A Quote by Hamid Karzai
As the president of Afghanistan I look at the suffering of our people as a whole.
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The calls that I have received from President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the fact that there are other people that are suffering every bit as much as I am, and that our whole nation is going through a tragedy together, I think we have to think about those things.
I don't think any man or woman should run for president unless, number one, they know exactly why they would want to be president, and two, they can look at folks out there and say, 'I promise you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy, and my passion.
If we take the time to look deeply, we see that understanding and compassion arise from suffering. Understanding is the understanding of suffering, and compassion is the kind of energy that can transform suffering. If suffering is not there, we have no means to cultivate our understanding and our compassion. This is something quite simple to see
At some point, deliberation begins to look more like indecisiveness which then becomes a way of emboldening our enemies and allies and causing our allies to question our resolve. So we shouldn't let one component of this determine our national security here which depends on providing an Afghanistan which denies a safe haven to terrorists as well as stabilizing Pakistan. Those are our two national security interests at stake in Afghanistan.
The President is not only the leader of a party, he is the President of the whole people. He must interpret the conscience of America. He must guide his conduct by the idealism of our people.
The second noble truth states that we must discover why we are suffering. We must cultivate the courage to look deeply, with clarity and courage, into our own suffering. We often hold the tacit assumption that all of our suffering stems from events in the past. But, whatever the initial seed of trauma, the deeper truth is that our suffering is more closely a result of how we deal with the effect these past events have on us in the present.
At least, it is encouraging to me that President [Barack] Obama has put Afghanistan front and center in this broader so-called War on terror, and that he is taking a different approach to Afghanistan.
How about Burma, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, our streets, our neighborhoods, our own minds. We don't have to look far - and we should look far as well.
Afghanistan is a country in need. Afghanistan needs to protect itself in the region; Afghanistan needs to secure itself within the country. Afghanistan needs to develop its forces, and Afghanistan needs to provide stability to the people.
Buddhism teaches us not to try to run away from suffering. You have to confront suffering. You have to look deeply into the nature of suffering in order to recognize its cause, the making of the suffering.
People in Afghanistan want peace, including the Taliban. They're also people like we all are. They have families, they have relatives, they have children, they are suffering a tough time.
Our efforts to disconnect ourselves from our own suffering end up disconnecting our suffering from God's suffering for us. The way out of our loss and hurt is in and through.
The suffering that food animals undergo, the suffering of those who eat them and profit by them, the suffering of starving people who could be fed with the grain that feeds these animals, and the suffering we thoughtlessly impose on the ecosystem, other creatures, and future generations are all interconnected. It is this interconnectedness of suffering, and its reverse, of love, caring, and awareness, that calls out for our understanding.
Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; seperation from what is pleasing is suffering... in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.
I've been in a position before where a president has turned to me in the Oval Office in a difficult moment, without any pleasantries, and said, 'I'm asking you as your president and Commander in Chief to take command of the international security force in Afghanistan.' The only response can be, 'Yes, Mr. President.'
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