“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.”

You need intelligence and special forces. And, most importantly, you need to resurrect Afghanistan from what is literally the graveyard of countries and transform it into a normal country, which the Afghans want.

We should remember that the Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

The idea of a permanent U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, as opposed to an economic presence, is going to create a new wave of hostility toward the United States.

Pashtun nationalism is reasserting itself. Its political history spans several hundred years.

In my view, the Western model of influencing the development of third world countries is doomed to failure.

vThis region harbors enormous potential. Pakistan could become the hub for the energy that is transported from Central Asia to South Asia. That could change the whole region.

What everyone underestimated was the acute unpopularity of the Taliban, even in the Pashtun areas.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

All that has really happened is that Al Qaeda has escaped from Afghanistan come into Pakistan, got in touch with their contacts and friends.

The Afghans can’t point and say, “Oh, the Americans built that road. They built that telecommunications facility.

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.

They are simply not capable of promoting the indigenous economy. Many billions of dollars flooded into Afghanistan, but without any significant effect.

There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

I had the honor to meet Geraldine Ferraro on a few occasions over the years at the DNC and what struck me was how she managed to be both gutsy and graceful at the same time.

The challenge, really, on any new film is to try to avoid that and achieve a few moments that aren’t cliche.

You do see a few people and you are thinking of how that chemistry is going to work, but it’s not really fair to put people who are auditioning together in a room.

I think ultimately what you really want is a few people within any label that are into the band enough to really work on it every day for a long time and to actually try a little bit.

And for the moment the whole burden of the war rested on the few hundred German fighter pilots on the Channel coast.