#taliban

If you're an Afghan village leader in a small town down around Kandahar somewhere, and you know that the footprint is getting smaller for your security, and the Taliban saying don't forget, I'm going to be back real soon, who is your loyalty going to go through? ↗

— Mike Rogers

#around #back #down #footprint #forget

Suppose something would happen to the president, who would be in charge? The Vice President. Joe Biden? You have got to be kidding today when you say the Taliban's not our enemy. ↗

— Douglas Wilder

#enemy #got #happen #joe #kidding

Some of the generals are saying, 'We're making progress. We are clearing an area.' But you really don't defeat the Taliban by clearing an area. They move. ↗

— Colin Powell

#clearing #defeat #generals #making #move

The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important. ↗

— Asne Seierstad

#afghan #after #behind #book #came

And the narrative for the Taliban that they can wait us out is a flawed narrative. I think that the unambiguous international support for Afghanistan has been a very powerful message. You know, that was the message that came out of the NATO summit. We will not abandon Afghanistan. ↗

— John R. Allen

#afghanistan #been #came #flawed #i

The armies, the difference of all of those armies that had been fighting each other and the Taliban took advantage of that to rule over the whole country. ↗

— Bulent Ecevit

#armies #been #country #difference #each

I mean, the Taliban, my view is that they have been weakened. We have not seen them able to conduct any kind of organized attack to regain any territory that they've lost. We've seen levels of violence going down. ↗

— Leon Panetta

#any #attack #been #conduct #down

The fact is that Iran doesn't want to see the Taliban come back any more than do most Afghan citizens. ↗

— David Petraeus

#any #back #citizens #come #fact

When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway. ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#anyway #created #does #fixed #history

The path to a sustained victory in Afghanistan lies in improving their economy, creating jobs for the Afghanis, strengthening their government and national services, getting the provinces to trust each other and work together, and eliminating the opium trade. Previously, the United States' policy was to not get deeply involved in internal Afghani drug issues; now we've changed the policy and are actively working to eradicate the drugs. But nobody has yet to come up with a way to shut down the poppy fields and get the Afghani people back to work. Until that happens, the Taliban will inevitable creep back in. ↗

— Michael DeLong

#government #heroin #opium #policy #taliban