The problem right now, which I’ve been pointing out very bluntly to American officials in Washington, is that the U.S. has no economic presence in Afghanistan.
AHMED RASHIDNow the United States has to ensure that Afghanistan does not immediately collapse after being left to itself in 2014.
More Ahmed Rashid Quotes
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We should remember that the Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.
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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.
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Pashtun nationalism is reasserting itself. Its political history spans several hundred years.
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The Pashtuns are angry at the Americans because, one, they’re still being bombed, and two, they perceive that the Americans are backing the Tajik faction, which controls the army and security forces in Kabul.
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I am confident that there are hedge funds, banks or investment companies that could allocate five percent of their portfolios for risky investments. In any event, for countries like Afghanistan the formation of an entrepreneurial class is of vital importance.
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The Afghans can’t point and say, “Oh, the Americans built that road. They built that telecommunications facility.
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They were communists and had the same vision for Afghanistan that Stalin and Lenin had for the Soviet Union: Progress is communism plus electrification. And today? Today Kabul gets its electrical power from Uzbekistan, Herat from Iran and Jalalabad from Pakistan.
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You have a lot of suspicion from the neighbors of Afghanistan about U.S. intentions. Iran is already, to some extent, trying to undermine the U.S. in Afghanistan.
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There is no way the Americans are going to be able to carry out a full scale war against Iraq and at the same time maintain the same kind of pressure on the Al Qaeda network in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Philippines, and Pakistan, as well as in Europe.
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Now the United States has to ensure that Afghanistan does not immediately collapse after being left to itself in 2014.
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The United States only knows one form of intervention and that is the military one. Everything depends on drawn weapons. We should, however, develop a wider scope of action. And we should learn to be patient.
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But all development programs of the United States and the European countries unfortunately exclude the private sector, which could make investments based on profitability.
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Russia is now becoming increasingly nervous about a more permanent U.S. presence in Central Asia.
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America does not hold to the colonial tradition. America came, liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban and al-Qaida, came to an arrangement with Hamid Karzai, wanted to organize elections as soon as possible and then withdraw.
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The Bush administration thought that once there is a democracy, everything else will fall into place. If today you speak to the architects of the 2001 Afghanistan Conference in Bonn, they will tell you that instead of being fixated on elections.
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