Well Australia’s been in Afghanistan from the get go, way back in 2001, but we have been resolute throughout and with support from both sides of Australian politics.
Obama is thoroughly mixed up with all these things he’s got. He’s got to solve Libya. He’s got to solve Afghanistan. He’s everywhere. And this nation, I don’t know why it’s not showing the leadership and capacity to attend different issues at the same time.
Nevertheless, I do know that we are part of a danger zone, we have military operations in Afghanistan and we’re training the Iraqi police force. The terrorists also have us in their sights.
I think this is a part of John McCain that a lot of people don’t know about, is that he took younger senators under his wing. And, in my case, I – he taught me so much about national security and foreign policy, even when we didn’t always agree. He took me four times with him to Iraq and Afghanistan.
One only has to look at the debacle that has unfolded in Iraq after the withdrawal of U.S. troops at the end of 2011 to have a sneak preview of what could take place in an Afghanistan without some kind of residual American presence.
It is in their inherent moral components that recent Western strategies may be deficient. What percentage of the populations in countries engaged in the 14-year effort in Afghanistan could even name the three main Taliban groups with whom their soldiers have been engaged?
The failings in Afghanistan don’t fall on the shoulders of the American service personnel trying to complete their mission. The failure falls on military leadership unable to adapt to irregular warfare, and a Congress that blindly continues to fund failure.
A victory for the Taliban in Afghanistan would have catastrophic consequences for the world – particularly for South Asia, for Central Asia, and for the Middle East.
In the years leading up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, thinking about defense was driven by ideas that regarded successful military operations as ends in themselves rather than just one instrument of power that must be coordinated with others to achieve – and sustain – political goals.
We stand with the government and people of Afghanistan in their quest for peace, stability and prosperity.
I mean, the United States has had an eighteen-year military commitment in Afghanistan, and frankly, I can’t think of any country other than the United States which is even capable of such a commitment.
Mattis has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama’s policies on Iran and Obama’s capping of troop numbers and campaign end-dates in theaters of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Mattis also appears to be a skeptic of the Obama-era policy of putting women into combat roles.
More than a decade and half after 9/11, U.S. military actions in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and several other Muslim nations are governed by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed in the days immediately after 9/11.
I was happy to be in Afghanistan, doing these real-world operations and taking the fight to the terrorists that attacked us.
The existence of the Taliban, in my view, is a tragedy for Afghanistan. We as Americans need to understand our role in helping bring that tragedy about. So I think it’s important to look at the stories about why these people are fighting.
During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically.
Afghanistan’s story, backwards or sideways, is not confined to the Americans or the English.
We in the West walked away from Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War and left it as a country devastated socially and armed to the teeth. If we do that again, there will be consequences.
We can stay in Afghanistan and the Middle East forever, and it won’t make a difference.
An interim government was set up in Afghanistan. It included two women, one of whom was Minister of Women’s Affairs. Man, who’d she have to show her ankles to to get that job?
The Buddhas had to be destroyed by the Taliban to get the world thinking about Afghanistan.
Do you know that every day, 10 people in Afghanistan are injured by landmines? It will continue for the next 50 years, because the country has the largest number of landmines in the world.
Afghanistan’s winters in the north are legendarily harsh, and southern Afghanistan, by contrast, is bleak desert. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that Afghanistan is one of the world’s most heavily mined countries.
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.
I got married in 2009, and my husband and I both immediately deployed to Afghanistan.
Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on. There was a real sense that you don’t get that critical of a government that’s leading us in war time.
Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.
Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.
The rapid proliferation of cell phones in Afghanistan proves that anything that adds value to people’s lives spreads like brushfire – and commerce is certainly a force that could add value for Afghanis.
We can no longer apply the classic criteria to clearly determine whether and when we should use military force. We are waging war in Afghanistan, for example, but it’s an asymmetrical war where the enemies are criminals instead of soldiers.
I think Americans understand that in Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq and Vietnam, we are fighting an enemy allied with the people who attacked us on 9/11.
My mission is to support our service members. They’re volunteers, and if they’re going to go to a hostile place like Afghanistan, I think we owe it to them to back them up and try to help them get through it.
The high probability is if American forces withdraw from Afghanistan and if no alternative international arrangement is made that then the historic contests between the regions and the sects will reappear, the Taliban will re-emerge, and a very complicated and maybe chaotic situation will develop.
But I knew that what had happened was an eye-opener not only to the United States but also to Pakistan, who realized that after what has happened on the 11th of September, it was simply impossible to continue to play those games in Afghanistan.
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.
At the end of any peace deal, the decision-maker will be the government of Afghanistan.
I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.
A lot of terrorists fled out of Afghanistan.
I have never believed you go to war in Iraq, you go to war in Afghanistan, and believe that you can deal with those battlefields, those countries, in microcosms, or narrow channels.
We can be proud of our record as an international beacon of liberty. From fostering democracies in Eastern Europe to the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have been true to that calling and helped spread freedom to oppressed peoples everywhere.
We cannot continue to ask the brave men and women of our Armed Forces to put their lives on the line to protect our country while we jeopardize their safety by failing to ensure that Defense Department funds are not siphoned off to warlords in Afghanistan.
It’s a tribal state, and it always will be. Whether we like it or not, whenever we withdraw from Afghanistan, whether it’s now or years from now, we’ll have an incendiary situation. Should we stay and play traffic cop? I don’t think that serves our strategic interests.
No one talked about the fact that in this year under the Obama administration you’ve seen the highest casualties in Afghanistan. And the fact that it took him almost 90 days to figure out what his strategy is going to be was absolutely appalling.
If there’s ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.
Seen through the eyes of a U.S. soldier, Afghanistan is a scary place.
The central thesis of the American failure in Afghanistan – the one you’ll hear from politicians and pundits and even scholars – was succinctly propounded by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: ‘The war in Iraq drained resources from Afghanistan before things were under control’.
You could say that bad typography brought us the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, the housing crisis and a good number of other things.
It is imperative that Congress provides adequately funded and stable budgets which allow us to support Afghan personnel and ensure that Afghanistan does not become a breeding ground for terrorists again.
The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.
