Taliban Quotes

It is in Pakistan’s own interest that the Afghan army is able to fight effectively against the Taliban, which is more likely if they continue to have American advisers at their side.

In the early 2009, a campaign plan developed by Petraeus and General McChrystal to defeat the Taliban, they required a minimum force of 40,000. President Obama rejected that recommendation and provided 25 percent less. He also decided he would pull the force out in 12 to 15 months.

The United States supports the reintegration of people who have fought with the Taliban into Afghan society provided they: one, renounce al Qaeda, two, lay down their arms and renounce violence, and three, participate in the public political life of the country in accordance with the constitution.

This body, the United States Congress, was united, Republicans and Democrats alike, in taking that action, toppling the Taliban government, and working to try and root out al Qaeda and find Osama bin Laden.

Winning in Afghanistan is having a country that is stable enough to ensure that there is no safe haven for Al Qaida or for a militant Taliban that welcomes Al Qaida. That’s really the measure of success for the United States.

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush’s 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

I say to the Taliban: surrender the terrorists; or surrender power. It’s your choice.

The Taliban may pine for a pre-industrial society, but most Afghans do not.

I might be afraid of ghosts and like dragons and those things, but I’m not afraid of the Taliban.

It is in their inherent moral components that recent Western strategies may be deficient. What percentage of the populations in countries engaged in the 14-year effort in Afghanistan could even name the three main Taliban groups with whom their soldiers have been engaged?

I don’t think the Taliban will ever come back to take Afghanistan, no.

We don’t see that the Taliban ultimately can succeed, and it’s a combination both of what the international community can do to support Afghanistan, not just in the short term, but over the long term.

Without U.S. forces in the country, there is a strong possibility Afghanistan could host a reinvigorated Taliban allied to a reinvigorated al Qaeda.

On the day when I was shot, and on the next day, people raised the banners of ‘I am Malala’. They did not say ‘I am Taliban.’

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

In Afghanistan, getting shot at was a regular occurrence. I viewed survival as a numbers game. As point man, every time I entered a Taliban compound first, I played the odds in my head.

I think the morale of Taliban fighters has been affected adversely as a result of the lack of success.

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India’s supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

While Taliban fighters had an initial claim to protection under the conventions, they lost POW status by failing to obey the standards of conduct for legal combatants: wearing uniforms, a responsible command structure, and obeying the laws of war.

I’ve dealt with the Taliban and al Qaeda.

I want education for the sons and the daughters of all the extremists, especially the Taliban.

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.

In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.

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.

On Sept. 20, 2011, a year after I spoke with Rabanni, a couple of Taliban emissaries arrived at his Kabul fortress with a gift for his 71st birthday. It turned out not to be the truce offering they had claimed they were bringing: one of the Talibs had a bomb hidden in his turban.

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

Although combat operations unseated the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime, a poor understanding of the recent histories of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples undermined efforts to consolidate early battlefield gains into lasting security.

Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban.

Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt.

The Buddhas had to be destroyed by the Taliban to get the world thinking about Afghanistan.

Negotiating with the Taliban must be done from a position of strength. Negotiating from a position of weakness would be a disaster.

I don’t think you can rely on Iran. I don’t think you can rely on other radicals like the Taliban. They dispatched Al Qaida to bomb New York and Washington. What were they thinking? Were they that stupid? They weren’t stupid. There is an irrationality there, and there is madness in this method.

One thing that I noticed is having met some former Taliban is even they, as children, grew up being indoctrinated. They grew up in violence. They grew up in war. They were taught to hate. They were, they grew up in very ignorant cultures where they didn’t learn about the outside world.

I was point man, which meant I was the first through the door, hunting down Taliban commanders, knocking down forts every night.

It is very much in America’s national security interests to ensure that the Taliban do not dominate Afghanistan and that neither ISIS nor al Qaeda continues their growth in the country.

Defeat the Taliban. Secure the population.

For years, Hizb-I-Islami fighters have had a reputation for being more educated and worldly than their Taliban counterparts, who are often illiterate farmers.

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.

There has not yet been a major ground offensive battle… There are, we know, negotiations going on between the opposition forces and the Taliban leadership for surrender.

As far as Iraq, the important thing is that the Taliban is gone in Afghanistan, three-quarters of the al-Qaida leadership is either dead or in jail, and we now have Saudi Arabia working with us, Pakistan working with us.

Thousands of civilians have lost their lives to terrorist attacks inside Pakistan, and thousands more will – because, unlike the Pakistani government, which has no coherent policy to deal with the radicals, the Taliban have one to deal with Pakistan and its citizens.

The documentary feature film ‘Legion of Brothers’ tells the stories of the handful of U.S. Special Forces soldiers who, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, went into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and, within a matter of weeks, overthrew the Taliban regime.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.

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

What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?

Our aim is always to minimise casualties and to separate a hardline Taliban from those who have been caught up in the insurgency.

The Taliban has not, in my judgment, in any significant way changed their fundamental goal and objective, which is to take over Afghanistan and return to running that country. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have negotiation talks with them. I think we should. But we’ve got to be clear-eyed about it.

