<blockquote>"The unwillingness to recognize a historical connection between the rise of anti-American terrorism and America's involvement in the Middle East makes the formulation of an effective strategic response to terrorism that much more difficult," wrote former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (See Zbigniew Brzezinski,
The Choice. [1]</blockquote>
'The longer the war goes on, the more deeply rooted and widespread the Taliban and their transnational milieu will become.'<blockquote>''...The United States and NATO have failed to understand that the Taliban belong to neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan, but are a lumpen population, the product of refugee camps, militarized madrassas, and the lack of opportunities in the borderland of Pakistan and Afghanistan. They have neither been true citizens of either country nor experienced traditional Pashtun tribal society. The longer the war goes on, the more deeply rooted and widespread the Taliban and their transnational milieu will become.
...
The enormous cost of these wars has crippled the United States and world economies, the military deployments have shattered the U.S. and British armies, and the death and destruction have bled civilian populations and worsened the humanitarian crisis for neighboring countries.
...
The Pakistan army has to put to rest its notion of centralized state based solely on defense against India and an expansionist, Islamist strategic military doctrine carried out at the expense of democracy. Musharraf deliberately raised the profile of jihadi groups to make himself more useful to the United States and to enhance his country's strategic importance in Western eyes. No Pakistani leader can afford to take such a deadly gamble again, to play with the destiny of the nation, betray the people's trust, and foster Islamic extremism that bites the hand that feeds it. Pakistan need national reconciliation that brings an end to the demonization of politicians by the army; a new military culture that is taught to respect civilians, institutions, and neighbors; and reformed intelligence agencies that cease to interfere politically.
Members of the Afghan elite need to appreciate the opportunity to be born again as a nation ... Central Asia needs a political transformation before it can move forward. A generation of leaders will have to die or step down before real change can be expected...
...the peoples and regimes of this region have to understand that unless they themselves move their nations toward greater democracy, the chaos that presently surrounds them will, in time, overwhelm them. ... If we can better understand what has happened before, what has gone wrong, and what needs to go right, as this book attempts to do, then we can better face up to our collective future.'
- Ahmed Rashdid,
Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, page(s) 401, 403, 404
[1] Descent into Chaos, Note 28, page 408.</blockquote>
'In the economy, free trade and free markets, through the harmony of reciprocal benefits, advanced the interest and happiness of all by each seeking his own personal utility and self-interest. The Golden Rule, and absence of violence, was the natural moral law that uncovered the key to social harmony and economic prosperity. While such analysis was not in itself anti-Christian, it certainly replaced the ascetic aspects of Christianity with an optimistic, more man-centred creed...
...
It should also be mentioned that it surely seemed easier to convince the king and his ruling elite of the general utility of private property and the free market, than to convince them that they were behaving as the heads of an immoral and criminal system of organized theft. So the basic strategy of trying to convert the king led inexorably to at least a broadly utilitarian approach to the problems of freedom and government intervention.'<blockquote>'In illustrating the nature and advantages of specialization and trade, Boisguilbert is one of the first economists to begin with the simplest hypothetical exchange: two workers, one producing wheat and the other wool, and then to extend the analysis to a small town, and finally to the entire world. This method of "successive approximation," of beginning with the simplest, and then extending the analysis step by step, would eventually prove to be the most fruitful way of developing an economic theory to analyse the economic world.
Graphically illustrating the respective workings of power and market, Boisguilbert supposes a tyrant who tortures his subjects by tying them up within sight of each other, each surrounded by an abundance of the particular good that he produces: food, clothing, liquor, water, etc. They would be made instantly happy if the tyrant were to remove their chains and allow them to exchange their surplus goods for those of one another. But if the tyrant says, no he can only remove the chains of his people when some war or other is settled, or at some future time, he is only adding ridicule and mockery to their grievous torture. Here, Boisguilbert was bitterly mocking the reply that Louis XIV and his ministers habitually made to the pleas of reformers and oppositionists: "We must wait for the peace." Again, like the other oppositionists, war was exposed as the standard excuse for maintaining the crippling interventions of government.
Like Belesbat, Boisguilbert had no patience with inconsistent reformers who tried to make an exception to laissez-faire in luxury products. To Boisguilbert, natural wealth was not just biological necessities; rather "true wealth consists of a full enjoyment, not only of the necessaries of life, but even of all the superfluities and all that which can give pleasure to the senses."
In addition, Boisguilbert was perhaps the first to integrate discussion of fiscal policy with his general economic doctrines. Adopting Vauban's proposal for the elimination of all taxes and their substitution by a single direct tax of 10 per cent on all incomes, Boisguilbert analysed and bitterly denounced the effects of indirect taxes on agriculture. Heavy taxes on grain, he pointed out, have raised costs and crippled grain production and trade. For four decades, he argued, the French government had virtually declared war on consumption and trade by its monstrous taxation, resulting in severe depression in every area of the economy.
On the free market, in contrast, everyone benefits, for "trade is nothing but reciprocal utility; and all parties, buyers and sellers, must have an equal interest or necessity to buy or to sell."
Hence, with Belesbat and Boisguilbert, the focus of the classical liberal attack on statism shifted from moralistic denunciation of luxury or pernicious Machiavellism to meeting mercantilist doctrine on its own utilitarian grounds. Even setting aside classical morality, then, utility and general happiness require the private property and laissez-faire of the natural order. In a sense, old-fashioned natural law had been extended to the economic sphere and to the meshing of individual utility and self-interest through the working of the free market.
...
In the economy, free trade and free markets, through the harmony of reciprocal benefits, advanced the interest and happiness of all by each seeking his own personal utility and self-interest. The Golden Rule, and absence of violence, was the natural moral law that uncovered the key to social harmony and economic prosperity. While such analysis was not in itself anti-Christian, it certainly replaced the ascetic aspects of Christianity with an optimistic, more man-centred creed...
...
It should also be mentioned that it surely seemed easier to convince the king and his ruling elite of the general utility of private property and the free market, than to convince them that they were behaving as the heads of an immoral and criminal system of organized theft. So the basic strategy of trying to convert the king led inexorably to at least a broadly utilitarian approach to the problems of freedom and government intervention.'
- Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995),
Belesbat, Boisguilbert, and the Natural Order of the Free Market (
excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (
pdf) - vol 2 (
pdf))