Top 100 Quotes About Afghanistan
#1. I'm not sure we have the right strategy in Afghanistan. Let me think this over for a few months.
Barack Obama
#2. We need to deal with the problem of al Qaeda, make sure that they can't have a sanctuary in Afghanistan and guarantee that we have regional stabilization and particularly focused on Pakistan.
Rahm Emanuel
#3. In my 20 years as a photographer, covering conflicts from Bosnia to Gaza to Iraq to Afghanistan, injured civilians and soldiers have passed through my life many times.
Anja Niedringhaus
#4. When I go there to Afghanistan or Pakistan, the question both asked - and if it's not asked, implied - is, 'Are you staying this time?' because we left last time, in 1989 in Afghanistan, and we sanctioned Pakistan from 1990 to 2002. So I think it's a fair question.
Michael Mullen
#5. We have to be realistic about what we can achieve in Afghanistan. The notion that the United States can build a Western-style democracy there is a myth
Barbara Boxer
#6. I want the troops from Great Britain and the U.S. to be successful, but by the same token, Afghanistan has always been a screw-up.
Clint Eastwood
#7. I'm outraged that we're building roads, schools, and hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that we're doing it with borrowed money from China that we're paying interest on. I'm outraged.
Gary Johnson
#8. A smile stretches across his [Pigpen] face. "Naw, but we had a chaplain over in Afghanistan. Cool son of a bitch. And he'd do this. Out of nowhere tell a story that would put it in perspective.
Katie McGarry
#9. No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren't about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country.
Paul Wolfowitz
#10. Eighty-five percent cannot read when they enter the security forces of Afghanistan. Why? Because the Taliban withheld education during the period of time in which these men and women would have learned to read.
James G. Stavridis
#11. The fate of Syria hangs in the balance, but it is entirely possible that the fall of the Assad regime will result in anarchy and cause Syria to turn into a second Afghanistan, a base for anti-Israel terrorism.
Martin Van Creveld
#12. To Pakistan? Or Afghanistan? Or Wherever-the-fuck-istan?
Daniel Silva
#13. Over in Afghanistan, Osama stuck his head out of the cave and saw a shadow. So, that means six more weeks of bombing.
David Letterman
#14. I'm the first girl from Afghanistan to lead a series in the United States.
Azita Ghanizada
#15. 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.
Solomon Ortiz
#16. We're not running out of [fixed] targets. Afghanistan is.
Donald Rumsfeld
#17. What kind of world is it that lets a thing like that happen? That lets a girl like Sue get murdered for kicks, or kids in Afghanistan starve, or baby seals get skinned alive?
-Matt Honeycutt
L.J.Smith
#18. While I disagree with our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have nothing but respect and admiration for the men and women deployed in these places.
Henry Rollins
#19. Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.
Keith Henson
#20. Without women taking an active role in Afghan society, rebuilding Afghanistan is going to be very difficult.
Khaled Hosseini
#21. The major problem for America is we're losing two wars. We're losing in Afghanistan, we're losing in Iraq. And there seems very little likelihood that we're going to increase the number of troops we have in either place to the point that we can prevail.
Michael Scheuer
#22. The Bible says there is a time for peace and a time for war. Now is the time for war. I cannot wait to say it is now a time for peace." - MAJ James Brisson, Chaplain, 1-160th SOAR, 19 October 2001, Afghanistan
Oliver North
#23. I'm saying 9/11 was to get us into Iraq and get us into Afghanistan.
Jesse Ventura
#24. 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.
William T. Vollmann
#25. I think indeed our response on counterinsurgency needs to be finely tuned to the needs of Afghanistan. This is not Iraq. We don't have a Sons of Iraq here. We don't have the same divisions here that we had between Sunni and Shia.
Rahm Emanuel
#26. Afghanistan - where empires go to die.
Mike Malloy
#27. I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.
Oliver North
#28. Never underestimate the ability of political leaders to misread history on a monumental scale. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have both served to hasten western decline: they have both failed to achieve their objectives and in the process demonstrated an underlying western impotence.
Martin Jacques
#29. Military surge in Afghanistan to eliminate the Taliban.
Barack Obama
#30. 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.
Lynsey Addario
#31. Canada has sent an army of 1,000 soldiers to occupy the Muslim country of Afghanistan (and ships to the Persian Gulf),
George Galloway
#32. If the military contractors are out of Afghanistan, Karzai is out 15 minutes later.
