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.
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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There will not be enough soldiers to ensure the security of the country. But will the US still be permitted to kill terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan with un-manned drones? That could worsen the situation in the neighboring states and they could view Afghanistan as a threat.
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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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Our Pakistan elites are spoiled by permanent foreign aid and therefore find it difficult to change course. Pakistan needs someone who stands up and says: Fundamentalism is bad, capitalism is good.
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The Americans make their usual recommendations. They want to train the army for the fight with the rebels. US special forces are already in Mali.
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It would have been better if the United Nations had sent a team to Mali right away to mediate between the government and the rebels. But where is the political initiative?
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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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There’s a sense of desperation in Afghanistan because of the lack of funding and the fact that the U.S. only has a one-track military strategy. It doesn’t have an economic and political game plan.
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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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There was a coming and going of Al Qaeda militants and leaders between Afghanistan and Pakistan for several years.
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The West does not understand how to deal with states that no longer have any authority and are threatened by dissolution. Their efforts failed in Iraq as well as Afghanistan.
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Of course, many of them did support the Taliban. But you cannot equate all Pashtuns with the Taliban.
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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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The biggest mistake Barack Obama could have made is to change quite a few things in his Afghanistan policy. He increased the number of troops and at the same time set the US withdrawal date to 2014.
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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 fact that there are no longer large units of Al Qaeda running around means you don’t need B-52s.
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George W. Bush and Tony Blair made the promise that they would not tolerate failed states because they could become a haven for terrorists. And today? The number increases.
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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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People like myself were saying the Taliban would be driven out very swiftly from the north of Afghanistan, but given that their main support base was in the Pashtun belt, there would be greater resistance there. That didn’t happen.
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They built that electricity powerhouse,” because nothing has been built so far.
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If Afghan soldiers continue to kill American soldiers as is happening these days, it can hardly be assumed that they will stay in Afghanistan in the long term. And what role are they to play?
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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 Pashtuns feel discriminated against by the Americans because they supported the Taliban and the war is still going on in their region with continued U.S. bombing.
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I met a lot of the senior Taliban, and I asked them precisely [about Mullah Omar]. The most common answer was he is humble. And that was very true.
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Pashtun nationalism is reasserting itself. Its political history spans several hundred years.
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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.
AHMED RASHID