For us, the death of Osama bin Laden is a time of profound reflection. With his death, we remember and mourn all the lives lost on September 11. We remember and mourn all the lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. We remember and mourn the death of our soldiers.
When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I’ve been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.
I was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents near Fallujah, in Iraq, ambushed by the Taliban in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, and injured in a car accident that killed my driver while covering the Taliban occupation of the Swat Valley in Pakistan.
I voted for Obama. I was very happy when he won. But Obama hasn’t really been able to effectively do anything that has made me… He hasn’t helped the environment. He didn’t close Guantanamo Bay. He went deeper into Afghanistan.
If there is a thread that unites all of our work, whether it’s in Iowa or whether it’s in Maryland or whether it’s among our young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, I believe that it’s the thread of human dignity.
In Afghanistan and Iraq we would often get cowardly fire and rounds hitting us from the sides but we just hunker down and keep going, we don’t turn the mission around.
If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response.
Rebuilding Afghanistan is not going to be solved by pouring billions in. Getting rid of the Taliban does not rid us of the problems of fundamentalism and instability.
When I’m documenting, for example, a story on women in Afghanistan, I will do a huge amount of research and a lot of time on the ground just getting to know the women before I even start shooting.
The public and private sectors in Afghanistan must work together to create an ICT-educated workforce.
Despite failing to get bin Laden, the U.S. government and media portrayed the early Afghanistan war as a great victory.
A trillion dollars spent, 2,000 American lives lost – Afghanistan is the longest war in American history. But you don’t hear a word about it.
Barack Obama commits war crimes – Somalia, Yemen. He commits war crimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to keep a spotlight on war crimes, to keep track of the innocents killed… There is a major clash.
There’s no country in the world that’s more devastated from natural resources than Afghanistan.
Consequences of linear thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq included overestimating indigenous forces’ capabilities, underestimating the enemy, and the associated expectation that the coalition could soon reduce force levels and shift to an exclusively advisory effort.
I said if you want me to go back to Afghanistan and work, I’m happy to do that. If you think accepting my resignation is best for the cause and for the nation, then I have no complaint with that.
If people really saw what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, then they might be marching in the streets to end wars. But you know, I think that no one ever sees because we’re not allowed to see, and we’re not allowed to publish what we do see. So it’s quite difficult.
I think 2001 was the year Al Jazeera started to play an international role, in a way. Because in 2001, we were the only TV station located inside Kabul, and every image out of the war in Afghanistan, the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, came through Al Jazeera screen.
We need to get a stable Afghanistan that can ensure the security of Americans, Europeans, and others on the one hand, but more fundamentally our own democratic rights and institutions.
In Afghanistan, I was talking to Afghan elders who were world-weary of a lack of sustained attention from their own government and from the international community to stop problems early.
Women in Afghanistan do not ask the United States to stay for the simple or sentimental reason of safeguarding their rights. They are the first ones to say that this is not enough of a reason for the world’s remaining superpower to remain in their country.
After 2014, we will support a unified Afghanistan as it takes responsibility for its own future.
I think we learned a lesson and paid a bitter price when we put troops on the ground on a long-term basis in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us support a homegrown, indigenous, and locally inspired effort to bring stability to the region.
The United States can’t impose democracies. We can’t impose our will. The Russians found that out in Afghanistan.
Anti-U.S. sentiment has been born out of many grievances – support and weapons for such dictators as Mubarak, unquestionable support for Israel in its occupation of Palestine, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen that kill more civilians than intended targets.
I think we need to just be very clear about what we’re trying to do in Afghanistan. Frankly, we’re not trying to create the perfect democracy. We’re never going to create some ideal society. We are simply there for our own national security.
It matters not what your individual position is on either war we are currently prosecuting – in Iraq or Afghanistan – certainly we can all agree protesting at military funerals is a cruel and unnecessary hardship on our military families during their most difficult hour.
Gen. Tommy Franks told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq – a war more than a year away.
Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military.
In a place like Afghanistan where the society is completely segregated, women have access to women. Men cannot always photograph women and cannot get the access that I get.
Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn’t care. This is war – not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that’s a victory he savors and desires – unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.
When I was 13, I read ‘Et la paix dans le monde, Docteur?’ a physician’s account of working with Medecins Sans Fontieres during the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. It was this book that inspired me to work for MSF.
We haven’t been out in many of these countries helping them build infrastructure. How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that, rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?
I didn’t vote for Bush, and I’m not happy particularly that he’s president. But I will say I’m impressed that he didn’t start bombing Afghanistan the day after Sept. 11. The more time that passes without him bombing Afghanistan, the more I respect him.
The one thing you learn from looking at places like Afghanistan is that the power of business to do good is enormous.
A simple leather jacket… has gotten me through cocktail parties in New York and cold nights in Afghanistan.
With U.S. support, Israel has developed a cutting-edge missile defense system that one day may be used to guard America, just as Israeli technology protects the vehicles that U.S. soldiers drive in Afghanistan.
There is still a severe and scary amount of extreme poverty in rural parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma and sub-Saharan Africa.
I do dream about Afghanistan. I wake up and think I’m still there.
Continued public and private sector partnership with multilateral and bilateral organizations to support policies that encourage the proliferation of broadband access is essential if Afghanistan is to see the kind of social and economic progress its people deserve.
As long as the Pentagon bankrolls the Pakistan army to fight its wars, and NATO troops remain in Afghanistan, there will be quarrels, charges of infidelity, a reduction in the household allowance, perhaps a separation – but a divorce? Never.
Obama is making a choice now that will lead to the deaths of many thousands of civilians in Afghanistan by American hands. By ordinary standards of presidents, he is a decent man. But those standards aren’t good enough. He’s in a position either to kill or not to kill, and he’s made the decision to kill.
I was no stranger to risk myself, having made documentaries in dangerous conditions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Africa.
In reality, Afghanistan has functioned as a nation-state for more than two centuries, and its army and bureaucracy reach back to the 19th century.
Stamps from Afghanistan are hilarious. You can tell when the revolutions are because suddenly they stop having pictures of the mullahs and the independence monument and they start having fish on them.
Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Centcom, is probably the most decorated officer of his generation.
There’s no place for mob justice in Afghanistan.
I mean Afghanistan is a very rugged, complicated country.
No woman in Afghanistan is in business without support from either her husband or her father or her uncle, someone.
