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 RASHIDBut all development programs of the United States and the European countries unfortunately exclude the private sector, which could make investments based on profitability.
More Ahmed Rashid Quotes
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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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[Mullah Omar] gave himself this religious title. So it was something that all those people there who swore an oath of loyalty to him as a religious leader could not easily get rid of.
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They are simply not capable of promoting the indigenous economy. Many billions of dollars flooded into Afghanistan, but without any significant effect.
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The Taliban had become deeply unpopular and were actually discarded by the Pashtun population almost as quickly as they were in the north. I don’t see the Taliban coming back in any way.
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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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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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They built that electricity powerhouse,” because nothing has been built so far.
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The strategy for peace-building in Afghanistan is economic aid, reconstruction, international security forces. On those lines, the U.S. has been extremely slow. And it has even blocked expanding security forces from Kabul to other cities.
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The Soviets held to the tradition of colonialism. They raped the country and killed many people. But they also built dams, electrical power plants, streets, and technical schools.
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Russia is now becoming increasingly nervous about a more permanent U.S. presence in Central Asia.
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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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I think within a year or so, perhaps, if 9/11 had not happened, in Afghanistan would have been a very broad-based general uprising against the Taliban.
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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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We should have built a State in Afghanistan with an army and a police force first.
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Of course, many of them did support the Taliban. But you cannot equate all Pashtuns with the Taliban.
AHMED RASHID