Sam Zarifi People Quotations

Lots of Afghans are disappointed and cynical because they feel like people who perpetrated serious human rights abuses have been allowed back in the parliament.

The Afghan people need a government that is functional and accountable. The warlords offer neither.

US forces are still detaining people without charge indefinitely in operating bases.

The success of the Conference should be judged by how much donors commit to do for the security and development of the Afghan people, not their own political agendas. The real measure of security and development in Afghanistan is not the number of foreign troops, but whether people feel safe enough to go to the market, to travel at night to seek medical care, or to send their children to school.

This election could have produced a parliament that really reflected the wants and needs of the Afghan people to be free from the rule of the gun . . . and for clinics, roads, schools and jobs. Instead what we may get is a parliament stocked with figures who represent the bloody past and who have very little legitimacy or competence to address the basic needs of the country.

The young people had been used as cooks, porters and medical personnel, but they had had military training and all were carrying grenades and socket bombs when they were picked up.