Quotes About Afghanistan

"Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age" was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age.

Don't kid yourself. President Obama's decision to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan before he stands for reelection is not driven by the United States' 'position of strength' in the war zone as much as it is by grim economic and political realities at home.

What we have done, I think, is build a model from a lot of hard lessons in Afghanistan and Iraq but in other places around the world, where we are working with them in an advisory capacity.

In early 1999, I was watching TV, when I came across a story on Afghanistan. It was a story about the Taliban and the restrictions they were imposing on the Afghan people, most notably women. At some point in the story, there was a casual reference to them having banned the game of kite fighting. This detail struck a personal chord with me, as I had grown up in Kabul flying kite with my friends.

The goal in Afghanistan is to find the terrorists and take them out.

When you start to really travel and you get to these abstract like places in the world, you would see certain people's names. It seemed like we could go anywhere. Like when we went to Afghanistan, you'd see in the dressing room Run DMC's name. Certain rappers are like journey men.

It was interesting watching the Afghanistan war review deliberations, this three-month process where Barack Obama did the most thorough foreign policy review ever by a modern American president. Compare that to Libya. For a month he said we weren't going to do anything, then suddenly changed his mind and did it on the fly. My view is that it's not how long or quick you take to make a decision, it's whether you make the right one.

What we can do is make sure that Afghanistan is not a safe haven for Al Qaeda. What we can do it make sure that it is not destabilizing neighboring Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons. The key is we’ve got to have a clear objective...

Ironically, many of people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after 25 years of brutal war - 10 years against the Soviet occupation, 15 years of US occupation - the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States.

The places where we went, it was not safe to be any bigger than a two-person crew. In Afghanistan, the only way for us to operate was to try to fly under the radar of everyone.

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.

Let's withdraw from Afghanistan and have the army invade America - that's the only way we'll get new schools and roads.

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.

We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy.

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 time has come to make the difficult decision. Charity begins at home. We can no longer afford to rebuild Afghanistan and America. We must choose. And I choose America.

If I could go to Kabul and not die, I would go back to Afghanistan as soon as I could. And, that was the most interesting place that I've been to.

For instance, in the last five years [till 2016], we've admitted nearly 100,000 immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan. And these two countries according to Pew Research, a majority of residents say that the barbaric practice of honor killings against women are often or sometimes justified. That's what they say.

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.

Afghanistan is the most daring and ambition mission in the history of NATO.

The dynamics of the Taliban now appear to be very different and complex, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, as they attack governments and mainstream parties.

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."

I do think that it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what's happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan. These things are interrelated. And if we are looking at the region as a whole and communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest, then I think that we can make significant progress.

If the United States had not intervened in Afghanistan, then obviously, we would have then allowed the attacks of 9/11 to go unanswered. I don't think most of Americans wanted that to happen.

People get upset when Baghdad, the "Cradle of Civilization" is burning, or when the Buddhas in Afghanistan are falling. These are real concerns.

Australia is this former British colony at the foot of Asia. We've been involved - we've been in lockstep with America in every battle you have fought for a century. We were there in Vietnam. We were there in Korea. We were there in Iraq. We were there in Afghanistan. We are slightly apprehensive about the rise of China.

If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that Bush lied about WMD, the thumbnail version of Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.

Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military.

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.

In Afghanistan you are not rebuilding, you are building. There is very limited infrastructure and extreme terrain, with deserts in the south and mountains so high in some areas that helicopters don't even fly well at a certain altitude because the air becomes so thin. The country has a serious problem of illiteracy, especially after so many years of war and Taliban rule.

Afghanistan has other enormous challenges as well, including a political system that is still very much developing, although there has been some progress in the past several years.

You know, if I were an - if I were a Taliban, I'd say, 'What did al-Qaida ever do for me except get me kicked out of Afghanistan?'

At no time in the past, now or in the future has or will Russia take any part in actions aimed at overthrowing the legitimate government. I'm talking about something else right now - when someone does this, the outcome is very negative. Libya's state is disintegrated, Iraq's territory is flooded with terrorists, it looks like the scenario will be the same for Syria, and you know what the situation is in Afghanistan.

The young patriots now returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other deployments worldwide are joining the ranks of veterans to whom America owes an immense debt of gratitude.

In a place like Afghanistan where the society is completely segregated, women have access to women. Men cannot always photograph women and cannot get the access that I get.

Counting the numbers of troops is not going to define our success here.There is no military success, ultimately, to Afghanistan. The Afghans themselves are going to define what happens here. And we have to convince ourselves that we have a strategy in place that empowers them to do that and that is realistic in what our expectations are from them and on what schedule.

What everyone underestimated was the acute unpopularity of the Taliban, even in the Pashtun areas. People like myself were saying the Taliban would be driven out very swiftly from the north of Afghanistan, but given that their main support base was in the Pashtun belt, there would be greater resistance there. That didn't happen. The Taliban had become deeply unpopular and were actually discarded by the Pashtun population almost as quickly as they were in the north. I don't see the Taliban coming back in any way.

Geographically, Afghanistan is a good place for the terrorists, because it's surrounded by mountains, and there are lots of villages inside mountains, so it's easy for them to hide themselves, or to recruit the people. Whatever they want to do they will do.

The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border of Afghanistan, I wrote to President Jimmy Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

If you are religious at all, it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false (knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan), you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

The third point is that for some time the UN has been talking about helping Afghanistan in the reconstruction of the country but there has never been any real commitment by the international community to provide resources for that.

The movie's only serious criticism is reserved for Baker's television network, which doesn't think Americans care about Afghanistan - kind of hypocritical given this film's lack of substance.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

I did a week-long assessment in 2005 at (then Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld's request. Following our return, I told him that Afghanistan was going to be the longest campaign of what we then termed "the long war."

One of the challenges over the last decade is America has done experiments in nation building in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and we've neglected, for example, developing our own economy, our own energy sectors, our own education system. And it's very hard for us to project leadership around the world when we're not doing what we need to do.

Ataturk sent several Turkish staff officers to Afghanistan, helped them build their own army.

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.