Politics & Power Quote by Condoleezza Rice

Triumphalism is doing a lot of work here. Rice’s sentence is engineered as a progress report, the kind that turns a messy, open-ended occupation into a crisp narrative of milestones: enemy degraded, sanctuary denied, partner government installed. The verbs are decisive, the timeframe conveniently elastic. “On the run” doesn’t require measurable defeat; it requires motion. “No longer a base of operations” swaps the hard problem of transnational militancy for a geographic fix, as if terrorism can be solved by evicting it from an address.

The subtext is reassurance aimed in multiple directions at once: to Americans tired of a post-9/11 war footing, to skeptics wary of mission creep, to allies who need a justification for staying the course. It’s also a preemptive defense against the charge that the U.S. toppled one regime without a viable successor. By calling the Afghan government “friendly,” Rice signals alignment first, legitimacy second. “Trying to bring democracy” lowers the bar from outcomes to intentions, turning state-building into an aspirational process rather than a deliverable.

Context matters: this is the Bush-era rhetorical bridge between counterterrorism and nation-building, between immediate retaliation and an ideological project to remake the political landscape. It works because it offers moral clarity (“democracy”) and strategic closure (“no longer a base”) without naming the trade-offs: warlords folded into power, corruption, civilian casualties, Pakistan’s role, the insurgency’s adaptability. The sentence is less a description of Afghanistan than a bid to stabilize the story Americans were being asked to believe.