War & Peace Quote by Hamid Karzai

“Remnants” is doing the quiet political work here: it shrinks an ongoing catastrophe into leftover debris, something manageable, something you can sweep up with patience and continued force. Karzai’s line lands in the tense space between reassurance and warning. He tells listeners not to expect closure, but he also frames the conflict as fundamentally winnable because it’s no longer a hydra, just the last scattered pieces. That’s not neutral language; it’s a bid to keep the public and foreign partners committed without admitting that “terrorism” in Afghanistan was never a single, contained enemy.

As a statesman speaking in the long shadow of 2001, Karzai is balancing multiple audiences: Afghans exhausted by violence, international backers paying the bills, and regional power brokers testing the new order. Repeating “fight” and “war” twice isn’t redundancy; it’s a drumbeat meant to normalize permanence. If the war will “go on for some time,” then delays, setbacks, civilian suffering, and emergency powers become not scandals but expected weather.

The subtext is legitimacy. Karzai’s government, still proving it can control territory beyond Kabul and survive factional pressure, needs the war’s continuation to read as purposeful state-building rather than drift. By naming “terrorism” instead of insurgency, militias, or civil conflict, he reaches for a morally clean category that travels well in Western capitals. It’s a vocabulary that keeps aid, troops, and political patience flowing while quietly admitting: the end is not on the calendar.