Rachel Maddow
#33. Don't kid yourself. President Obama's decision to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan before he stands for reelection is not driven by the United States' 'position of strength' in the war zone as much as it is by grim economic and political realities at home.
Ron Fournier
#34. The United States can't impose democracies. We can't impose our will. The Russians found that out in Afghanistan.
Chuck Hagel
#35. When you ask people, "What's America's longest war?" they usually answer "Vietnam" or amend that to "Afghanistan," but it's neither. America's longest war is the war on drugs.
Don Winslow
#36. Once, back home, I decided to count how many days out of my twenty months in Afghanistan I'd been on combat missions. 217 days. And I'm still paying the price for every one of those days.
Vladislav Tamarov
#37. Only, his email is there. I check the date and time of his note. As of this morning, Dad was still alive in Afghanistan. I try not to think about it this way, but I can't help it.
Valerie O. Patterson
#38. In Afghanistan, life is so fragile; who knows what the next week will bring? That fragility really affects the way you're able to report, and the kind of stories people will tell you.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
#39. Look, I think the public generally understands that what's at stake in Afghanistan is American security, number one.
Paul Wolfowitz
#40. The military alone cannot end the conflict in Afghanistan. On that much nearly everyone can agree, offering a rare island of consensus among sides otherwise divided on the question of how and when America's longest-ever war should wind down.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
#41. We don't consider the battle has ended in Afghanistan ... The battle has begun and its fires are picking up. These fires will reach the White House, because it is the center of injustice and tyranny.
Mohammed Omar
#42. Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.
Miguel Syjuco
#43. Afghanistan must never again be a safe haven for terrorism.
Julia Gillard
#44. The one thing you learn from looking at places like Afghanistan is that the power of business to do good is enormous.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
#45. I remember, on the medevac helicopter, I said to myself, "I am not f - - g dying in Afghanistan." People talk about having flashbacks; I began having flash-forwards. I began thinking of all the things I still wanted to do.
Giles Duley
#46. out why or explore their options. Then she met Wakil. It was at a conference her husband had attended at the U.S. consulate in Afghanistan for
Deborah Rodriguez
#47. The attacks of 9/11 came out of Afghanistan. It was a failed state, a rogue nation. That's why al Qaeda was there in the first place.
Sebastian Junger
#48. The average ordinary person, in the worst slums of America, someone who might even hate the law and disagree with the government, they would do something about that [abandoned child]. But in Afghanistan, people hardly have the means to take care of themselves, let alone a random child on the street.
Immortal Technique
#49. 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.
Allen West
#50. In all the debate about Afghanistan, we don't hear much about our obligation to the wretched lives of Afghan women. They are being treated as collateral damage as the big boys discuss geopolitical goals.
Tina Brown
#51. Involvement in Afghanistan, I thought, was totally warranted. We were attacked, we attacked back, but after six months of being in Afghanistan, I thought we had pretty well effectively wiped out al Qaeda.
Gary Johnson
#52. In his first term, President Barack Obama played a cautious manager navigating the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and cleaning up the messes left by President George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kevin O'Leary
#53. A simple leather jacket ... has gotten me through cocktail parties in New York and cold nights in Afghanistan.
Ronan Farrow
#54. One is the goals of 9/11 itself, of that attack was to draw the United States into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency as the Soviets had done before them.
Mark Danner
#55. The other problem is that the priority of many soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan is operational security: not getting killed. Now that is a very valid priority, but it has to be balanced against many other priorities, especially not killing too many locals in the process.
Yaroslav Trofimov
#56. Lost Decency (a memoir) covers three phases of Afghanistan's last 50 years (Where it was? What Happened and Where it is headed?)
Atta Arghandiwal
#57. Canada is preparing to play a major role in the continued stability and security of Afghanistan through ISAF.
Paul Cellucci
#58. 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.
Hamid Karzai
#59. 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'.
Anand Gopal
#60. We didn't do anything wrong, but among the lessons learned, given the magnitude of the problems we now face in Afghanistan, a major U.S. force on the ground would convince the world we were in for the long-haul recovery of a country devastated by 21 years of warfare.
Alexander Haig
#61. 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.
Lynsey Addario
#62. something: scenario x is responded to by action y. Everyone learns it and then practices it until responses are almost instinctive. It's all part of the "train hard, fight easy" philosophy that's central to military life - though veterans of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan smile
Nick Pope
#63. Here's the latest from the Pentagon
the generals are worried that the White House is spreading itself thin by trying to fight a war on two fronts; Afghanistan and Fox News.
