A Quote by James Buchan

The theory of permanent Muslim-Christian enmity, though it flourishes in the caves of Tora Bora and parts of the American academy, was long ago exploded by the historians.
A war on Al-Qaeda could have been won with a decisive military strike in Tora Bora during December 2001, but American fighters at Tora Bora were refused requests for more forces when they trapped Al-Qaeda there; the Pentagon was busy husbanding resources for the Iraqi invasion.
A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Air Force dropped massive 15,000-pound 'Daisy Cutter' bombs on the Tora Bora complex where Osama bin Laden was hiding in December 2001.
Talk to me 20 years ago and I had a complete sense of illegitimacy as an American Muslim. I felt like I wasn't authentic. But I don't understand and I don't believe or subscribe to this idea that I don't have a right to speak as a Muslim because I'm an American. Being Muslim is to accept and honor the diversity that we have in this world, culturally and physically, because that's what Islam teaches, that we are people of many tribes. I think the American Muslim experience is of a different tribe than the Saudi Muslim world, but that doesn't make us less than anyone else.
I came to the conclusion long ago that all religions were true and that also that all had some error in them, and while I hold by my own religion, I should hold other religions as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we were Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu; but our innermost prayer should be that a Hindu should become a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, and a Christian a better Christian.
I think 9/11 was a couple of thousand assholes in Afghanistan who ran rampant and just kind of did their thing and we could have gotten them in Tora Bora if that was handled better.
After 9/11, Hekmatyar helped Osama bin Laden escape from the mountains of Tora Bora into Pakistan, and then decamped to Iran, until his presence there became a bit too inconvenient.
Few American presidents are held in higher esteem than Thomas Jefferson. Though historians have scrutinized every phase of his long public career and found him wanting in a number of respects, he holds an unshakable place in the pantheon of American heroes.
Gary Berntsen, head of the CIA in Afghanistan there, he was a field commander. And he has a book out called "Jawbreaker." And he says we missed an opportunity at Tora Bora to get him. We put resources elsewhere. That's been a critique of the administration. Did we miss opportunities?
As I have said for two years now, when Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, it was wrong to outsource the job of capturing them to Afghan warlords who a week earlier were fighting against us.
I cannot think of permanent enmity between man and man, and believing as I do in the theory of reincarnation, I live in the hope that if not in this birth, in some other birth I shall be able to hug all of humanity in friendly embrace.
I went to Afghanistan in '96 to write about terrorist training camps south of Jalalabad and Tora Bora, in the mountains. I was there right before the Taliban took over, literally a few weeks before they took Kabul. The frontline wasn't terribly active, but it was definitely there. And they swept into power.
For many Sudanese, it's for strength they choose to be Christian rather than Muslim. My mum was a Muslim but she became a Christian later.
I as a Muslim want you, as a Christian, to really be a perfect Christian. I want my Jewish friends to be perfect Jews, to live according to the highest principles of what it means to be a Jew, to be a Christian, to be a Muslim.
I would have to say my favorite place on Earth is Bora Bora.
Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.
When we started after Osama bin Laden, we really decided to go after the Taliban. And we seemed to be content to kick the Taliban out of Kandahar. And then we let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.
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