“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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some Pakistanis fought for the Taliban. Pakistani extremist groups provided infrastructural support to Al Qaeda. There was a coming and going of Al Qaeda militants and leaders between Afghanistan and Pakistan for several years.

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.

I don’t like a tremendous amount of conflict. I don’t think that fighting and passion are the same thing.

The only one who can fight for these values like democracy and freedoms are the people of any country or any society, not the foreigners.

Just do your job. Get in early. Stay late, and don’t complain. Fight the big fights.

You don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.

I will fight for what I believe in until I drop dead. And that’s what keeps you alive.

I have worked with some horrible idiots in my life. You learn the pattern of how architects work and the thing is not to fight it. Just to be very quiet, let them get on with it and let them really mess it up.

I believe that we are who we choose to be. Nobody is going to come and save you. You’ve got to save yourself. Nobody is going to give you anything. You’ve got to go out and fight for it.

Fighting is easy to understand. You just hit the guy as hard as you can.