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.
Alcee Hastings
The Taliban and its backers bear the responsibility for the consequences of this outrageous act.
Amanullah Khan
When US-led forces toppled the Taliban government in November 2001, Afghans celebrated the downfall of a reviled and discredited regime.
Anand Gopal
Never short of guns and guerrillas, Afghanistan has proven fertile ground for a host of insurgent groups in addition to the Taliban.
For years, Hizb-I-Islami fighters have had a reputation for being more educated and worldly than their Taliban counterparts, who are often illiterate farmers.
The existence of the Taliban, in my view, is a tragedy for Afghanistan. We as Americans need to understand our role in helping bring that tragedy about. So I think it's important to look at the stories about why these people are fighting.
Unlike other Taliban groups, the Haqqanis' approach to mayhem was worldly and sophisticated: they recruited Arabs, Pakistanis, even Europeans, and they were influenced by the latest in radical Islamist thought.
If we're so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren't they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban?
Ann Coulter
In Afghanistan, getting shot at was a regular occurrence. I viewed survival as a numbers game. As point man, every time I entered a Taliban compound first, I played the odds in my head.
Ant Middleton
I was point man, which meant I was the first through the door, hunting down Taliban commanders, knocking down forts every night.
When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.
Arundhati Roy
By terrorising the people, the Taliban have sown deep doubts about the government.
Ashraf Ghani
Peace cannot come without the government of Afghanistan speaking directly to the Taliban or the Taliban talking directly to us.
The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.
Asne Seierstad
But here too it should be noted that the President's approach was to first ask the repressive and brutal Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden to us, and only after that government refused to do that did we invade.
Barney Frank
I don't think you can rely on Iran. I don't think you can rely on other radicals like the Taliban. They dispatched Al Qaida to bomb New York and Washington. What were they thinking? Were they that stupid? They weren't stupid. There is an irrationality there, and there is madness in this method.
Benjamin Netanyahu
I have a lot of security - I lost my mother to the Taliban because of a lack of security - and that explains partly why I can be so vocal.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari
Our aim is always to minimise casualties and to separate a hardline Taliban from those who have been caught up in the insurgency.
Bob Ainsworth
The war in Afghanistan is too important to be reduced to a political football. We are fighting there to protect our national security. We are confronting the Taliban-led insurgency to prevent terrorists returning to that country.
There was expectations that the fights there, the operation there might be extended for several months, even for several years. But within a few weeks it ended, because obviously the Taliban wasn't a real force.
Bulent Ecevit
The armies, the difference of all of those armies that had been fighting each other and the Taliban took advantage of that to rule over the whole country.
Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban.
This body, the United States Congress, was united, Republicans and Democrats alike, in taking that action, toppling the Taliban government, and working to try and root out al Qaeda and find Osama bin Laden.
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.
Some of the generals are saying, 'We're making progress. We are clearing an area.' But you really don't defeat the Taliban by clearing an area. They move.
We can't afford to leave Afghanistan to the Taliban and the terrorists.
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.
The fact is that Iran doesn't want to see the Taliban come back any more than do most Afghan citizens.
When the Taliban took over in 1996, the news of their crimes hit the Toronto papers. As a feminist and as an anti-war activist, I heard about what was happening to women, and I wanted to do something to support those folks.
'Horse Soldiers' is the untold story of how a small band of U.S. Special Forces soldiers secretly entered Afghanistan in 2001, just five weeks after September 11, saddled up on horses, and rode to an improbable victory against a vastly larger Taliban and Al Qaeda army.
Suppose something would happen to the president, who would be in charge? The Vice President. Joe Biden? You have got to be kidding today when you say the Taliban's not our enemy.
After September 11, when the United States took action to overthrow the Taliban, our interests and Iran's aligned, and we were able to coordinate quietly but effectively.
Since 1996, the Feminist Majority Foundation has been immersed in a campaign to support Afghan women and girls in their fight against the brutal oppression of the Taliban.
President Trump should appoint a special presidential envoy and empower them to wage an unconventional war against Taliban and Daesh forces, to hold the corrupt officials accountable and to negotiate with their Afghan counterparts and the Afghan Taliban that are willing to reconcile with Kabul.
I'm not sure whether a person can really gauge the quality of his work by the enemies he's made, but if I somehow upset Hamas and the Taliban and Henry Waxman, I must have done something right.
When the United States first went into Afghanistan in 2001, it devastated the Taliban and Al Qaeda in a matter of weeks using only a few hundred C.I.A. and Special Operations personnel, backed by American air power. Later, when the United States transitioned to conventional Pentagon stability operations, this success was reversed.
After 9/11, a few hundred CIA and Special Operations personnel, backed by airpower and Afghan militias, devastated Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. That effort has since turned into a conventional Pentagon nation-building exercise and gone backward.
The greatest threat to our freedom and prosperity is not al-Qaida, the Taliban, Iran or even China. It's an idea, the idea that we can spend our way out of our problems without tightening our belt and paring down the very bloated government.
The Taliban is the Muslim version of the Salem witch trials.
A desire to contain extremism is a major reason why Putin offered help to the United States in battling the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. It is also why Russia maintains close relations with Shia Iran, which acts as a counterweight to Sunni powers.
There's a group of people - maybe the secular Taliban is a good name for them - who have morphed this idea, that you have to accept my values being every bit as cherished as your values. That's not tolerance... There are too many things in this world which we sit back and tolerate.
The draconian prohibitions of the Taliban years and the gains Afghan women have achieved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001 are now well known and often cited: Today, Afghans lucky enough to live in secure regions can go to school, women may work in offices, and the burqa is no longer mandatory.
When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.
One thing that I noticed is having met some former Taliban is even they, as children, grew up being indoctrinated. They grew up in violence. They grew up in war. They were taught to hate. They were, they grew up in very ignorant cultures where they didn't learn about the outside world.
Although combat operations unseated the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime, a poor understanding of the recent histories of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples undermined efforts to consolidate early battlefield gains into lasting security.
It is in their inherent moral components that recent Western strategies may be deficient. What percentage of the populations in countries engaged in the 14-year effort in Afghanistan could even name the three main Taliban groups with whom their soldiers have been engaged?
People in Afghanistan want peace, including the Taliban. They're also people like we all are. They have families, they have relatives, they have children, they are suffering a tough time.
I don't think the Taliban will ever come back to take Afghanistan, no.
The high probability is if American forces withdraw from Afghanistan and if no alternative international arrangement is made that then the historic contests between the regions and the sects will reappear, the Taliban will re-emerge, and a very complicated and maybe chaotic situation will develop.
If American forces leave Afghanistan, the Taliban is going to do what to America? Don't say you're worried about what they will do to the Afghan people. If that was America's concern, America's operational presence there would be much different.
