Taliban Quotes - Page 5

• Americans have eliminated Iran's worst enemies, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam [Hussein]. I occasionally threatened my Iranian counterpart in Kabul that one day I would send him a big bill for what we did. But, seriously, Iran is pursuing a dual strategy in Iraq. On the one hand, the Iranians, after decades of hostility, are now interested in good relations. On the other hand, they want to keep the country weak and dominate the region.

  Zalmay Khalilzad

  Country, Hands, Iran

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• More bad news for the Taliban. Remember how they are promised 72 virgins when they die? Turns out that it's only one 72-year-old virgin.

  Jay Leno

  Years, News, Remember

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• The question about the Salafi is an important question as I say in Arab Awakening, and have often repeated since. I am really underlining the importance of this, because we really don't have very good memories. Remember - the Taliban in Afghanistan were not at all politicised in the beginning. They were just on about education. And then they were pushed by the Saudi and the Americans to be against the Russian colonisation, and as a result they came to be politicised.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Memories, Important, Awakening

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• There are many difficult challenges in Afghanistan. And we still have Taliban. We still have terrorist organizations there, and we will see violence and we will see conflict there also in the coming years,.

  Jens Stoltenberg

  Challenges, Violence, Conflict

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• If the Taliban comes back to power, the impact would be devastating. A country that has made great strides, in terms of development indicators, would take a huge step backwards. Afghanistan's national economy would be devastated.

  Chris Alexander

  Country, Impact, Would Be

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• The future of Afghanistan is incredibly dark, and decisions are happening incredibly quickly. Speculation is a fool's game, but I've seen many political projections that look like the Taliban could hold most of the country, and possibly Kabul, within perhaps a short time. I can't imagine how Afghanistan's fall isn't going to be ten times faster than Iraq's. The role of women in that space is terrifying, and the idea of retribution is a nightmare.

  Eliza Griswold

  Country, Fall, Dark

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We all hoped in 2001 that we could put in place an Afghan government under President Karzai that would be able to control the country, make sure al-Qaeda didn't come back, and make sure the Taliban wasn't resurging. It didn't work out.

  Colin Powell

  Country, Government, Work Out

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• You know, if I were an - if I were a Taliban, I'd say, 'What did al-Qaida ever do for me except get me kicked out of Afghanistan?'

  Robert M. Gates

  Als, Afghanistan, Ifs

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• In 2007 and 2008, it was impossible to get American and British policy makers, or Pakistani politicians, to acknowledge that the Taliban leadership was in Pakistan. This is the great virtue of the early statements of the Obama administration, when Obama himself, Richard Holbrooke and others, said that the threat to both countries comes principally from western Pakistan, in Balujistan and Waziristan. So there has been some progress, but probably the hardest part is yet to come.

  Chris Alexander

  Country, Progress, Administration

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• But here too it should be noted that the President's approach was to first ask the repressive and brutal Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden to us, and only after that government refused to do that did we invade.

  Barney Frank

  Government, President, Firsts

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• I happen to be one of those in the antiwar part of things who actually supported Bill Clinton when he sent the cruise missiles in to take out bin Laden. I had thought we had the right to use Special Forces to go in for bin Laden. He had attacked American embassies. He attacked ships. And so, I didn't see any need to coddle the Taliban.

  Robert Scheer

  Special, Needs, Use

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Some Pakistanis fought for the Taliban. Pakistani extremist groups provided infrastructural support to Al Qaeda. There was a coming and going of Al Qaeda militants and leaders between Afghanistan and Pakistan for several years. All that has really happened is that Al Qaeda has escaped from Afghanistan come into Pakistan, got in touch with their contacts and friends in these extremist groups, which then provided them with safe houses, cars, and not just in the border areas but also in the cities. Rooting out Al Qaeda in Pakistan now is where the main battle is being fought.

  Ahmed Rashid

  Extremist Groups, Years, Cities

  Source: progressive.org

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• For most directors, the scriptwriter is about as welcome on set as a member of the Taliban.

