Daily Inspiration Quote by Hamid Karzai

“Terrorism as a force is gone” is less a victory lap than a careful act of political engineering. Karzai is trying to collapse an abstract, rallying-word enemy into something smaller, lonelier, and easier to police: not a movement with momentum, but scattered “individuals.” After years in which “terrorism” functioned as a kind of atmospheric threat - a justification for emergency powers, foreign troops, and endless operations - he’s attempting to declare the era of the grand narrative over.

The sentence is also a negotiation with two audiences at once. For Afghans exhausted by war, it offers a thin but necessary promise of normalcy: the country is no longer defined by a single, omnipresent menace. For international partners, it’s a signal that the mission has matured and the state can claim ownership of security. But Karzai keeps the second half of the quote taut: “they are all around.” The reassurance is immediately hedged, like a press conference smile that doesn’t reach the eyes. That pivot protects him from looking naive, and it gives continued surveillance and targeted force a new rationale even as the larger war frame is rhetorically retired.

The subtext is equally strategic: if “terrorism as a force” is “gone,” then insurgency starts to look less like an existential national uprising and more like criminality, sabotage, or spoilers - a shift that invites policing, intelligence work, and governance reforms rather than open-ended war. It’s a bid to reclassify the conflict, and in that reclassification, to reclaim sovereignty.