Quotes About Afghanistan

There [in Afghanistan ] is a tremendous need for selter. So I am focusing most of the efforts of the foundation to building shelters for refugees in northern Afghanistan and we have already begun doing so.

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 West has been able to bring Afghanistan a much better health service, better education, better roads, a better economy, though some have benefited more; some have benefited less from that economic well-being in Afghanistan.

I feel most empires fell when they started to act human, but then look at Russia. They kept a pretty strong hand, and they fell from Afghanistan alone because Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. I guess you just can't sustain it.

Who was it in Afghanistan who screwed up in Tora Bora and let bin Laden escape? It was the Bush Administration. Who leached all the resources, military and civil, from Afghanistan, creating the instability that we see there today in order to prepare for the misbegotten invasion of Iraq? It was the Bush administration. If there's a terrorist problem today, who is responsible now? Bush has not done the job.

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.

There was a time when the women of Afghanistan - at least in Kabul - were out there. They were allowed to study, they were doctors and surgeons, walking free, wearing what they wanted. That was when it was under Soviet occupation. Then the United States starts funding the mujahideen. Reagan called them Afghanistan's "founding fathers." It reincarnates the idea of "jehad," virtually creates the Taliban.

The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.

The president is being denounced for not taking the kind of pre-emptive action in Afghanistan that he has been so passionately denounced for taking in Iraq. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

I think all of us who have been in Afghanistan on the ground multiple times know that what we're doing there on the ground is just not sustainable.

The best way to get Americans to focus on what's happening in Afghanistan is by using the example of their own.

Karzai is Afghanistan's first democratically elected president. He brought the international community into partnership on an unprecedented level, and he championed a new constitution that is liberal, democratic and still very Afghan. All of that does reflect a vision. But he's presided over a country that is still in conflict, and he hasn't taken some of the difficult decisions his own government wanted him to take. On corruption, he hasn't been as decisive as he should've been. There are legitimate questions about him.

Poetry isn't as relevant in the Western world as it is in Afghanistan. And not many people make time for something that doesn't feel relevant.

The Syrian border town of Qa'im was the main gateway Islamic radicals used to go to Iraq. Syria became the passageway for extremists from Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations to fight a jihad against American forces in Iraq.

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.

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

We do know of certain knowledge that he [Osama Bin Laden] is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead.

There are still many, many uncertainties, challenges and difficulties in Afghanistan. But we have to enable the Afghans to manage those challenges themselves. We cannot solve all the problems for the Afghans.

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.

What's always got me is the fact that when people talked on the telly about Iraq, before Afghanistan kicked off, you'd get only these public-school-type army officers talking about what was going on out there. I kept thinking, 'Why don't we get the true voice of the squaddie? Why don't we hear from the lads on the battlefield?'

Suddenly that it was as dangerous to be in America as it was to be overseas. So that the false distinction that's made by the anti-war movement between being over there and over here was exposed for all to see as an illusion. Although a number of people, a large amount of people still share in it. In other words, when I've been in Iraq or Afghanistan, I've probably been safer because I can carry a weapon if I have to, than my wife and daughter are living in Washington.

In Desert Storm, we had too many troops; in Afghanistan probably not enough for the major commitment we have made.

It is not surprising that most Pakistanis do not support America's bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans are neighbours on the brink of starvation and devastated by war. America has shown itself to be untrustworthy, a superpower that uses its values as a scabbard for its sword.

We can no longer apply the classic criteria to clearly determine whether and when we should use military force. We are waging war in Afghanistan, for example, but it's an asymmetrical war where the enemies are criminals instead of soldiers.

[Today's left] would have left us with Slobodan Milosevic in power, Bosnia ethnically cleansed, Kosovo part of Greater Serbia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Iraq the property of a psychopathic crime family. Now, I'm sorry to say, I've no patience with that leftist mentality anymore.

Our tragedy today is not just that millions of people who called themselves communist or socialist were physically liquidated in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, not just that China and Russia, after all that revolution, have become capitalist economies, not just that the working class has been ruined in the United States and its unions dismantled, not just that Greece has been brought to its knees, or that Cuba will soon be assimilated into the free market - it is also that the language of the Left, the discourse of the Left, has been marginalised and is sought to be eradicated.

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.

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

I was overwhelmed with the kindness of people [in Afghanistan] and found that they had managed to retain their dignity, their pride, and their hospitality under unspeakably bleak conditions.

[ General James Mattis] is a Marine's Marine who has served in combat in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

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.

Iraq and Afghanistan have exacted a toll on America - in lives, treasure and standing - that it will take a generation to work through.

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

In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.

Too often in the past, our Armed Forces have returned to Canada from their trials with little fanfare. Not so today. Canadians across the country came out in force, united in appreciation, to honour the bravery, heroism, strength and sacrifice of those who fought for freedom and security in Afghanistan.

Certainly the existence of these huge nuclear force was important for the ultimate confrontation, let's say, over western Europe. You just can't use them to deal with a situation like Afghanistan.

One is the goals of 9/11 itself, of that attack was to draw the United States into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency as the Soviets had done before them.

Since 2001, people have been scared. There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening - 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down.

We know that much of the training and the direction for terrorists comes from Pakistan and the border area with Afghanistan

The terrorist attacks of September 11th and the courageous actions of our armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq remind us that friends of tyranny and enemies of freedom still exist

We're interested in it because it would provide a land bridge up to Uzbekistan, which provides us, among other things, a humanitarian pathway for us to move supplies out of Central Asia and down into Afghanistan.

When an army unit returns from service in Iraq or Afghanistan, it barely gets a breather before it begins training for its next deployment.

I mean Afghanistan is a very rugged, complicated country.

Every time we have come to the end of a conflict, somehow we have persuaded ourselves that the nature of mankind and the nature of the world have changed on an enduring basis and so we have dismantle our military and intelligence capabilities. My hope is that as we wind down in Iraq and whatever the level of our commitment in Afghanistan, that we not forget the basic nature of humankind has not changed.

The problem with an economic meltdown is that the responsibility and the challenges to deal with the environment are squandered. That's an age-old battle in terms of the major conflicts in places like Afghanistan, etc. So there are age-old battles that'll keep going on. Unfortunately, man is a very slow learner, and we tend to repeat mistakes, as opposed to learning from mistakes.

People may be vaguely aware that there's suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan, but simply because the media are filled with American-centric versions, we still see the experiences through the American perspective. We are just completely ignorant of what might be happening to other people.

If the military contractors are out of Afghanistan, Karzai is out 15 minutes later.