Quotes About Afghan

We've got to see a state where the Afghan government can handle its own day-to-day security.

There was no American policy on Afghan politics at the time, only the de facto promotion of Pakistani goals as carried out by Pakistani intelligence. The CIA forecasted repeatedly during this period that postwar Afghanistan was going to be an awful mess; nobody could prevent that. Let the Pakistanis sort out the regional politics. This was their neighborhood.

By 1986, however, that Afghan cause entangled increasingly with the international Islamist networks whose leaders had a more ambitious goal: the toppling of corrupt and antireligious governments across the Islamic world.

McNeill argued, the war hadn't changed. They had to be patient. Privately, McNeill figured it would take up to two decades to put Afghan forces in a position where they could defend the country adequately on their own.

On May 12, 2011, Bordin published a seventy-page paper titled "A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility." It provided a raw, highly detailed account of estrangement between American and Afghan allies.

Soviet and Afghan Communists purposefully decimated the country's educated elites, executing or exiling traditional leaders. By the time I turned up, this culling had left much of the field to radical preachers and armed opportunists.

The C.I.A. subcontracted its aid to the Afghan rebels through Pakistan's main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I. By 1989, the service had grown into a powerful, corrosive force within Pakistan, a shadowy deep state that manipulated politics on behalf of the army and increasingly promoted armed groups of Islamists, including the Arab volunteers we had learned to approach cautiously. I.S.I. officers were not easy to meet, but not impossible to track down, either.

On patrol, he had sometimes felt that he was just as likely to be shot in the back by an Afghan police officer as to be killed by a Taliban insurgent. There were always a handful of Afghan comrades alongside him who had a hard stare that Bordin felt as hostility.

Karzai believed that Pakistan should be the main effort of the American war. As Eikenberry once put it to him, "If you had a choice about where to deploy thirty thousand new American troops, you would put five thousand into training Afghan forces, five thousand along the border with Pakistan, and twenty thousand in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas," inside Pakistan.

Where are they?" he would ask Afghan intelligence counterparts. "Everywhere." "What villages?" "All of them." "When?" "Every day." "What about the mountains?" "In the mountains too."30 The only way to pinpoint Taliban positions was through reconnaissance by force, which meant driving around until "somebody shoots at you

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as allies battling Soviet occupation forces and their Afghan communist proxies, the CIA had pumped cash stipends as high as $200,000 a month to Massoud and his Islamic guerrilla organization, along with weapons and other supplies.

Bin Laden's mentor at the time was also one of Hayatabad's leading Islamist theoreticians, a Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam, who in 1984 had published a book that became a manifesto for the Afghan mujahidin. It argued that Muslims had both an individual and communal obligation to expel conquering or occupying armies from their sacred lands.

I tried to render the Afghan war as much as I could fro the perspective of the Afghans. I have served as an advisor to Afghan troops, and much of my war experience was seen through the lens of fighting that war alongside Afghan soldiers.

It's fair to say average Americans think that the average Afghan doesn't want American troops in their country.

As the country now turns a new leaf, our ambition is to give hope to each and every Afghan.

Mecca and Medinah is a very special place in the hearts of every Muslim but particularly for every Afghan.

Despite the limitations of the bulky 16mm camera and 10-minute film magazines, 'The Anderson Platoon' feels as spontaneous and fresh as any films that have come out of the Afghan or Iraq wars.

Marxism-Leninism offered little guidance to rural Afghan society, with its ancient concepts and ways. Since Moscow's obligatory ideological treatment of war-most important, between socialist and capitalist forces-did not include explanations of a popular uprising against an (at least nominal) socialist state, the Kremlin failed to understand its new mujahadeen enemy.

Marxism-Leninism offered little guidance to rural Afghan society, with its ancient concepts and ways.

Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.

If you were to roam the world from the arctic goldfields of Kotzebue Sound to the pearl-fisheries of Thursday Island,' wrote Lowell Thomas when he visited the region in the 1920s, 'you could find no men more worthy of the title "desperado" than the Pushtuns who live among these jagged, saw-tooth mountains of the Afghan frontier.' Elliot, Jason. Unexpected Light (p. 56). Pan Macmillan UK. Kindle Edition.

It's the Afghan national army that went into Najaf and did the work there.

Needless to say, innumerable challenges exist in all areas of governance, and much more needs to be done to help the Afghan government assume full responsibility for addressing the concerns of ordinary Afghan citizens.

Organizations are accumulations of historical debris. They are not consciously thought. So when you ask the Education Ministry 'What's your core function and who's your client?' they laugh at you. When I say that the client is the Afghan child - and the Ministry is an instrument, not the goal - it's greeted with shock. It's a new idea.