I was point man, which meant I was the first through the door, hunting down Taliban commanders, knocking down forts every night.
By terrorising the people, the Taliban have sown deep doubts about the government.
Peace cannot come without the government of Afghanistan speaking directly to the Taliban or the Taliban talking directly to us.
The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.
But here too it should be noted that the President's approach was to first ask the repressive and brutal Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden to us, and only after that government refused to do that did we invade.
I don't think you can rely on Iran. I don't think you can rely on other radicals like the Taliban. They dispatched Al Qaida to bomb New York and Washington. What were they thinking? Were they that stupid? They weren't stupid. There is an irrationality there, and there is madness in this method.
I have a lot of security - I lost my mother to the Taliban because of a lack of security - and that explains partly why I can be so vocal.
Our aim is always to minimise casualties and to separate a hardline Taliban from those who have been caught up in the insurgency.
The armies, the difference of all of those armies that had been fighting each other and the Taliban took advantage of that to rule over the whole country.
There was expectations that the fights there, the operation there might be extended for several months, even for several years. But within a few weeks it ended, because obviously the Taliban wasn't a real force.
