Hamid Karzai Quotes

Syrian influence has not ended yet. It is going to be a very long path.

We all hoped in 2001 that we could put in place an Afghan government under President Karzai that would be able to control the country, make sure al-Qaeda didn't come back, and make sure the Taliban wasn't resurging. It didn't work out.

I wish - I wish the peace and good for the Syrian citizen and the Syrian regime.

The main problem that we have in Lebanon, and in the region, is we don't have a real peace process and I think this is the main focal problem that we have in the region.

I think you should appreciate the limits of military action in Iraq during next few months without a favourable political situation. Forces from India can secure Basra, but cannot, in my opinion, advance northwards unless the co-operation of the local population and tribes is fully secured.

Nobody ever lost any money betting against Arab-Israeli peace

To bring about a permanent peace in Syria, the southern part of the country must be protected.

Things have to be straightened out to keep Lebanon away from regional conflicts.

Turkey knows the importance of its ties with Israel; it knows it's in the same moderate camp with Israel, the moderate Palestinians and other Muslim countries, and the threat to Turkey is not from us.

Things use to be real nice, til they got out of hand. Since they moved in, they call themselves the Taliban.

You cannot bring peace in Syria as long as [Bashar] Assad is, in fact, there.

The question is: Shouldn't Hezbollah disarm? And ultimately they should. And it's necessary for the Lebanese government to succeed.

We have no interest in seeing an unstable Yemen or seeing a Yemen that is devastated.

The people who are fleeing Syria, they're the ones who need to run the country there long-term.

[Response to the question "Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?”]: No, it is not … because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped - as well as equipped as any army in the world - and an air force, against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.

The Iraq war can only be won diplomatically, politically and economically, and the president needs to come to that realization.

The violence engulfing the region today has made too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard work of peace. But let’s be clear: the status quo in the West Bank and Gaza is not sustainable.

Any outside use of military power would at best furnish a temporary respite from the processes that we see playing out. We know that because we have been through all this before. The "surge" of several years ago was supposed to provide space and time for Iraqi political interests to work out their differences. 30,000 additional U.S. troops failed to lead to any working out of those differences, and the outcome is the mess we see today.

We need a united front against Islamic State and Assad happens to be the decisive power that can fight them. But the situation is preposterous because we also have to respect the calls for change. I would be in favor of a dignified change.

I would say of all the things that have happened during the course of my presidency the knowledge that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, millions who have been displaced, [makes me] ask myself what might I have done differently along the course of the last five, six years.

There are hundreds and hundreds of followers of Islamic State around Europe and the U.S. The Saudis are showing this. And all you have to do is look at the conversation inside of our mosques and inside of our communities.

Where we find young democracies, we need to help them. Where we find the enemy, we need to fight them. And that's exactly the Bush policy.

This is eventually how Syria will be resolved - through a political settlement.

The recent wave of Taliban attacks has made clear that the international community must not waiver in its support for a stable, secure and prosperous Afghanistan.

They won the war but lost the peace.