Hillary Clinton Quotes

I do not believe that a counterterrorism strategy all by itself, without a sufficient level of counterinsurgency, will work.

You know as well as I do that counterinsurgency is a very nuanced type of military operation.

Time and again, attempts by machine-age armies to impose their will on irregular forces supported by a sympathetic population failed.

The United States Army had become reliant on firepower and technological superiority in its history of annihilating enemy forces...The concept that success in counterinsurgency consisted of separating the insurgents from popular support never took hold. The U.S. Army proceeded with its historical role of destroying the enemy army –p even if it had a hard time finding it.

Counter insurgency is something we can’t do, can’t do well, and shouldn’t be doing.

Counter insurgency is unworkable without a responsive and politically popular national government.

When the population does not feel secure, it is very difficult to win their hearts and minds.

Can a foreign army, particularly with a vastly different culture, be a successful counterinsurgent?

We want to make the insurgents come to us. Make them be the aggressors. What I want to do is get on the inside looking out - instead of being on the outside looking in.

In counterinsurgency operations, the human terrain is the decisive terrain.

Military leaders, many of whom were students of counterinsurgency, recognized the dangers of an incremental escalation and the historical lesson that 'trailing' an insurgency typically condemned counterinsurgents to failure.

Instead of large-scale occupations, we should rely on small units of Special Forces who have proved it's infinitely more effective to work with a country's soldiers and citizens at eye level.

The history of warfare has not yet enabled any army, any civilized army, the army of a democracy like Israel, to be able to deal with a ruthless terrorist enemy that uses civilians as a human shield without having some incidental civilian casualties.

Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.

In military terms, if you're not winning, sometimes you are losing. We've seen the Taliban and associated terrorist organizations make gains in recent years. It's time to stop those gains and roll them back. There's a lot of different techniques to do so, but we cannot allow Afghanistan to once again become an ungoverned country from which terrorist organizations can launch attacks against the United States and our citizens.

[Insurgents] pose no strategic threat to the United States or to the Coalition Forces.

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

We [Afghanistan government] were in the process of cleaning up the government when these attacks happened in the north - not only in Kunduz, but also in other provinces. Our special forces are limited - we cannot be everywhere at the same time and we had to defend every district regardless of how insignificant it might be, because of the very social and political makeup of this country.

The kind of problem that America faces in Iraq is a little bit the kind of problem that Israel faced in dealing with Hezbollah. If the conflict, the theater of conflict enlarges, it's going to become more and more absorbing and more and more costly.

When guerillas engage a stronger enemy, they withdraw when he advances, harass him when he stops, strike him when he is weary, pursue him when he withdraws.

Guerrilla warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defense against oppression.

I think the scale of the conflict [in Afghanistan] has dramatically changed in 2003. You're now facing a much more motivated, well-supported enemy. I don't see any quick end to this thing.

Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong, but of the weak.

When your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies.