Asked if such tactics had failed in places like Afghanistan, where members of the Taliban movement seized power and imposed harsh Islamic rule with arms supplied by the United States in the 1980s, he replied: "I'd rather have the problems we have in Afghanistan than the problems we had during the Cold War, " he said, referring to the Soviet invasion there in 1980.
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At the same time, much of Afghanistan's problems over the years have come from outsiders trying to force their vision on Afghanistan.
It was a sign of the huge problems Afghanistan still faces, well President Hamid Karzai was in London during the middle of this week putting the case, the urgent case for more international aid and support and I caught up with him at his hotel and I asked him first if he feared the world was walking away from his country.
Victims who are rescued from the horrors of the flood-ravaged city of New Orleans may have frequent and intense psychological problems similar to those that plague troops returning from Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam--problems that could spread to the rescuers as well.
"Children are the best to tell the problems of Afghanistan, " said Berit Muhlhausen, co-director of the school, which is funded in part by the Danish government.
He identified three critical problems in Afghanistan: the lack of legitimacy for the government, the existence of safe havens for terrorists across the border in Pakistan, and the lack of military resources.
We cannot, as Americans, allow ourselves to think we are not in any way responsible for the problems in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other places where terrorist roots have now branched out.
Attempts to form a national army have been hampered by a lack of non-partisan army volunteers and problems with convincing Afghanistan's different ethnic factions on how much representation they should have in the army.
As NPR reported last year, numerous soldiers from Fort Carson who have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan with serious mental health problems have been kicked out of the Army with few or no benefits.
His story is a microcosm of the problems that have consumed Afghanistan for three decades: He was orphaned by war and disease -- his father was killed by the Taliban, his mother died of tuberculosis.
"People in Afghanistan need legitimate institutions to resolve their problems, " says Alex Their, a senior rule-of-law adviser at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Military studies show that as many as one quarter of soldiers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan have symptoms of serious mental health problems.
There were also questions about how he was evaluated, promoted and transferred to Fort Hood with plans to deploy to Afghanistan despite signs that he was having problems.
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We're expecting this week a big meeting of local leaders, tribal chiefs and other leaders, from both Afghanistan and Pakistan to talk about the problems of the Taliban and al-Qaida, who are strongest along that border region.
Following an attack on the Srinagar assembly on 1 October in which 38 people died, Mr Vajpayee wrote to President Bush saying India did not want to create problems in the campaign against Afghanistan but that Pakistan should understand there was a "limit to India's patience".
However, as Victor Davis Hansson correctly points out in a recent Washington Times op-ed, the problems we're seeing in Afghanistan don't originate there.
In Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, we do have real problems with the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Gen David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan, said on Monday that the action could cause problems "not just in Kabul, but everywhere in the world".
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U.S. troops can depart Afghanistan "as the Afghans can deal with their own security problems, " he said.
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Now this raises some problems because there is a feud going on between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with each country accusing the other of hosting Osama Bin Laden.
Afghanistan's southern desert is stunning but the country's problems have made many forget how beautiful the place actually is.
The defining political question of this decade will not be Iraq or Afghanistan, or the environment or any of a host of other problems.
Maseth's mother, Cheryl Harris, said wiring problems are a problem for U.S. troops in Afghanistan as well.
The same problems are re-emerging largely because too little was done to clean up Afghanistan's electoral machinery after last year's flawed presidential poll.
There will be foreign policy problems aplenty for the next Commander-in-Chief, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the likelihood of an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, from Russian aggression to North Korean foot-dragging regarding its own nuclear ambitions.
"We do have some problems with local police and Arbaki forces, " says Siddiq Siddiqi, spokesman for Afghanistan's Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kabul.
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