The key to breaking the Taliban taboo against women and the cultural brainwashing that the Taliban imposed upon many Afghans is to get women back into the workforce.

[Mullah Omar] gave himself this religious title. So it was something that all those people there who swore an oath of loyalty to him as a religious leader could not easily get rid of.

There's a sense of desperation in Afghanistan because of the lack of funding and the fact that the U.S. only has a one-track military strategy. It doesn't have an economic and political game plan.

Pashtun nationalism is reasserting itself. Its political history spans several hundred years. The Pashtuns are angry at the Americans because, one, they're still being bombed, and two, they perceive that the Americans are backing the Tajik faction, which controls the army and security forces in Kabul.

There is no way the Americans are going to be able to carry out a full scale war against Iraq and at the same time maintain the same kind of pressure on the Al Qaeda network in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Philippines, and Pakistan, as well as in Europe.

The biggest mistake Barack Obama could have made is to change quite a few things in his Afghanistan policy. He increased the number of troops and at the same time set the US withdrawal date to 2014. Now the United States has to ensure that Afghanistan does not immediately collapse after being left to itself in 2014.

It would have been better if the United Nations had sent a team to Mali right away to mediate between the government and the rebels. But where is the political initiative? The Americans make their usual recommendations. They want to train the army for the fight with the rebels. US special forces are already in Mali.

The fact that there are no longer large units of Al Qaeda running around means you don't need B-52s. You need intelligence and special forces. And, most importantly, you need to resurrect Afghanistan from what is literally the graveyard of countries and transform it into a normal country, which the Afghans want.

The strategy for peace-building in Afghanistan is economic aid, reconstruction, international security forces. On those lines, the U.S. has been extremely slow. And it has even blocked expanding security forces from Kabul to other cities.

I met a lot of the senior Taliban, and I asked them precisely [about Mullah Omar]. The most common answer was he is humble. And that was very true. We never had reports of Mullah Omar living luxuriously or making money in large quantities or anything like that.

The idea of a permanent U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, as opposed to an economic presence, is going to create a new wave of hostility toward the United States.

We should remember that the Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Of course, many of them did support the Taliban. But you cannot equate all Pashtuns with the Taliban.

The United States only knows one form of intervention and that is the military one. Everything depends on drawn weapons. We should, however, develop a wider scope of action. And we should learn to be patient.

I am confident that there are hedge funds, banks or investment companies that could allocate five percent of their portfolios for risky investments. In any event, for countries like Afghanistan the formation of an entrepreneurial class is of vital importance.

Dysfunctional states like Afghanistan need business people who are deeply rooted in their country and invest in it. They can add stability. But all development programs of the United States and the European countries unfortunately exclude the private sector, which could make investments based on profitability.

I think within a year or so, perhaps, if 9/11 had not happened, in Afghanistan would have been a very broad-based general uprising against the Taliban.