A day in Afghanistan is like a week at home.
Several million people inside and outside Afghanistan are destitute and desperately in need of help.
Over this August district work period, like many of my colleagues, I spent a lot of time with the men and women in uniform from my home State. The 196th Field Artillery Brigade just got back from a year in Afghanistan.
I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth.
When we look around the world today, when we see in Afghanistan that 10 million people have registered to vote in their upcoming elections, including 40 percent of those people are women, that's just unbelievable.
The case of Afghanistan vs. the Soviet Union is the clearest case of good against evil that I've seen in my lifetime. I thought it was terrific the way they got their country back.
We had a couple of minor coups that made a big difference. We snared away from a competitor a correspondent already on the ground in Afghanistan. That was an enormous help to us, because there we were.
The Buddhas had to be destroyed by the Taliban to get the world thinking about Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.
The people who illegally cross into the country are from countries that have very close ties to al Qaeda, whether it's Yemen or Afghanistan, Pakistan, China. It is an absolute national disgrace.
Clinton has more important things to worry about. He not only risks being destroyed historically, like Afghanistan's Buddha statues; he also could end up going to jail.
I just think it would be unrealistic to suggest we're going to eliminate every last domestic insurgent in Afghanistan. Certainly, the history of the country would indicate that's not a very realistic objective, and I think we have to have realistic objectives.
I watched the Bush administration overreact to the Clinton administration, who believed they did too much nation building, sustaining other countries, and that's why we never put the commitment on Afghanistan and Iraq that should have been in there under their policy leadership.
The use of military force against Iraq and Afghanistan was and remains just.
I've always been fascinated with Navy SEALs in general and their role in Afghanistan in particular.
I think we need to just be very clear about what we're trying to do in Afghanistan. Frankly, we're not trying to create the perfect democracy. We're never going to create some ideal society. We are simply there for our own national security.
We can stay in Afghanistan and stabilize the situation, or we can get out and win, or we can get out and lose.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers signed up intentionally. That's a huge difference from the largely conscripted army of my era.
Seen through the eyes of a U.S. soldier, Afghanistan is a scary place.
Kids coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan deserve to come back to 21st century medical care.
When I arrived in the summer of 2009 to command the war in Afghanistan, I entered an effort that was failing. Many Afghans, some ISAF coalition members, and much of the American public had lost confidence in both the trajectory of the war and our ability to correct it.
In fact, if you look upon the situation today, there is great division in the world and we have failed to capitalize on that unity to finish the job in Afghanistan and against al Qaeda.
I think Americans understand that in Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq and Vietnam, we are fighting an enemy allied with the people who attacked us on 9/11.
I think we learned a lesson and paid a bitter price when we put troops on the ground on a long-term basis in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us support a homegrown, indigenous, and locally inspired effort to bring stability to the region.
Because Iran understands Afghanistan far better than Americans do, making Iran a partner in a long-term effort to transform Afghan agriculture makes sense.
It is the responsibility of Afghanistan's new government to gain better control over the country's administration and to resolutely fight the drug trade and corruption.
We are particularly interested in the mental health programs and policies that support our troops and their families before, during, and after deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.
Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one of a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance.
It was essentially for self defence that we went to war in Afghanistan and would go to war in Iraq.
Let us also reflect on the honorable service of our men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces currently serving our country overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, and around the world.
We have to have a conversation about whether Obama's plan to increase spending to occupy Afghanistan helps make America a safer country, or not. I think at some point, we may decide that we don't have to have that size military and cost footprint in the country. You look at what you want to accomplish, how many soldiers you need.
Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on. There was a real sense that you don't get that critical of a government that's leading us in war time.
You would have thought that after 9/11 the president would have finished the job in Afghanistan, and kept the focus on capturing Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda deputies, but he and his team gave top priority to their original plan to invade Iraq.
I am not going to second-guess my old battlefield comrades from Iraq and Afghanistan; each has his own reason for what he has done.
There is a difference between a military mission and the aspiration for the long-term plans for the country. What we want is a stable enough Afghanistan, able to look after its own security so we can leave without the fear of it imploding... But let's be clear - it's not going to be perfect.