A Quote by Ant Middleton
In Afghanistan, getting shot at was a regular occurrence. I viewed survival as a numbers game. As point man, every time I entered a Taliban compound first, I played the odds in my head.
Related Quotes
Entrepreneurship is like a computer game in which you have to master every level before achieving success. Startups repeatedly stumble and have to go back to the drawing board. The best way to skip some levels and to increase the odds of survival is to learn from others who have already played the game.
You look at today, it's a different situation. You have a game that has been transformed into a game where almost every shot is either an outside shot - a three-point shot - or a dunk.
I've been playing the CNN Drinking Game, have you ever played that? Where you do a shot every time George Bush says the word "evil"? Oh, I'm a wreck! You gotta do a double shot every time he says "evildoers". Chug the bottle for "axis of evil". Are you a president or an exorcist?!
In mid-November 2001, as they moved toward the city of Kandahar, the Taliban's de facto capital in southern Afghanistan, Amerine's team called in airstrikes against advancing Taliban units and more or less obliterated a Taliban column of a thousand men that had been dispatched from Kandahar. It was the Taliban's final play to remain in power.
I was point man, which meant I was the first through the door, hunting down Taliban commanders, knocking down forts every night.
People talk about Kobe's 81-point game, the second-highest scoring game in NBA history. I saw the game. I don't care if it was 79, 81 - I just remember the game. I remember the moves. I remember the shots. I remember the beauty of it. The numbers? What he shot from the field? I don't care.
Oh, if I played in the All-Star game, I'm playing defense - hard for the first quarter. And I want to get a couple of dunks, too, like I do in a regular game.
The first time I visited Afghanistan in May 2000, I was 26 years old, and the country was under Taliban rule. I went there to document Afghan women and landmine victims.
It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ...[Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of] promoting enemy propaganda...we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people.
Do you remember when we were kids and played that game 'Telephone'? It was like that. The first time I heard about it, someone said he'd been shot 17 times.
The future of Afghanistan is incredibly dark, and decisions are happening incredibly quickly. Speculation is a fool's game, but I've seen many political projections that look like the Taliban could hold most of the country, and possibly Kabul, within perhaps a short time. I can't imagine how Afghanistan's fall isn't going to be ten times faster than Iraq's. The role of women in that space is terrifying, and the idea of retribution is a nightmare.
At all levels - with men and women - the 3-point shot has utterly transformed the way the game is played. More and more, the players are spread out, looking to pop behind the 3-point arc.
Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man; and it is first in point of occurrence; for the wife comes after.
The last game I played in college was in the NIT against St. Mary's. That was the first time I had come to the Oakland area. So, the last game I played in college and the first game of my NBA career were out here in the Bay Area. It's pretty cool.
By releasing these five top Taliban commanders, the U.S. is demonstrating that it is throwing in the towel in the long struggle against the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies in Afghanistan.
I had said from the start that I thought Iraq was a mistake, that we should have stayed focused on Afghanistan. I think it was the right decision because the Taliban at that point had gotten a lot of momentum before I'd gotten into office, partly because we hadn't been paying attention as much as we needed to to Afghanistan.
Related Authors
Brandon Webb Quotes
American
Soldier
Chiang Kai-shek Quotes
Chinese
Soldier
Chris Kyle Quotes
American
Soldier
Dakota Meyer Quotes
American
Soldier
Kyle Carpenter Quotes
American
Soldier
Marcus Luttrell Quotes
American
Soldier
Miyamoto Musashi Quotes
Japanese
Soldier
Moshe Dayan Quotes
Israeli
Soldier
Oliver North Quotes
American
Soldier
Philip Sidney Quotes
English
Soldier
R. Lee Ermey Quotes
American
Soldier
Robert Baden-Powell Quotes
English
Soldier
T. E. Lawrence Quotes
British
Soldier
Wilfred Owen Quotes
English
Soldier
William Tecumseh Sherman Quotes
American
Soldier
Yamamoto Tsunetomo Quotes
Japanese
Soldier