The Taliban may pine for a pre-industrial society, but…

“Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure. In a pre-industrial economy,…

— Isabel Paterson

My soul desires a pre-industrial world, and since I can't have that, I don't really care for anything material.

— Alison Moyet

The Afghans, despite their backwardness, are a friendly lot, but the Taliban are as barbaric as the Huns from the past.

— Sushmita Banerjee

The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans - farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the…

— Rory Stewart

If you take a look at Afghan history, usually they have united to defend against an outside enemy, and as soon as that's accomplished,…

— Lawrence Eagleburger

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

— Salman Rushdie

“By not burning their poppy fields to the ground but instead maintaining a security umbrella that international development agencies could safely work under as…

— Jake Wood

The dangers of an Afghan collapse are many: Afghan deaths, a loss of American prestige, a loss of NATO prestige, a moral blow to…

— Richard Engel

Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren't guided.

— Richard Engel

The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets.

— Richard Engel

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs,…

— Hilary Mantel

Obviously it is right that the Afghans take responsibility for their own future in the end, but they need to know and feel that…

— Tony Blair

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

— Abed Rahmani

“The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late…

— Khaled Hosseini

Our [Afghanistan] main problem is education. Over 90 percent of our population is uneducated. So what can you expect? The terrorists come from Syria,…

— Najibullah Quraishi