Farewell Kabul Quotes

“By 1986 the CIA was spending 70 per cent of its entire operations budget funding a Muslim jihad to kill Russians. The whole campaign was managed by a bunch of Islamists who were giving the lion’s share of the US money and weapons to people who wanted to kill Americans. The US was happy to use Islam as a rallying cry. The CIA funded the printing of Korans to be distributed throughout the region, and the University of Nebraska produced primary-school textbooks, known as ‘the ABC of Jihad’, which taught children the alphabet and to count with Kalashnikovs and swords instead of apples and oranges, and were filled with images of Islamic warriors. Alphabet”
― Christina Lamb, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

“All the air power in the world was of little use when what they were really fighting was an ideology, not a conventional army. Our”
― Christina Lamb, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

“However, the fact that American forces continued to work with the warlords and pay them gave them new power in their communities. They intimidated local people by telling them they could call in airstrikes on their satellite phones. And to the horror of many of the Europeans, Rumsfeld and other US officials would visit them as if they were important leaders. ‘There is a certain illogic in trying to boost the authority of the central government on one hand and in conniving with local warlords on the other,’ complained Chris Patten, the European Union Commissioner, when he visited Kabul in May 2002. ‘There are things done in the short term which are unhelpful in the long term.”
― Christina Lamb, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

“what they saw as a British retreat from Basra. The initial British arrogance in Iraq, based on their belief that unlike the Americans they knew how to deal with peacekeeping because of long experience in Northern Ireland, had long faded as they found themselves locked in battle with the Mahdi army, the murderous followers of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and other extremist militias. Without enough troops to deal with the situation they had ended up making a secret deal with the Mahdis to be able to withdraw in peace. On 2 September 2007 British troops left Basra Palace, their last base in the city, for the airport in a retreat described by one officer as ‘utter”
― Christina Lamb, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

“So worried by the chaos were the British that between Christmas 1928 and New Year 1929 they organised an airlift first of their women and children then of all personnel, the first large-scale air evacuation in history”
― Christina Lamb, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

“One only had to go to Kabul airport to see a classic example of the aid community helping itself rather than Afghans. The scariest part of going to Afghanistan was flying in from Dubai on the state airline Ariana. Its planes were in such bad condition that they were banned from most places on earth. Even the model plane in the sales office was held together by sticking plaster and elastic bands. The UN has its own airline to fly staff in and out of danger spots, so it quickly began its own service from Dubai or Islamabad to Kabul. As I stood nervously fiddling with my Ariana boarding pass, I would enviously watch the foreign aid workers and diplomats boarding the shiny UN planes. What I didn’t realise was that the millions of dollars to subsidise this service was coming from the money pledged to help Afghanistan. Ghani was indignant. ‘The first thing the UN system provided through the $1.6 billion of donor money channelled to UN agencies in 2002 was an airline devoted to serving UN staff, and occasionally (after much lobbying) some Afghan government officials.”
― Christina Lamb, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

“Instead, contracts were awarded to American consultancies like Bearing Point, or Adam Smith from the UK, to bring in their own people to run ministries and government departments. The Afghans themselves had little say. ‘The quality of internationals was extremely poor,’ complains Jawad. ‘I had an adviser to my office assigned through USAID, and one day I asked him to draft three template letters in English to reply to congratulatory letters to the President, and requests we kept getting for pictures and flags. All it needed to say was “Thank you, but we don’t have any.” This adviser spent two days on this, and then I had to go and correct it – and it wasn’t even my language. In the end I said, “You’re fired.”’ Jawad then received an angry call from the USAID office to say they had spent $60–70,000 on hiring this man, so he could not fire him. ‘I don’t care,’ replied Jawad. ‘I don’t have room for him in my office – send him to Dubai or somewhere. So much money was wasted.’ In”
― Christina Lamb, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World