapy are in Afghanistan. They've seen horrible human cruelty and degradation, but they don't have time or the money for therapy.

At the time we are focusing our efforts primarily on building shelters for refugees. Homelessness in Afghanistan is a huge problem.

You go to London, you see a TV set in every cell and the sign up that all the officers must treat prisoners with dignity. What about your dedicated soldiers that have helped fight in Afghanistan and Iraq? They're living in tents and our soldiers are living in tents. So it's OK for soldiers to live in tents, in hot tents, but it's wrong for inmates?

In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.

The brave and capable women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have performed admirably.

What NATO troops are doing in Afghanistan is to train, assist and advise Afghans, but they are actually doing the fighting. They are actually taking the responsibility for the security in their own country. And that is a great achievement, compared to what we saw just a few years ago, when NATO troops had to conduct the combat operations fighting the Taliban.

We in the west walked away from Afghanistan at the end of the cold war and left it as a country devastated socially and armed to the teeth. If we do that again there will be consequences.

Our [Afghanistan] main problem is education. Over 90 percent of our population is uneducated. So what can you expect? The terrorists come from Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, saying the Quran says this, Quran says that, and the Afghans believe that because they speak Arabic, they think they know the language of Quran, and they know Islam better than us, let's follow them. So they simply follow them.

From the bitter cold winter at Valley Forge, to the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq, our soldiers have courageously answered when called, gone where ordered, and defended our nation with honor.

The spirit of Thanksgiving rests in our recognizing the blessings in our lives, and as we all take stock, I hope you will join me in expressing sincerest thanks to our soldiers serving in harm's way in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. May God bless you on this day of thanks, and may God protect our troops.

We have two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan - again it's the instability that is a problem there. So over the next several years, we expect to drive the number of [polio] cases back down to zero because that is likely to be the second disease after smallpox that we completely eradicate.

Afghanistan must never again be a safe haven for terrorism.

I have a very deep concern about President Obama putting in another 21,000 troops into Afghanistan with the promise of more to come.