  Julian Fellowes

  Directors, Welcome, Members

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• In military terms, if you're not winning, sometimes you are losing. We've seen the Taliban and associated terrorist organizations make gains in recent years. It's time to stop those gains and roll them back. There's a lot of different techniques to do so, but we cannot allow Afghanistan to once again become an ungoverned country from which terrorist organizations can launch attacks against the United States and our citizens.

  Tom Cotton

  Country, Military, Winning

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

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• Throughout our history, there has been a long list of those we've been conditioned to hate. The British, French, Spanish, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Communists, Northern Koreans, Vietnamese, Iranians, Taliban, and both northerners and southerners in America are some of the people we've been encouraged at various times to call enemies and to hate. The list is long, and as time passes, those we were assigned to hate we later were told should be removed from our hate list. The enemy is obviously hatred itself. Have empathy for your assigned enemy.

  Wayne Dyer

  Hate, Long, People

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• When George W.Bush attacked Afghanistan, it was widely hailed, and the failure of our war there wasn't understood. Within a few months of attacking Afghanistan, Bush clearly moved on to get ready for Iraq, long before Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda were dispensed with. There was never any serious debate in the press about whether even the notion that every Taliban was our enemy was valid. A lot of assumptions about that war were never challenged.

  Seymour Hersh

  War, Long, Enemy

  Source: progressive.org

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• Take the example of my daughter. A lot of people were speaking out about education when the Taliban were bombing schools in Swat Valley, but Malala's voice was like a crescendo. It spread all around the world. She was the smallest but her voice was the biggest, because she was speaking for herself.

  Ziauddin Yousafzai

  Mother, Daughter, School

  "Ziauddin Yousafzai: learn from Malala, use your own voice to demand rights" by Anna Leach, www.theguardian.com. April 9, 2014.

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• I had said from the start that I thought Iraq was a mistake, that we should have stayed focused on Afghanistan. I think it was the right decision because the Taliban at that point had gotten a lot of momentum before I'd gotten into office, partly because we hadn't been paying attention as much as we needed to to Afghanistan.

  Barack Obama

  Mistake, Thinking, Should Have

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• My father used to say the people of Swat and the teachers would continue to educate our children until the last room, the last teacher and the last student was alive. My parents never once suggested I should withdraw from school, ever. Though we loved school, we hadn't realized how important education was until the Taliban tried to stop us.

  Malala Yousafzai

  Teacher, Children, Powerful

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• My father was convinced the Taliban would hunt him down and kill him, but he again refused security from the police. 'If you go around with a lot of security the Taliban will use Kalashnikovs or suicide bombers and more people will be killed,' he said. 'At least I'll be killed alone.'

  Malala Yousafzai

  Suicide, Powerful, Father

  Malala Yousafzai (2013). “I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World (Young Readers Edition)”, p.209, Hachette UK

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• Because of you, in Afghanistan we've broken the momentum of the Taliban. Because of you, we've begun a transition to the Afghans that will allow us to bring our troops home from there. And around the globe, as we draw down in Iraq, we have gone after al Qaeda so that terrorists who threaten America will have no safe haven, and Osama bin Laden will never again walk the face of this Earth.

  Barack Obama

  War, Home, Safe Haven

  Obama's Speech to Troops at Fort Bragg, www.nytimes.com. December 14, 2011.

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• I've come to the conclusion that, aside from Nazis, the Taliban, and possibly the honey badger, there is no one on the planet more merciless than a teenage girl once she's decided she dislikes you.

  Meg Cabot

  Girl, Teenage, Honey

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• I don't think the ongoing negotiations with the Taliban will yield a positive result

  Aitzaz Ahsan

  Thinking, Yield, Ongoing

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• To call someone anti-American, indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie, you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good, you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.

  Arundhati Roy

  Hate, Evil, Imagination

  Arundhati Roy (2003). “War Talk”, p.50, South End Press

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• The key to breaking the Taliban taboo against women and the cultural brainwashing that the Taliban imposed upon many Afghans is to get women back into the workforce.

  Ahmed Rashid

  Keys, Brainwashing, Workforce

  Source: progressive.org

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