War in Afghanistan Quotes

I'm saying 9/11 was to get us into Iraq and get us into Afghanistan.

I think 2001 was the year Al Jazeera started to play an international role, in a way. Because in 2001, we were the only TV station located inside Kabul, and every image out of the war in Afghanistan, the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, came through Al Jazeera screen.

The 2000s were marked by terrorism and a bipartisan desire to fight it.

After 9/11, a few hundred CIA and Special Operations personnel, backed by airpower and Afghan militias, devastated Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. That effort has since turned into a conventional Pentagon nation-building exercise and gone backward.

The war in Afghanistan is not of a peace with the rest of Obama's worldview. It's a holdover from the era that his election was supposed to bring to a close.

A significant U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan has been continuous since October 2001, and President Obama's short-lived 'surge' in 2009 was a continuation of his predecessor's buildup there.

The use of military force against Iraq and Afghanistan was and remains just.

We all know that, unfortunately, the media does not always portray the good things that are happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this will be a great opportunity for us to glean some information from the Iraqi women who are here for us to also take back to our constituents.

The Taliban didn't attack us on 9/11 - Al-Qaeda did. That's why I and other people joined the military - to go after Al Qaeda. Not the Taliban.

You would have thought that after 9/11 the president would have finished the job in Afghanistan, and kept the focus on capturing Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda deputies, but he and his team gave top priority to their original plan to invade Iraq.

It's ironic that early on in the war with Afghanistan, the Americans and the British were saying, 'We recognise there must be a Palestinian state,' then they rapidly forgot about it. I think history will show that that kind of amnesia will come back to haunt you.

Our neighbor Canada has 2,200 troops serving in Afghanistan. Canada has also assumed responsibility for the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, which was originally established by our own military.

If you polled the military in Afghanistan as to how many think we should be there or not, the numbers would probably be similar to what the U.S. population believes. That's not because they're watching the news. But, hey, they are out there risking their lives. No one likes to be criticized and it really sucks to be criticized when you're risking your life.

The war in Afghanistan was fought for feminist reasons, and the Marines were really on this feminist mission. But today, all the women in all these countries have been driven back into medieval situations. Women who were liberated, women who were doctors and lawyers and poets and writers and - you know, pushed back into this Shia set against Sunnis. The U.S. is supporting al-Qaeda militias all over this region and pretending that it's fighting Islam. So we are in a situation that is psychopathic.

When I arrived in the summer of 2009 to command the war in Afghanistan, I entered an effort that was failing. Many Afghans, some ISAF coalition members, and much of the American public had lost confidence in both the trajectory of the war and our ability to correct it.

I think Americans understand that in Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq and Vietnam, we are fighting an enemy allied with the people who attacked us on 9/11.

We've been at war for 10 years with this generation of Marines. We've seen women do a whole lot of things between the war in Iraq and the current war in Afghanistan. The fact that I'm sitting here making sure that we continue to put out the best young Marines is just a matter of it being 2011.

Afghanistan's story, backwards or sideways, is not confined to the Americans or the English.

I have a very deep concern about President Obama putting in another 21,000 troops into Afghanistan with the promise of more to come.

The military sensed weakness, exploited it and played Barack Obama. Obama's foreign policy has been consistently hawkish despite this reluctant warrior schtick that he pulls. But at the end of the day a reluctant warrior is still a warrior. Look at the drone strikes, the tripling of the war in Afghanistan, and now Libya. I'm convinced that had Obama been in the Senate in 2003 he would have voted for the Iraq war. He's clearly easily convinced by his advisers and the Pentagon.

I find George Bush and Dick Cheney frightening, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft frightening.