Best 193 quotes in «afghanistan quotes» category

I have the impression that our children are much more excited about going to school than children in other countries are. They think of it as a special privilege. Going to school, being with other children, getting books and pencils - all of that is like a dream for them.

I have this thought, it’s horrible, and it makes me sick, but it’s true: one day these students will grow up and have their own kids, and they’re going to name them for men and women who will die in this war.

I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle.

I’ll give you one chance to run, but may your shoulder always whisper in your ear… “It’s best to watch out for men, like me.

I’m clinging to one last thought: pain is the harbinger of hope. You have to be alive to feel pain. If you are alive, then you have purpose. If you have purpose, then you have hope.

I’m in my classroom and I’m looking at this girl, but all I can see is my dad on the ground, in front of The Wall, telling the truth, finally—his knees drawn and his chest heaving—and when people pass by they look the other way, except for this one lady who stops to give my dad a hug. She gets down on her knees to reach him, and now she’s crying with a stranger, and without asking I know it’s because she’s lost something, too, and I wonder if in comforting my dad she thinks she can find it again. Probably not. It doesn’t work that way.

In Afghanistan girls can dream, but only the dreams of boys come true.

I needed to talk to my dad. My dad who had been to war, who had seen its horrors, who suffered from its nightmares, my dad who was a good man, the best man I’d ever known, who, along with my uncle, I wanted to honor by teaching military kids—my dad, the only one who I would believe if he would just tell me I could be good, too, that I could do right by my students, because for sure they were going to suffer. It’s just cause and effect. We’re at war. The military fights wars. I teach military kids. I’d never served, but now I could make a difference. I just needed my dad to tell me what to do, to tell me I was good enough to get it done.

In fact, I couldn't help thinking that despite their height, adults were just plain unbelievably stupid: men were blowing up other men; soldiers were shooting at children; men were ignoring women they loved; the women who loved them pretended they didn't; and when I read the newspapers to Pir Hederi everyone they talked about seemed to be far more interested in rules and arguments and taking sides than the actual business of living.

In Korea I’d been so afraid that Sami would lose her dad. She did, but she didn’t get a flag. He went to Doha, then to Baghdad, then to Kabul, then to someplace else, and then to a different someplace else, on and on. He’d come home, leave again, come home, leave again, until one day he came home a different person altogether. Sami lost Angel, lost her family, and then she lost herself.

In total this journey will take five flights and fifty-five hours, but in reality it began four decades and two generations ago when my uncle died in Vietnam.

I saw houses burned by the Mujahadeen, as well as disfigured bodies of prisoners they’d taken. But I saw other things too: villages destroyed by our shelling and bodies of women, killed by mistake. When you shoot at every rustling in the bushes, there’s no time to think about who’s there. But for an Afghan, it didn’t matter if his wife had been killed intentionally or accidentally. He went into the mountains to see revenge.

I'm done doing this!' Obama said, finally erupting. 'We've all agreed on a plan. And we're all going to stick to that plan. I haven't agreed to anything beyond that.' The 30,000 was a 'hard cap,' he said forcefully. 'I don't want enablers to be used as wiggle room. The easy thing for me to do - politically - would actually be to say no' to the 30,000. Then he gestured out the Oval Office windows, across the Potomac, in the direction of the Pentagon. Referring to Gates and the uniformed military, he said. 'They think it's the opposite. I'd be perfectly happy -' He stopped mid-sentence. 'Nothing would make Rahm happier than if I said no to the 30,000.' There was some subdued laughter. 'Rahm would tell me it'd be much easier to do what I want to do by saying no,' the president said. He could then focus on the domestic agenda that he wanted to be the heart of his presidency. The military did not understand. 'Politically, what these guys don't get is it'd be a lot easier for me to go out and give a speech saying, 'You know what? The American people are sick of this war, and we're going to get out of there.

In my life I’ve been very lucky to travel around the world and see students and teachers in nearly two dozen countries—but the most awe-inspiring experience I’ve ever had was two years after 9/11 when I had the chance to attend a conference in Manhattan and personally meet many of the heroic teachers who persevered under conditions that in our worst nightmares we could never have imagined. In my opinion there’s not been nearly enough written about those teachers, and I hope that changes soon.

In Our Villages - You killed thousands by thousands, after each thousand, You are killing another one thousand.

I stood with my mom in the cemetery. She felt terrible pain. My grandmother is with God. My mom has to continue living. It’s not so easy, moving forward.

It’d be easy to blame everything on 9/11 or the wars that came after. It’s really about the choices we made. By necessity we adapt to the realities of the world we live in, but if we forget that how we live shapes and influences the world around us, then we’ve already lost.

