Political Quotes

“I will not yield. I will not yield. I am almost finished, and you can have the floor, and I will be happy to discuss it in any way. To keep the continuity of the point I am trying to make here, the same thing exists in Afghanistan. They don't have the money to do what this administration says it wants to do. So guess what. We are trying to help them. We are trying to help them. So we are reallocating $386 million of the $1.655 billion, out of $21 billion. We are reallocating it where we think--we may be wrong, but we have a right to think it--to allocate it where we think it is needed. Where will it go in Afghanistan? Mr. President, $75 million of that $366 million will go to the Afghan National Army, which currently pays, I might add--do you know how much they pay? Let's everybody remember this. I know we know it, but sometimes there are so many facts it is easy to forget. We are trying to get an army in Afghanistan that is made up of Tajiks, made up of Pashtun, made up of all the ethnic groups. That is what we are trying to do. You know, that is our objective. But right now the war lords, who historically control them all and have armies bigger than the national army, are paying their armies that they have made up--they are paying them a fair amount of money. They are also the biggest opium traders, now, in the world. Do you know what we are paying the Afghan Army, what Karzai gets to pay them? It is $50 a month--$50 a month. We went back and looked, Senator Lugar and I.…”