Jay Leno
#64. The war in Afghanistan is too important to be reduced to a political football. We are fighting there to protect our national security. We are confronting the Taliban-led insurgency to prevent terrorists returning to that country.
Bob Ainsworth
#65. To understand Afghanistan, you have to face the stress the average Afghan deals with.
Hyder Akbar
#66. Certainly the existence of these huge nuclear force was important for the ultimate confrontation, let's say, over western Europe. You just can't use them to deal with a situation like Afghanistan.
Lloyd Cutler
#67. Given Mr. Obama's lack of experience as an executive, and his past performance in crises such as the oil spill, it is reasonable for those of us who support the effort in Afghanistan to worry that he will not be up to the job.
Jim Talent
#68. I oppose the spending of trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan, I strongly oppose Islamic extremism but don't believe that sending troops to die in two unwinnable wars makes sense.
Roger Stone
#69. I am now concerned with women's issues in a different way: women from Afghanistan, from Cambodia.
Emma Bonino
#70. Liberia is not at the center of a massive geopolitical game. Afghanistan is and has always been. The history is dramatic, the politics are dramatic, the landscape is incredibly dramatic.
Tim Hetherington
#71. As we continue to make great progress in the war on terror, now more than ever, it is important that members of the international community stand-by and bolster the efforts of the emerging diplomatic leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan.
James Inhofe
#72. We can stay in Afghanistan and stabilize the situation, or we can get out and win, or we can get out and lose.
Dinesh D'Souza
#73. India has been contributing very much to the reconstruction of Afghanistan; we are strongly engaged there.
Joschka Fischer
#74. If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.
Robert M. Gates
#75. Their conversation had gone like this: 'Something something, something something, something something something ... the White Dog of Afghanistan ... something something something, something, something, something else, something entirely unintelligible.
Mark Helprin
#76. The American administration is trying to achieve any gain in the shadow of the embarrassment hitting it because of its failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine after the failure of Israel's war on Lebanon and the retreat of America's project in the region.
Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah
#77. Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the president's advisers said, "This is probably not going to work." A lot of people in the military said, "This is probably not going to work."
Michael Hastings
#78. Romania will continue to fulfil its obligations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Traian Basescu
#79. 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.
John R. Allen
#80. 'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.
Christopher Hitchens
#81. Poetry isn't as relevant in the Western world as it is in Afghanistan. And not many people make time for something that doesn't feel relevant.
Eliza Griswold
#82. The blow back from the cold war is that a weakened Russia allowed Afghanistan to become a failed state, and then all this weaponry to flow into all these other conflicts. Our greatest triumph has almost fueled our most intractable battle now.
Jon Stewart
#83. We have been helping, trying to help Afghanistan in many ways, even from the beginning of ... the beginnings of the '20s, 1920s, when he we were fighting our own national struggle.
Bulent Ecevit
#84. 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.
Otto Schily
#85. It's always a mistake for writers to key their submissions to world events, because they move so quickly and unpredictably, as has certainly proven the case in Afghanistan.
Richard Curtis
#86. The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was.
Tim Weiner
#87. It doesn't matter what we think we are there [in Afghanistan] for; it matters what they think. They think we are invaders.
Gwynne Dyer
#88. They [U.S. soldiers] are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan.
Sarah Palin
#89. 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.
Jeanne Shaheen
#90. The budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs the total impact will exceed £20 billion.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
#91. 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.
Patti Smith
#92. In Afghanistan this week, outnumbered Northern Alliance rebels on horseback defeated Taliban forces armed with tanks. Experts say the victory is just like the story of David and Goliath and David's friend, the Stealth Bomber.
Tina Fey
#93. I want the American people to understand, we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Stanley A. McChrystal
#94. When did an old white guy yelling at me, telling me what to think become news? What gives him the right to tell me what to think? When was the last time he was in Iraq or Afghanistan or Sri Lanka ... or anywhere that didn't have a beach?
Lisa Ling
#96. The events of September 11 and what has happened since have made people understand that even a small, distant and far away country like Afghanistan cannot be left to break up into anarchy and chaos without consequences for the whole world.
Lakhdar Brahimi
#97. Our lives are not good - it is not the Afghanistan we remember - but it is still life.
Eric Blehm
#98. From the bitter cold winter at Valley Forge, to the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq, our soldiers have courageously answered when called, gone where ordered, and defended our nation with honor.
Solomon Ortiz
#99. 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.
Barack Obama
#100. There's an 800 kilometer border between Iran and Afghanistan.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