It feels like last week, but in fact we’re now closing in on five thousand days at war. I always picture Sami as a nine-year-old soccer stud ... and yet there are soldiers in Afghanistan today who were in fourth grade on 9/11.

It felt like we were reliving the first day of the school year, when students and teachers do the get-to-know-you dance—teachers tell students something about who they are, students pretend to care, and then vice-versa.

I thought i could wake up this sleeping country with my cries, but still they sleep as if in a dream.

It's a thin line between what we're calling acceptable and not acceptable. As a leader, you're supposed to know when not to cross it. But how do you know? Does the army teach us how to control our emotions? Does the army teach us how to deal with a friend bleeding out in front of you? No.

It’s hard to describe being an expatriate of sorts to people who’ve never lived overseas, but when you’re an American living in a geographically separated region within a country like Korea, you form bonds with people who you’d never associate with stateside.

I was after truth, no matter how painful it was to swallow.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.

I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan.

Look, look at my country, look at my Kabul, my city, what is left of my city? The streets are as bare as mountains now, the buildings are as ragged as mountains and as bare and empty of life, there is no life here only fear, we do not live in the buildings now, we live in terror in the cellars in the caves in the mountains, only God can save us now, only order can save us now, only God's Law harsh and strictly administered can save us now, only The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice can save us now, only terror can save us from ruin, only neverending war, save us from terror and neverending war, save my wife they are stoning my wife, they are chasing her with sticks, save my wife save my daughter from punishment by God, save us from God, from war, from exile, from oil exploration, from no oil exploration, from the West, from the children with rifles, carrying stones, only children with rifles, carrying stones, can save us now.

Military life is hard, even cruel—especially for the kids.

Najibullah abandoned all Marxist rhetoric and proceeded to change the name of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan to Party of the Homeland (Hizb-i-Watan). The party was now open to "believing and practicing Muslims," and Najibullah put mullahs on the civil servant payroll.

On August 10, 1984, my plane landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. There were no skyscrapers here. The blue domes of the mosques and the faded mountains were the only things rising above the adobe duvals (the houses). The mosques came alive in the evening with multivoiced wailing: the mullahs were calling the faithful to evening prayer. It was such an unusual spectacle that, in the beginning, I used to leave the barracks to listen – the same way that, in Russia, on spring nights, people go outside to listen to the nightingales sing. For me, a nineteen-year-old boy who had lived his whole life in Leningrad, everything about Kabul was exotic: enormous skies – uncommonly starry – occasionally punctured by the blazing lines of tracers. And spread out before you, the mysterious Asian capital where strange people were bustling about like ants on an anthill: bearded men, faces darkend by the sun, in solid-colored wide cotton trousers and long shirts. Their modern jackets, worn over those outfits, looked completely unnatural. And women, hidden under plain dull garments that covered them from head to toe: only their hands visible, holding bulging shopping bags, and their feet, in worn-out shoes or sneakers, sticking out from under the hems. And somewhere between this odd city and the deep black southern sky, the wailing, beautifully incomprehensible songs of the mullahs. The sounds didn't contradict each other, but rather, in a polyphonic echo, melted away among the narrow streets. The only thing missing was Scheherazade with her tales of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights ... A few days later I saw my first missile attack on Kabul. This country was at war.

[On one of his comrades depicted in the book:] "Sasha was my friend … Like me, he was 19. But he didn't come home. He was killed 12 hours after this photo was taken.

On the TV and in the newspapers all we hear and read is 'live your life or the terrorists win' and it sounds great, I’m all for that, except my kids won’t ask for a bathroom pass because the faculty facilities are on the first floor of the building and the MPs patrolling the second floor won’t go downstairs on their shift—so I’ve got middle school kids afraid to take a piss because there might be a soldier in the stall next to them carrying a loaded M- 16—but hell yes, I’m all for 'live your life' and screw the terrorists, and screw all the countries who harbor and support them. I’m on board with that, except I’ve got these kids who stay home now, because they’re scared riding a bus with soldiers carrying guns, knowing that one soldier isn’t enough, so there’s a military truck full of soldiers with even bigger guns following the bus 'just in case.

