“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Dysfunctional states like Afghanistan need business people who are deeply rooted in their country and invest in it. They can add stability.

They built that electricity powerhouse,” because nothing has been built so far.

That window, which has stayed open for nearly five years, with amazing good will from the Afghans, is threatening to close unless the world wakes up and deals with the crisis.

But all development programs of the United States and the European countries unfortunately exclude the private sector, which could make investments based on profitability.

Russia is now becoming increasingly nervous about a more permanent U.S. presence in Central Asia.

In these extremist groups, which then provided them with safe houses, cars, and not just in the border areas but also in the cities. Rooting out Al Qaeda in Pakistan now is where the main battle is being fought.

This year we watched the collapse of Mali, a consequence of the Libyan civil war. The south of Libya and Mali, and Niger too, are well on the way to becoming a no-man’s land. After 9/11,

We never had reports of Mullah Omar living luxuriously or making money in large quantities or anything like that.

There is not a subject in which I take a deeper interest than I do in the development of Alaska, and I propose, if Congress will follow by recommendations, to do something in that territory that will make it move on.