A Quote by Khaled Hosseini
The [George W.] Bush administration tripled its aid package to Afghanistan. [Hamid] Karzai finally (and courageously) announced that warlords will be forbidden from holding office in the future government. And finally, NATO agreed to expand the peacekeeping forces to troubled areas outside of Kabul.
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America does not hold to the colonial tradition. America came, liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban and al-Qaida, came to an arrangement with Hamid Karzai, wanted to organize elections as soon as possible and then withdraw. The Bush administration thought that once there is a democracy, everything else will fall into place. If today you speak to the architects of the 2001 Afghanistan Conference in Bonn, they will tell you that instead of being fixated on elections, we should have built a State in Afghanistan with an army and a police force first.
I returned to Kabul after a 27-year absence. I came away with some optimism but not as much as I had hoped for. The two major issues in Afghanistan are a lack of security outside Kabul (particularly in the south and east) and the powerful warlords ruling over the provinces with little or no allegiance to the central government. The other rapidly rising concern is the narcotic trade which, if not dealt with, may turn Afghanistan into another Bolivia or Colombia.
The strategy for peace-building in Afghanistan is economic aid, reconstruction, international security forces. On those lines, the U.S. has been extremely slow. And it has even blocked expanding security forces from Kabul to other cities.
Afghanistan is very satisfied with Croatia's participation in the NATO-led peace mission and expects Croatia to expand its contribution to peace restoration in Afghanistan to other areas as well.
[Mikhail] Gorbachev said that he would agree to the unification of Germany, and even adherence of Germany to NATO, which was quite a concession, if NATO didn't move to East Germany. And [George] Bush and [James] Baker promised verbally, that's critical, verbally that NATO would not expand "one inch to the east," which meant East Germany. Nobody was talking about anything farther at the time. They would not expand one inch to the east. Now that was a verbal promise. It was never written. NATO immediately expanded to East Germany.
You know, it's been President Clinton's dream that we'll have finally a fully integrated Europe; and the steps that NATO will take to expand to the East, that's a commitment.
Who was it in Afghanistan who screwed up in Tora Bora and let bin Laden escape? It was the Bush Administration. Who leached all the resources, military and civil, from Afghanistan, creating the instability that we see there today in order to prepare for the misbegotten invasion of Iraq? It was the Bush administration. If there's a terrorist problem today, who is responsible now? Bush has not done the job.
There were between 46 and 52 drone strikes under the [George W.] Bush administration. And now there are over 400 - that's not counting Afghanistan. So this has been tremendously increased under the [Barack] Obama administration.
Trying to rebuild Afghanistan on the cheap has left the country in the hands of warlords and an impotent Northern Alliance puppet regime that runs Kabul and nothing else.
I know that historically our foundation has had great relations with all the administrations.[Bill] Clinton administration did a lot of outreach. The greatest rise in U.S. foreign aid was under the [George] Bush administration, that's where we got the AIDS initiative, which is called PEPFAR.
When George Bush finally leaves the White House, the satire industry will briefly join the rest of the economy in recession. It will certainly be the end of an era.
The warlords took part in atrocities during the civil war in Afghanistan. They looted, they raped, they killed. They have become incredibly empowered and entrenched. They live in mansions, they have jobs in the government, and they're incredibly powerful. In Kabul, people don't want to speak about it too publicly, because these people are essentially like Tony Soprano.
U.S. analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted reaction to the Bush administration's militancy and aggressiveness.
Now, here we are, and we have Obama in office, and he has drawn down forces in Iraq - which is a plan that was on Bush's desk the day that he left office. The forces in Afghanistan, he's going to draw down, too. But at the same time, Obama has also expanded a lot of the more unsavory, covert aspects of the wars, with the drone strikes and some of the night-raid missions.
Officials in the George W. Bush administration later criticized the cruise missile strikes that were ordered by President Bill Clinton in Afghanistan in 1998 as only 'pounding sand.'
When George W. Bush decided to save the American position in Iraq by going against the advice of all of his wise men, of Jim Baker and the whole Iraq Study Group, and 90% of his administration, that was George W. Bush's decision. So we have to bear in mind that this isn't an administration we're electing. It's a person that we are electing.
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