Organisasi-organisasi raksasa dengan momok birokrasi yang rumit terus berbicara tentang konsep-konsep dan solusi dalam "bahasa langit", sementara kaki mereka tak menjejak pada kehidupan akar rumput rakyat Afghan yang sebenarnya. Anak-anak jalanan masih saja bertebaran di mana-mana. Perempuan masih bersembunyi. Jalan masih berdebu. Rumah-rumah belum tersentuh listrik dan air.

per troppo tempo l'Afghanistan è stato usato come terreno di scontro nel "Grande Gioco" delle superpotenze. (...) hanno dato denaro e potere ai fondementalisti e signori della guerra, che hanno trascinato il nostro popolo in una situazione drammatica.

Sami and I had exactly one day together in the old world. On Tuesday the jihadists came to our front door and knocked down our buildings. Our new world was hijacked planes, anthrax, and Afghanistan. Then we had snipers inside the Beltway. Then came Iraq. With every military action we were told reprisals were not just probable, but a foregone conclusion. An intelligence officer with a fancy PowerPoint briefed teachers on ‘our new reality.’ He called us ‘targets.’ He said ‘get used to it.’ He told our Webmaster ‘get off your ass’ and remove bus routes/stops from the school’s website. Johnny Jihad would find that information especially helpful if he decided to plow through our kids one morning as they stood half-asleep waiting for the school bus.

I start thinking about what happened and then I start thinking about why I'm still here. It's pointless. They say on TV that the soldiers want to be there? I can't speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain't nobody that wants to be here, because there's no point. What are we getting out of fucking being here? Nothing.

It was too late to pray, though. The sky was clear. The helicopters were gone. Too late for so many things. My fists hit the floor. My head hit the floor. My heart broke, hardened, and I lost my faith. That’s when the killing thoughts came. When it felt right to punish everyone who let this happen. I could start with Angel’s dad—but where would it stop?

She was learning that being with Slade was like riding a roller coaster. Good news one minute and bad news the next. She could only imagine what this restaurant must be like.

I wanted to share the risks the digger in Afghanistan took every day. Whenever I could I joined patrols ‘outside the wire’, walking the same dusty tracks and fields as the ordinary soldiers. I did everything in my power to keep them alive, I failed. In that year I lost ten soldiers under my command, killed in action. I personally identified the remains of each of them, sending them home to their families. More than sixty of my soldiers were wounded, some horribly.

Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11: I'll talk about the situation in Afghanistan.... Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide.... It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next—in the next couple of weeks.... very casually with no comment.... we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder three or four million people. Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts...') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political.

Sounds like I’m the man of your dreams…

Teaching isn’t rocket science. It’s about being engaged, listening, paying attention. Despite conventional wisdom, you don’t need to talk a lot to teach well. You do need to care, though. Not so much about what people think of you or whether or not they like you, but about the kids and doing what’s best for them.

Sea Prayer was inspired by the story of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach the Safety in Europe in 2015. In the year after Alan's death, 4,176 others died or went missing attempting that same journey.

Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be. Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.

So, Slade, the swearing, the poor english and everything else is just a facade. You're really quite a deep and intelligent man, aren't you?

The first Embassy to Afghanistan by a western power left the Company's Delhi Residency on 13 October 1808, with the Ambassador accompanied by 200 calvary, 4,000 infantry, a dozen elephants and no fewer than 600 camels. It was dazzling, but it was also clear from this attempt to reach out to the Afghans that the British were not interested in cultivating Shah Shuja's friendship for its own sake, but were concerned only to outflank their imperial rivals: the Afghans were perceived as mere pawns on the chessboard of western diplomacy, to be engaged or sacrificed at will. It was a precedent that was to be followed many other times, by several different powers, over the years and decades to come; and each time the Afghans would show themselves capable of defending their inhospitable terrain far more effectively than any of their would-be manipulators could possibly have suspected.

The best thing we could have done for Afghanistan was to get out of our Humvees and drink more green chai. We should have focused less on finding the enemy, and more on finding our friends.

The chowdry, or burqa -- the Saudi, North African, and Central Asian version of the head, face, and body shroud -- is a sensory deprivation isolation chamber. It is claustrophobic, may lead to anxiety and depression, and reinforces a woman's already low self-esteem. It may also lead to vitamin D deficiency diseases such as osteoporosis and heart disease. Sensory deprivation officially constitutes torture and is practiced as such in the world's prisons.

The heart of evil beats in Afghanistan. When men hold every advantage, neither wealth, nor beauty, nor intelligence, nor education, nor strength, nor family can compete with gender. Women have only prayer and hope as allies.

The last two days I’ve been on long bus rides, driven through the countryside on the back of a motorbike, and crossed rivers on wooden boats, traversing currents into a different century. It’s late and dark, but I’m so close now. My uncle died five kilometers from here.

The look of a smug teacher is priceless.