Quotes About Afghanistan

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.

My central objective is, turn Afghanistan's location into a greater asset. Central Asia is becoming Afghanistan's major trading partner. The vision of connectivity is really important.

What President Bush did in his doctrine of preemptive strike and in his war in Afghanistan and in Iraq was to turn even his allies in Europe negatively toward America.

Most people are not affected by [the death penalty]. It's like how many people are actually sent to Iraq and Afghanistan? Such a small percentage.

We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened.

One day Syria would push Israel back to its pre-1967 borders. They had made gains in the region, kicking the Americans out of Iraq, but Israel still existed. Their American masters were on their knees, sent running from Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They were now focused on domestic problems, riots in their streets, political division, and an economy crippled by the pandemic. They even made themselves again dependent on foreign oil, oil from the Arab world. Self-inflicted wounds.

What his time in Afghanistan was teaching him was that there needed to be better reasons, stronger threats to national security, before the United States deployed its sons and daughters. The abstract threat of terror was not enough,

If we can't understand the Afghan family, we can't understand Afghanistan.

We were sent to Afghanistan to carry out hugely dangerous missions. But we were also told that we could not shoot that camel drover before he blew up all of us, because he might be an unarmed civilian just taking his dynamite for a walk.

Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan—regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.

It's an Afghanistan goat, so it can't stay here, or else it'll choke on the sweet air of freedom.

The people of Afghanistan will continue to remember his lasting friendship with the people of Afghanistan as well as his unstinting support during the years of jihad against the Soviets.

The standard argument is that civilian deaths in Afghanistan were the regrettable consequence of military action that was needed to destroy Al Qaida bases and thus prevent further terrorist attacks. But this is a spurious argument since it is obvious that Al Qaida is a decentralised network. The counterargument – that bombing Afghanistan has made it more likely that terrorists will attack – is equally plausible. Most of the September nth hijackers were from Saudi Arabia,

with few apparent connections to Afghanistan as such, but there were no calls to bomb Riyadh (imagine if the hijackers had been Iraqi). Rather, Saudi Arabia is a favoured ally in the 'war against terrorism'. It is obvious that at stake here are US geopolitical interests (discussed further below), more than concerns to prevent future terrorism.

Many soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from serious, long-term, physical and mental health problems, due to their service. It is unconscionable to cut the already limited health care benefits available to these brave men and women.

As for the United States' future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors - the Soviets and, before them, the British.

In the Afghan parliament, apparently, they disconnect the mics when they don't want to hear the women speak).

I knew very little about Afghanistan. Like most of my fellow countrymen, I preferred not to learn too much about dysfunctional countries until after my government invaded them. It's emotionally easier that way.

What is happening now is not a surprise. It was predicted. If anything, it is happening faster than predicted, said Mick Mulroy, the Pentagon's former top Middle East policy official and an ABC News analyst. We are not seeing the worst of it. The Taliban is not only taking territory, they are killing people with the weapons we provided to Afghan security forces, said Mulroy, a former CIA officer and Marine infantryman who served in Afghanistan.

On taking office as General Secretary in 1985 I was immediately faced with an avalanche of problems. It was vital to change our relationship with the West, particularly the United States, and to bring the costly and dangerous arms race to an end. We needed to withdraw from the damaging and costly war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union faced tremendous internal problems. The process of reform required new leadership and courage.

Within weeks of the attacks, the United States went to war in Afghanistan, a conflict that continues at this writing. The war in Iraq followed, starting in 2003 and officially ending in 2011.

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.

In strict Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, many young men have little hope of ever finding a partner. Typically in such nations, there are at least 3 percent more males than females, partly because females don't receive the same medical care as males. Also, polygamy means that the wealthiest men take two or three wives, leaving even fewer women available for the poor. The inability of a young man to settle down in a family may increase the likelihood of his drifting toward violence.

Another Western aid group, trying to improve the hygiene and health of Afghan women, issued them bars of soap—nearly causing a riot. In Afghanistan, washing with soap is often associated with post-coital activity, so the group was thought to be implying that the women were promiscuous.