Afghanistan War Quotes

“This world’s anguish is no different
from the love we insist on holding back.”
― Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love

“You are going to war! It is no longer a question of if you are going to go, but a question of when. Look around! In a few years, or even a few months, several of you will be dead. Some of you will be severely wounded or so badly mutilated that your own mother can’t stand the sight of you. And for the real unlucky ones, you will come home so emotionally disfigured that you wish you had died over there.”
― Michael Anthony, Mass Casualties: A Young Medic's True Story of Death, Deception, and Dishonor in Iraq

“In Dari we say, ''If you sit with good people, you will become a good person. If you sit with bad people, you will become a bad person.”
― Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

“Now we had peace in Kabul, and we did not see blood and corpses and body parts on the streets anymore. But it was an unhappy peace, a frightened peace. We did not know what was going to happen next.”
― Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

“You have the watches, but we have the time”
― Taliban

“Maybe this is necessary. Maybe there will be hope when Bush's bombs stop falling. But she cannot bring herself to say it, not when what happened to Babi and Mammy is happening to someone now in Afghanistan, not when some unsuspecting girl or boy back home has just been orphaned by a rocket as she was. Laila cannot bring herself to say it. It's hard to rejoice. It seems hypocritical, perverse.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Laila had seen enough killing of innocents caught in the crossfire of enemies.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“But the first casualty of the Afghanistan War wasn't truth. That had long before succumbed to the onslaught of Soviet lies about all aspects of life. The all-encompassing brainwashing makes the task of discerning what actually took place in Afghanistan especially difficult. The manufactured justifications that enabled many to close their eyes to the war's unspeakable abuses continue to influence perceptions-although the Soviets had no monopoly in that.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“It would be an irony of history, or another lesson about the unintended consequences about using force, that [Najibullah's] regime would outlive the Soviet Union that was convinced it had a duty to teach the world how to think and live.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“Many young men's more immediate and important problems were abuse from their superior, on top of their material privations. Perhaps nothing more could have been expected of a political system founded on mass murder and preserved with oppression.”
― Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

“The victory of a reactionary idea is always a defeat for humanity!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Every second I am dying inside, for Ukraine. I'm dying for Afghanistan, I'm dying for Palestine, I'm dying for Kashmir. Even my pen pours blood. And this bleeding won't stop till I put an end to the bloodshed of the innocents.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“A brief look back in history makes it evident that Jammu and Kashmir’s oppression and colonial exploitation started long before the formation of modern India. Ever since its annexation by the Mughal empire in 1589 AD, Kashmir has never been ruled by Jammu and Kashmir themselves. After the Mughals, the region was ruled by the Afghans (1753-1819), Sikhs (1819-46), and the Dogras (1846-1947) until the Indian and Pakistani states took over.”
― Jammu and Kashmir for JK's

“A bunch of really poor Afghans can defeat the USA military.”
― Steven Magee

“After spending time at [Camp] Wilson, which felt like we were at war, Kandahar Airfield looked like an ugly American city filled with lots of European tourists. Soldiers from a handful of nations, thanks to NATO—the Netherlands, the UK, Canada—walked around unarmed and apparently unfazed by the war that was being waged around them. Overhearing their conversations, I got the feeling that their most serious concern was a shortage of coffee at the French PX.

But for the guys who were having to do without, like the soldiers at Camp Wilson, a PX run was a treat. Parking the trucks, the team peeled off their gear and bounded across the street into what can only be compared to a Walmart at home. The warehouselike building was filled with junk food, sodas, magazines, and even obnoxious T-shirts advertising Operation Enduring Freedom.

Only Americans would make T-shirts for a war.”
― Kevin Maurer, Gentlemen Bastards: On the Ground in Afghanistan with America's Elite Special Forces

“Everybody knew that the only way for the United States to get out of Afghanistan was by creating a strong Afghan Army. The 101st called their effort to achieve this shonna ba shonna, translated as “shoulder to shoulder.”
― Kevin Maurer, Gentlemen Bastards: On the Ground in Afghanistan with America's Elite Special Forces

“Perhaps someday I will understand all these things better. Perhaps other will, as well. Perhaps till book will help

Insh'allah.”
― Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers by Qais Akbar Omar

“Perhaps someday I will understand all these things better. Perhaps others will, as well. Perhaps this book will help

Insh'allah.”
― Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers by Qais Akbar Omar

“Love makes the old feel young, and it makes the young feel like a child. If you separate the lover from his beloved, they will feel destroyed.”
― Qais Akbar Omar

“My head was always shaved now; I looked like a bald man. I could no longer wear my choice of clothes. I would not watch movies. I could not fly kites. In short, I could no longer be myself.”
― Qais Akbar Omar

“First it was dozen people who were killed. Then it was a hundred. Then a thousand. It was like when a forest catches fire, both the dry and the wet burn.”
― Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

“A broken hand can work, but a broken heart cannot.”
― Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

