John R. Allen Quotes

You know, great powers don't get angry, great powers don't make decisions hastily in a crisis.

Protecting Afghan civilians is the cornerstone of our mission.

Afghanistan is going to be here a long time, and what's critical is that Afghanistan's relationship with its neighbors are, to the maximum extent they can be, constructive and operationally useful.

There are problems in the world today.

I seek as much as I can to mitigate risk.

The thing that I'm always left with is this overwhelming desire for people to be rooted and the only way that they feel rooted is through another person.

We dont want the Taliban to put down roots, or the al Qaeda to put down roots in Afghanistan that can facilitate Afghanistan becoming - once again - a launching pad for international terrorism.

I can't spend a lot of time worrying about the numbers at home. I've got to focus on the mission.

There is a direct line relationship between what happened in Afghanistan in the work up to 11 September 2001 and what we're doing in Afghanistan today.

We dont see that the Taliban ultimately can succeed, and its a combination both of what the international community can do to support Afghanistan, not just in the short term, but over the long term.

One would think that if you're anonymous, you'd do anything you want, but groups have their own sense of community and what we can do.

The best thing I ever did was give my family everything I could.

It's not possible to put into words the sense of loss and grief that comes to a family that loses one of their children.

None of us wants any more war.

We need to have a commander-in-chief who knows what she is doing.

Planning is really the hallmark of any large military formation, and it's typically a weakness in new formations and new armies.

We need to understand what we're saying matters.