Words matter. These are the best Afghanistan Quotes from famous people such as Kyrsten Sinema, Jeanne Shaheen, Ant Middleton, Claire Danes, Phil Klay, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As you know, I did not support the United States’ engagement in Iraq and have long had concerns about Afghanistan… But I obviously have always been 100 percent supportive of our military.
I think we need to get the measurements that Congress has mandated from the White House on how we’re going to determine progress in Afghanistan.
I’m from a generation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Our battleground was where we learned. It’s not like the old generation where they used to train and train and train, and then suddenly an operation would come up, and they’d go on it.
My go-to gifts are scarves from my friend Matin Maulawizada’s nonprofit organization, Afghan Hands, which supports disenfranchised women in Afghanistan. In exchange for their beautiful embroidery, the women are given financial aid and classes in math and literacy. The scarves are all stunning and one of a kind.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are as much every U.S. citizen’s wars as they are the veterans’ wars. If we don’t assume that civilians have just as much ownership and the moral responsibilities that we have as a nation when we embark on something like that, then we’re in a very bad situation.
We are not in Afghanistan because girls were not allowed to go to school, but helping them do so will give the Afghan people hope for a better future.
The women of Afghanistan have a voice, and it needs to be heard and not forgotten.
Buttigieg was a naval reservist who served as a lieutenant in Afghanistan, so he has seen first hand how American foreign policy has veered wildy off her once-well-rooted tracks.
As Michael Scheuer, who ran the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit until 1999, has pointed out, if bin Laden believed in Christmas, the Iraq war would be his perfect present from Santa Claus. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan severely damaged bin Laden’s organization.
It is in American and Afghan interests for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan so it doesn’t turn into Iraq circa 2014, with the Taliban controlling much of the country while hosting a strong presence of ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as every other jihadist group of note.
The most successful cultural diplomacy strategy integrates people-to-people or arts/culture/media-to-people interactions into the basic business of diplomacy. The programs in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iran all contribute to core goals of U.S. policy in those countries.
When I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, I never once turned to someone before a raid on a house and said, ‘Hey, man, are you a Democrat or a Republican?’
What bin Laden had hoped to achieve in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 period, which was to drag the United States into a protracted guerrilla war like the one he had fought against the Soviets, never happened. Instead, that protracted guerrilla war is now playing out in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East.
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.
Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.
Afghanistan remains an opportunity to deal al Qaeda a vital strategic blow, especially since we have abandoned all operations – including counterterrorism operations – in Iraq.
In Afghanistan, we have had a history of very strong women, and we need to reclaim that history and talk about it.
I would have voted ‘no’ on the Iraq war and ‘yes’ to Afghanistan.
When we look around the world today, when we see in Afghanistan that 10 million people have registered to vote in their upcoming elections, including 40 percent of those people are women, that’s just unbelievable.
I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth.
By the time the United States went to war with Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, I had made three trips to the country. I covered the fall of the Taliban in Kandahar and have been returning routinely for the past 14 years.
That’s driven by any number of factors, the most prominent of which have been the combat experience of two major campaigns – one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq – and the ongoing demands of the global war on terrorism.
Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one of a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance.
Whenever my mom goes to Afghanistan, I’m just like, ‘Bring me jewelry.’
Gains achieved at great cost against our enemy in Afghanistan are reversible.
Some have called Afghanistan ‘the graveyard of empires,’ and it probably is the graveyard of empires.
It is the responsibility of Afghanistan’s new government to gain better control over the country’s administration and to resolutely fight the drug trade and corruption.
The Taliban has not, in my judgment, in any significant way changed their fundamental goal and objective, which is to take over Afghanistan and return to running that country. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have negotiation talks with them. I think we should. But we’ve got to be clear-eyed about it.
If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything in recent history, it is the unpredictability of war and that these things are easier to get into than to get out of, and, frankly, the facile way in which too many people talk about, ‘Well, let’s just go attack them.’
Officials in the George W. Bush administration later criticized the cruise missile strikes that were ordered by President Bill Clinton in Afghanistan in 1998 as only ‘pounding sand.’
When I arrived in the summer of 2009 to command the war in Afghanistan, I entered an effort that was failing. Many Afghans, some ISAF coalition members, and much of the American public had lost confidence in both the trajectory of the war and our ability to correct it.
A notorious network of violent Islamist hoodlums, concentrated in the rough-and-tumble district of Molenbeek in Brussels, has been operating in plain sight since the 1990s, planning, plotting and carrying out dozens of elaborate jihadi missions from Afghanistan to Algeria.
Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.
To leave Afghanistan as a playground for terrorists and adventurers was simply not possible anymore.
It is unacceptable that a senator or a representative in the American House of Representatives assist Afghanistan during the war and meet with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda leaders, express his support for their war against the U.S., and be allowed to return to serve in Congress.
From my films, you can at least learn about Iran, you can get a sense of the history and the society. But no such films have been made about Afghanistan, so you really can’t know much about it.
We can stay in Afghanistan and the Middle East forever, and it won’t make a difference.
Losing their reproductive rights is the first step to how women live in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn’t suffer from PTSD.
Afghanistan can’t police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary and assistance to insurgents.
When al-Qaeda was on the run from Afghanistan crossing through Iran, some were arrested and they are imprisoned. Some of them are charged with some actions in Iran.
Over the years, I’ve spent time in Saudi Arabia, the Bekaa Valley, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Kenya, among other vacation hotspots.
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.
The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years’ War.
Let us also reflect on the honorable service of our men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces currently serving our country overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, and around the world.
There are tens of thousands of interactions every single day across Afghanistan between the Afghan troops and International Security Assistance Force. On most of those, every single day we continue to deepen and broaden the relationship we seek.
Clay Hunt was the kind of individual that has made America a great country. In 2005, when his country needed him, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Shot in Iraq, he earned a Purple Heart, and after he recuperated, he graduated from Marine Corps Scout Sniper School and was deployed to Afghanistan.
