Quotes About Afghanistan

The people of Afghanistan, they are Muslims, and nobody is rejecting Islam here," he said. "This is very easy for the people of Afghanistan to come together and solve this. America came here for what? They came for women? No. They came for education? No. They came because they were attacked from Afghanistan and they sought security. This is their right. But they should not occupy or interfere with Afghanistan.

Known as National Security Decision Directive 166, with an annex classified Top Secret/Codeword, the blueprint they produced became the legal basis for a massive escalation of the CIA's role in Afghanistan, starting in 1985.

President Reagan signed the classified NSDD-166, titled "Expanded U.S. Aid to Afghan Guerrillas," in March 1985, formally anointing its confrontational language as covert U.S. policy in Afghanistan. His national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, signed the highly classified sixteen-page annex, which laid out specific new steps to be taken by the CIA.

To enlarge Pakistan's sphere of influence in Afghanistan during the 1990s, Directorate S covertly supplied, armed, trained, and sought to legitimize the Taliban.

Directorate S seeks to provide a thorough, reliable history of how the C.I.A., I.S.I., and Afghan intelligence agencies influenced the rise of a new war in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and how that war fostered a revival of Al Qaeda, allied terrorist networks, and, eventually, branches of the Islamic State.

Musharraf told Wendy Chamberlin at Army House that a postwar government in Afghanistan, in addition to being "pro-Pakistan," should also be "Pashtun dominated."15 For two decades, I.S.I. had tried to control Islamist Pashtun parties to influence Afghan politics; it was not about to stop now.

Larry Goodson, an American scholar of Afghanistan, interviewed Taliban leaders along the Pakistan border during this period and found that the movement benefited from "a perception that the Americans would leave, that reconstruction would not succeed, and that Afghanistan would return to chaos.

The Afghans primarily blamed Pakistan. The sanctuary the Taliban enjoyed in Pakistan as they regrouped empowered them. Afghans wondered, reasonably: How could the United States fail to see that I.S.I. was up to its old tricks?

The Americans and their Canadian and European allies were in a hurry to get the Afghan army and police organized, so they could go home. The Afghan soldiers being trained could not withdraw from the challenge of the Taliban, so they were open to local truces and other improvised, even cooperative strategies with the enemy to avoid direct combat.

In the absence of more robust American support, Massoud depended on Iran, India, and Russia for weapons, money, and medical aid. Iran was perhaps his most reliable ally. Iranian Revolutionary Guards and intelligence operatives worked in northern Afghanistan alongside Massoud's guerrillas.

During the 1980s, across a long, bitter uprising against the Soviet Union, Afghan mujaheddin had not participated in suicide attacks. The mujaheddin's prideful, family-supported ethos of jihad emphasized individual bravery and, where possible, living to fight another day. When the Taliban conquered Afghanistan during the late 1990s, Mullah Mohammad Omar and his commanders did not employ suicide bombers, either.

Afghans believe that if their country is to be sold to Pakistan they would prefer to bargain over the price directly rather than rely on an agent," meaning the United States, Rubin wrote.17

He told Williams that he appreciated what the United States was trying to do in Afghanistan. "The day you leave, the Taliban will be back," he predicted.

As Senate investigators later concluded, the events at Tora Bora "forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism.

Obama was new to Afghanistan but he had personal connections to Pakistan. As a college sophomore in Los Angeles, he had shared an apartment with a Pakistani friend, Hasan Chandoo, a business-minded Shiite from a prosperous Karachi family. Obama visited Pakistan with Chandoo and made other Pakistani friends as he came of age and later entered Harvard Law School.

Al Qaeda's brigades in Afghanistan were made up of determined fighters who would be no easy match for Taliban forces.

month to Massoud and his Islamic guerrilla organization, along with weapons and other supplies. Between 1989 and 1991, Schroen had personally delivered some of the cash. But the aid stopped in December 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved. The United States government decided it had no further interests in Afghanistan.

I believed in the Taliban when they first appeared," Karzai later conceded. "I gave them fifty thousand dollars to help them out, and then handed them a cache of weapons I had hidden near Kandahar. . . . They were good people initially, but the tragedy was that very soon after they were taken over by the I.S.I.

The Americans struggled to understand just how much support reached bin Laden in Afghanistan from Saudi sources. It appeared to be substantial, even into 2000. A Saudi government audit of the National Commercial Bank, the kingdom's largest, showed that at least $3 million had flowed from its accounts to bin Laden. One of Saudi Arabia's largest charities, the International Islamic Relief Organization, acknowledged that it had sent about $60 million to the Taliban.25

Al Qaeda was growing, and its sanctuary in Afghanistan allowed ever more ambitious operations. Within the CIA and at interagency White House sessions the Counterterrorist Center officers spoke starkly. "Al Qaeda is training and planning in Afghanistan, and their goal is to destroy the United States," they declared, as one official recalled it. "Unless we attack their safe haven, they are going to get continually stronger and stronger."29

Black Label–sipping Pakistani generals with London flats and daughters on Ivy League campuses had been managing jihadi guerrilla campaigns against India and in Afghanistan for two decades.

The Taliban kept spinning off in new and bizarre directions, however. On March 1 the movement announced its intention to destroy all the statues in Afghanistan that depicted human form.

The Buddhas in Afghanistan were older even than Islam. Thousands of Muslim soldiers had crossed Afghanistan to India over the centuries, but none of them had ever felt compelled to destroy the Buddhas. "When they have spared these statues for fifteen hundred years, all these Muslims who have passed by them, how are you a different Muslim from them?" Haider asked. "Maybe they did not have the technology to destroy them," Omar speculated.

The best time of being a Marine was Afghanistan. There will never be a time when I'm sleeping in the dirt and I haven't showered in four months and I'm with 50 of the people that I'll be the closest with ever.