The existence of the Taliban, in my view, is a tragedy for Afghanistan. We as Americans need to understand our role in helping bring that tragedy about. So I think it’s important to look at the stories about why these people are fighting.

The Taliban is the Muslim version of the Salem witch trials.

Does the global Left – as well as the Israeli Left – truly not care about the horrific Taliban regime, the terrible oppression of women in Gulf states, and the mass hanging festivals in Iran?

There was expectations that the fights there, the operation there might be extended for several months, even for several years. But within a few weeks it ended, because obviously the Taliban wasn’t a real force.

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.

The Taliban knows they have more to fear from an educated girl than an American drone.

I think every religious person should have a deep sense of respect for other people’s religious documents and religious symbols just as we were deeply opposed to the Taliban destroying the two historic buddhas which they blew up. So I think we ought to all oppose burning the Koran.

After September 11, when the United States took action to overthrow the Taliban, our interests and Iran’s aligned, and we were able to coordinate quietly but effectively.

When the Taliban took over in 1996, the news of their crimes hit the Toronto papers. As a feminist and as an anti-war activist, I heard about what was happening to women, and I wanted to do something to support those folks.

As you will recall, soon after the 9/11 attacks, an international coalition led by the United States conducted an impressive campaign to defeat the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other associated extremist groups in Afghanistan.

People in Afghanistan want peace, including the Taliban. They’re also people like we all are. They have families, they have relatives, they have children, they are suffering a tough time.

As a matter of international law, the United States is in an armed conflict with al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, and associated forces, in response to the 9/11 attacks, and we may also use force consistent with our inherent right of national self-defense.

It is in American and Afghan interests for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan so it doesn’t turn into Iraq circa 2014, with the Taliban controlling much of the country while hosting a strong presence of ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as every other jihadist group of note.

When US-led forces toppled the Taliban government in November 2001, Afghans celebrated the downfall of a reviled and discredited regime.

The condition that the Taliban part with al Qaeda is not just a condition, it is an objective. We must convince them that al Qaeda ideology and dogma will not help them.

I’m not sure whether a person can really gauge the quality of his work by the enemies he’s made, but if I somehow upset Hamas and the Taliban and Henry Waxman, I must have done something right.

Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren’t guided.

Well, the reports are correct that we’re conducting very robust military operations on the Afghan side of the border in areas where we think al-Qaida is operating and Taliban remnants are.

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.

When the Taliban was ruling Afghanistan, women were not allowed to go to school, to work, or even leave the house without a male chaperone. The greatest moment was when that ended.

The Taliban is resilient.

A desire to contain extremism is a major reason why Putin offered help to the United States in battling the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. It is also why Russia maintains close relations with Shia Iran, which acts as a counterweight to Sunni powers.

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.

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.

Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women.

Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn’t care. This is war – not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that’s a victory he savors and desires – unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.

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.

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.

Fighting the Taliban and the various radical organizations on the front lines is like adding a Band-Aid to a cut, it may stop the bleeding but unless you clean it with antiseptic, the germs stay and multiply.

There’s a group of people – maybe the secular Taliban is a good name for them – who have morphed this idea, that you have to accept my values being every bit as cherished as your values. That’s not tolerance… There are too many things in this world which we sit back and tolerate.

When news of the first plane’s hitting the World Trade Center reached them, bin Laden’s followers exploded with joy. But shrewder members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan realized that the attacks might not be the stunning victory that bin Laden, and many in the West, took them to be.

People will politicize religion; we see it in every faith, in every religion. We see it with Pat Robertson, in my opinion, and we see it with the Taliban.

The high probability is if American forces withdraw from Afghanistan and if no alternative international arrangement is made that then the historic contests between the regions and the sects will reappear, the Taliban will re-emerge, and a very complicated and maybe chaotic situation will develop.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing. Today you are looking at the Taliban or ISIS; tomorrow you might be looking at another name.

President Trump should appoint a special presidential envoy and empower them to wage an unconventional war against Taliban and Daesh forces, to hold the corrupt officials accountable and to negotiate with their Afghan counterparts and the Afghan Taliban that are willing to reconcile with Kabul.

By terrorising the people, the Taliban have sown deep doubts about the government.

It is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called ‘Islamic regimes’ such as Saudi Arabia, Iran – and the worst case was the Taliban in Afghanistan – they are pretty authoritarian. No doubt about that.

I was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents near Fallujah, in Iraq, ambushed by the Taliban in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, and injured in a car accident that killed my driver while covering the Taliban occupation of the Swat Valley in Pakistan.

The Taliban are terrible shots. At the end of some long patrols, we’d be walking through the fields and get shot at – and we’d just keep walking.

If American forces leave Afghanistan, the Taliban is going to do what to America? Don’t say you’re worried about what they will do to the Afghan people. If that was America’s concern, America’s operational presence there would be much different.

If we’re so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren’t they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban?

Women and children were slaughtered by the Taliban. You are going to sit down and negotiate with these folks? They never lived up to an agreement. The Pakistanis tried in ’08, the Russians tried it when they were there. George Bush tried it in ’05. It has never worked.

Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.