“I remember the time I had cut a rose from one of these bushes. The owner told me, ''A flower looks happiest on its bush. That is where it belongs.'' Since then, I have never cut a flower, because he was right. But I could not imagine how anyone had cut the heads of these men and women. They belonged on their bodies, I thought.”
― Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

“This garden is not mine, it is God's'' the old man replied. ''He gave it to me for use by those who need it for as long as they want. In fact, He is the owner of everything, and whatever He gives us, it is with us for only a few days.”
― Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

“My name is Steve Eston, I'm from Campbellford, Wisconsin. I was a fort observer in the United States army for just under five years. I deployed to Solder City, Iraq in 2005.,and I am giving back my medals for the children of Iraq and Afghanistan. May they be able to forgive us for what we have done to them, may we begin to heal and may we live in peace for here to eternity.”
― Veterans for Peace

“Now it is a common Kashmiri saying:
Kashmir has moved so far away from India after August 5th August that even Afghanistan was not that far away.”
― Sheikh Gulzar after 5th August......Plebiscite for Kashmir

“In sum, while from 2001 to 2005, drugs were simply not part of the US agenda in Afghanistan, since 2005, there has been more talk about drug control, and more counternarcotics operations have taken place. However, this does not mean that the United States is moving closer to conducting a real war on drugs. It is not the intensification of militaristic counterdrug missions per se that makes a drug war real, but the implementation of strategies known to reduce drug problems. On that count, Washington has failed. Further, the United States has continued to support allies involved in trafficking, and Obama stated explicitly that his drug war is instrumental in fighting the insurgency and not about eliminating drugs per se. Indeed, in 2009, his administration presented its new approach to narcotics and elaborated a target list of 50 "major drug traffickers who help finance the insurgency" to be killed or captured by the military. Therefore, if traffickers help the Taliban, they will be attacked – but if they support government forces, they apparently will be left alone. This suggests that the drug war is used to target enemies.”
― Julien Mercille, Cruel Harvest, US Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade - 2013

“Mainstream commentary blames the size of the narcotics industry and much of what goes wrong in Afghanistan partly on corruption. But to focus on bad apples in the Afghan government and police misses the systemic responsibility of the United States and NATO for the dramatic expansion of opiates production since 2001 and for their support of numerous corrupt individuals in power. The United States attacked Afghanistan in association with Northern Alliance warlords and drug lords and showered them with weapons, millions of dollars, and diplomatic support. The empowerment and enrichment of those individuals enabled them to tax and protect opium traffickers, leading to the quick resumption of narcotics production after the hiatus of the 2000–2001 Taliban ban, as many observers have documented. Ahmed Rashid has written that the whole Afghan Interior Ministry "became a major protector of drug traffickers, and Karzai refused to clean it out. As warlord militias were demobilized and disarmed by the UN, commanders found new positions in the Interior Ministry and continued to provide protection to drug traffickers." The United States was not interested in cleaning Afghanistan of drug traffickers either. Thus, to blame "corruption" and "criminals" for the current state of affairs is to ignore the direct and predictable effects of US policies, which have followed a historical pattern of toleration and protection of strongmen involved in narcotics.”
― Julien Mercille, Cruel Harvest: US Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade

“Second, many of the United States’ local Afghan allies were involved in trafficking, from which they drew money and power. Destroying drug labs and poppy fields would have been, in effect, a direct blow to American operations and proxy fighters on the ground. As Western diplomats conceded at the time, "without money from drugs, our friendly warlords can’t pay their militias. It’s as simple as that." According to James Risen, this explains why the Pentagon and the White House refused to bomb the 25 or so drug facilities that the CIA had identified on its maps in 2001. Similarly, in 2005, the Pentagon denied all but 3 of 26 DEA requests for airlifts. Barnett Rubin summarized the US attitude well when he wrote in 2004 that when "he visits Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld meets military commanders whom Afghans know as the godfathers of drug trafficking. The message has been clear: Help fight the Taliban and no one will interfere with your trafficking." As a result, US military officials closed their eyes to the trade. An Army Green Beret said he was "specifically ordered to ignore heroin and opium when he and his unit discovered them on patrol." A US Senate report mentioned that "congressional committees received reports that U.S. forces were refusing to disrupt drug sales and shipments and rebuffing requests from the Drug Enforcement Administration for reinforcements to go after major drug kingpins.”
― Julien Mercille, Cruel Harvest: US Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade

“The condition of Afghanistan after the U.S war was appalling. The World Food Programme warned that by the end of 2021, 98 per cent of Afghans were not getting enough to eat, with millions facing starvation. By september 2023, the WFP claimed that they were nearly out of rescources and were "obliged to choose between the hungry and the starving, leaving millions of families scrambling for thier next meal." News reports out of Afghanistan are heartbreaking. There has been a significant rise in child labour as kids are sent to work to help feed families, doing jobs like picking through garbage. Some parents have been forced to sell one of their children in order to feed their other children. Others have had to sell their own organs or their children's organs.”
― Noam Chomsky