Richard Holbrooke Quotes

My mission was not to assure that little girls could go to school in Afghanistan. My mission was not to establish a legal system in Afghanistan. That was not my mission. My mission was to destroy Al Quaeda and to do that we had to overthrow the Taliban.

Osama bin Laden is gone. The war in Iraq is over. Afghanistan is coming to a close.

Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We've blunted the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.

I want the American people to understand, we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Instead, we did take our eye off the ball. We decided, instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan, to go into Iraq. And today, unfortunately, if you look at the situation on the ground, it is a mess.

The war on terror is the war in Afghanistan.

The problem was you didn’t have an approach against Al Qaeda because you didn’t have an approach against Afghanistan. And you didn’ have an approach against Afghanistan because you didn’t have an approach against Pakistan. And until we could get that right, we didn’t have a policy.

Since Bin Laden's death, many Americans have decided that our job in Afghanistan is done. They see a victory in the counterterrorism campaign, and are tired of the corruption, confusion and dysfunction of the nation-building campaign.

I oppose the spending of trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan, I strongly oppose Islamic extremism but don't believe that sending troops to die in two unwinnable wars makes sense.

Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.

Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?

The United States does not view our authority to use military force against Al Qaeda as being restricted solely to 'hot' battlefields like Afghanistan.

There is a direct line relationship between what happened in Afghanistan in the work up to 11 September 2001 and what we're doing in Afghanistan today.

I generally don't follow domestic news that much aside from how it relates to the stories I'm covering abroad, like what Americans think of the War in Afghanistan.

If today is anything like the typical day of the past 3 years, three American soldiers will die in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Taliban will get a little stronger in Afghanistan and the civil war will continue to be enhanced in Iraq.

Everybody in Afghanistan ought to know we’re coming in and hells coming with us.

We told the Taliban in no uncertain terms that if this happened, it’s their ass. No difference between the Taliban and al Qaeda now. They both go down.

A dangerous idea is gaining currency within a segment of the American populace. If a person does not support the United States-British bombing expedition in Afghanistan, it means that he or she backs Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda

Your first priority is to go after bin Laden.

We do not need Pakistan to win our war in Afghanistan, but as long as we say that we do, the Pakistanis will play us like a bad fiddle.

Find Al Quaeda and Kill Them

Any of these defense initiatives, looked at 10 years later, you end up asking, “Was it worth it?” Look at Vietnam. Look at Iraq 10 years later. Bin Laden, The War on Terror? We spent a trillion dollars over 10 years to put a 50 cent round in this guy’s head. Everybody thinks that’s a huge success. I don’t know.

The war in Afghanistan is underreported.

The war in Afghanistan is not of a peace with the rest of Obama's worldview. It's a holdover from the era that his election was supposed to bring to a close.

As you will recall, soon after the 9/11 attacks, an international coalition led by the United States conducted an impressive campaign to defeat the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other associated extremist groups in Afghanistan.