A Quote by Ahmed Rashid
You have a lot of suspicion from the neighbors of Afghanistan about U.S. intentions. Iran is already, to some extent, trying to undermine the U.S. in Afghanistan. Russia is now becoming increasingly nervous about a more permanent U.S. presence in Central Asia. And China is not keen that the U.S. should be so close to its borders over a long period of time. Certainly, if the U.S. is going to be there for a long time, it's going to exacerbate regional tensions.
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Afghanistan is going to be here a long time, and what's critical is that Afghanistan's relationship with its neighbors are, to the maximum extent they can be, constructive and operationally useful.
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.
In Afghanistan, there have been a lot of teachers assassinated, schools are being blown up, girls are harassed and in some cases, attacked on their way to school. Even if the girls are able to get an education, they can dream big, they can think about how they want to become a member of parliament because they are now women members of parliament in Afghanistan, nobody is really sure how long everything is going to last.
I think what happened with 9/11 is that people sort of felt that it came from nowhere. Whereas I think now we understand the roots are very deep. I say it's like revolutionary Communism, something that is going to have to be knocked out over a very long period of time. This strain of extremism continues to be very strong, whether it's in Afghanistan, or Somalia or Yemen, or any of these places.
The Iraq War has thrown such a heavy shadow on Afghanistan that you can't hardly get any news about that now. I went to Afghanistan this year and spent more time there than I did in Iraq ... just 'cause they were forgotten about, and I wanted them to know that I appreciated it.
When I hear people flatteringly say, 'You're an expert on East Asia...' I'm certainly an observer of East Asia, and central Asia, and ASEAN, and to a lesser extent South Asia and the Gulf, but there's always something behind the wall in China.
The idea of a permanent U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, as opposed to an economic presence, is going to create a new wave of hostility toward the United States.
What I've said from the beginning is that I am going to try to help all the vulnerable populations in Afghanistan - and to a certain extent, that's the majority of Afghanistan.
Iraq and Afghanistan will, over time, become stable. But the War on Terror will continue long after Iraq and Afghanistan have had success in standing up their own governments.
Johnny Apple, a New York Times correspondent, wrote a front-page story saying Afghanistan could be a quagmire and he was mocked and derided. What is certainly true is that all sorts of resources that would have been used in Afghanistan were diverted to Iraq. Would those resources have helped? Almost undoubtedly. Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.
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." If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that George W.Bush lied about mass destruction weapons, the thumbnail version of Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.
God doesn't love me any more or less because I had some work done on my face. You know, I prayed about it a long, long, long, long, long time, because there again, I wouldn't want to do anything that I felt was going to be offensive to God.
Let me put it in a rather larger picture framework. Let's go to the longest time frame, the time frame of the life of our sun. As a star, our sun is about halfway through its life cycle. In the long run, we only have a couple of billion more years likely that we can inhabit this planet. By that time, we're going to have to be out of here before our sun dies. Now, I don't think we need to wait that long, and we certainly shouldn't wait that long. At the moment, we are not on a sustainable path.
Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.
The U.S. must continue to carefully withdraw troops from Afghanistan at a pace based on assessment of the ground conditions so we do not leave our Afghan partners unable to guarantee long-term security or risk Afghanistan becoming a terrorist safe haven again.
I think it's important to remember the tensions between Turkey and Russia predate this jet shoot down by some time. I mean, Russia's long been Bashar al-Assad's strongest backer.
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