Home/Recent kwiples > Headlines >

Afghanistan War

Thursday 9th of July 2026

Afghanistan War $1,000,000,000,000 pissed away, and counting © 2015 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War The absence of periodic reality checks created the risk of doing the wrong thing perfectly: A project that completed required tasks would be considered “successful,” whether or not it had achieved or contributed to broader, more important goals. citation What We Need To Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction, the final SIGAR report [SIGAR is the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War Afghanistan is a Vietnam with snow citation slogan of opponents to the war © 2017 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War At each point in the post-9/11 story big US decisions have been based on conditions on the ground — the ground in Washington, that is. citation Edward Luce, Financial Times, August 17, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War Fuck that we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger got away with it. citation Joe Biden, responding to a question about America's moral obligation to evacuate interpreters and other Afghans who trusted and worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan, thereby delaying the government's planning for an evacuation for months © 2022 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They [Biden] couldn't stop the process. Twenty-one years is enough. Don't we think? Twenty-one years. They [Biden] couldn't stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process. … Twenty-one years by a government that wouldn't last — the only way they last is if we're there. What are we going to say? We'll stay for another twenty-one years. Then we'll stay for another fifty. The whole thing is ridiculous. So we're bringing our troops back home. citation Donald Trump, June 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War I would take these gentlement over and let them get shot a few times and maybe they'd have a different opinion. citation Allen West, on Congressmen who voted a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan © 2015 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War  Marines in Afghanistan started telling a joke about their enemy: “We have the watches,” they'd say, “but they have the time.” citation Phil Klay, The Atlantic, May 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War More Americans cared about the country than the Biden administration had accounted for in its political calculations. Most of these Americans were in their 30s or 40s — the generation that came of age with the 9/11 wars, now reaching a calamitous end. Helping Afghans escape would become a way to avoid succumbing to a sense of waste and despair and helpless rage. citation George Packer, Atlantic Monthly, March 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War One Marine battalion fighting in Helmand province in 2010 and 2011 suffered worse losses than any Marine battalion in the previous 10 years of fighting. When asked by an embedded journalist what such sacrifices were for, the best that one of the sergeants in the battalion could muster was: “This war is stupid. Well, so what? Our country is in it.” citation Phil Klay, The Atlantic, May 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War The paradox of being a refugee is that the more likely you are to have a valid claim for asylum in any given country, the less likely you are to be able to travel there: Afghanistan has the worst passport in the world when it comes to visa-free travel, a direct result of producing so many refugees. citation Matthieu Aikins, New York Times, February 14, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War So it has come full circle. What started as an operation to eradicate al-Qaeda has ended two decades later with the return of its Afghan enablers to power. Rarely have so many lives and so much cash been spent on so little. citation Edward Luce, Financial Times, August 17, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War “The State Department always insists that we we have to play by the rules,” Representative [Tom] Malinowski, who once served in it, told me. The department celebrates Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who forged passports to save Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. “But if any State Department employee tried to pull what Raoul Wallenberg did, he'd be fired in three seconds.” This was the thinking of the period before the August evacuation. “And then, for two glorious weeks, we threw out the rules.” Now the department is back to its risk-averse, pre-August thinking, with an obstacle for every human need. “Bureaucracy is killing more people than the Taliban,” Mary Beth Goodman, the State Department official, told me. citation George Packer, Atlantic Monthly, March 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War This, in the end, is what the big screen's relative neglect of the Afghan war comes down to. The modern incapacity for despair. Most wars connote glory (the second world war) or folly (Iraq),  either of which is a guide to future action. This one was not a teachable moment so much as an extended riddle. It was right to go in and it was hopeless to go in. We have to leave and it is rash to leave. citation Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 9, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War The VA augmented its mental-health hotline in case Afghanistan veterans began to see their interpreters beheaded on social media. citation George Packer, Atlantic Monthly, March 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War We got on the wrong side in Afghanistan long ago by supporting the religious extremist mujahedin against a secular government favored by the Soviet Union — all because we had anti-Communism as a mental disease. Allowing girls to go to school and women to go to political meetings were the reasons cited by the mujahedin for overthrowing that government — we armed them, paving the way for the Taliban. By allowing massive child abuse, we created the next generation of vengeance. Gloria Steinem © 2015 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail. citation George W. Bush, Address to the Nation, September 20, 2001 © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
Afghanistan War You have soldiers who were supposed to be defending places with no food, fuel, ammunition or air support. They are thinking, I don't need to be here … to die for this. citation Sami, a former Afghan commando quoted in Financial Times, August 21/22, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com