Noah Shachtman also covered Blair's comments in an article for Wired.com called "Former Intel Chief: Call Off The Drone War (And Maybe the Whole War on Terror)."
It is not just Blair who is questioning the basic, publicly stated rationale for the war on terror. In 2010, the Afghanistan Study Group, led by former State Department official Matthew Hoh, issued a report called "A New Way Forward: Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan." The report is short, readable, and filled with new ideas and new approaches. You can read it here.
On October 14 2010, Hoh talked about the purpose behind the report in Washington with two other members of the Afghanistan Study Group, former CIA analyst Paul Pillar, and Darcy Burner, executive director of ProgressiveCongress.org. Watch the video of ASG's public discussion on YouTube.
Many great points were made in the discussion. I wrote down the most interesting points that Hoh made about why America's strategy in Afghanistan is leading to financial, moral and political bankruptcy for the United States. Hoh said:
It is hard to publicly defend a war against a terrorist organization that was created by America's own intelligence community. Al-Qaeda is literally an imaginary enemy. America's war on terror is about chasing shadows in the mountains. What you have in Afghanistan is something like duck hunting season or a turkey shoot, but not a war. Even Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that there are less than 100 Al-Qaeda fighters [read: CIA trained operatives] in Afghanistan.
History will remember America's war in Afghanistan as another episode of an empire mass murdering innocent civilians. The threat of terrorism never existed.
Konstantin Sivkov, first vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, said in an interview in September 2010 on Russian television that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) could become a strategic and economic counterweight to NATO in Eurasia. He said:
But what happens when America and Pakistan go to war? Or when America stops tiptoeing around in Iran and drops the gloves for real?
How many millions of dead bodies are we looking at when the blood-soaked tyrants in Washington are finished with the world? Two million? Four? Ten? Twenty?
If the psychopaths in Washington, Tel Aviv, and London continue to have their way in the region and start new criminal wars, the Middle East will become a graveyard.
The question is: what happens then?
It is not just Blair who is questioning the basic, publicly stated rationale for the war on terror. In 2010, the Afghanistan Study Group, led by former State Department official Matthew Hoh, issued a report called "A New Way Forward: Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan." The report is short, readable, and filled with new ideas and new approaches. You can read it here.
On October 14 2010, Hoh talked about the purpose behind the report in Washington with two other members of the Afghanistan Study Group, former CIA analyst Paul Pillar, and Darcy Burner, executive director of ProgressiveCongress.org. Watch the video of ASG's public discussion on YouTube.
Many great points were made in the discussion. I wrote down the most interesting points that Hoh made about why America's strategy in Afghanistan is leading to financial, moral and political bankruptcy for the United States. Hoh said:
"Too many times with Afghanistan people don't see the proverbial forest because of the trees. . . . Particularly when I talk to the military, with my former counterparts, they get lost in the tactical or the operational perspectives. Whether or not we can clear and hold and build in Marja, whether or not 30,000 troops are going to expand that inkblot further out, as opposed to asking the questions: Why should we clear and hold and build in Marja? Does it really matter to us if we expand those inkblots out in terms of benefits to the United States and national security terms.The Afghanistan Study Group's report is helping to form a new public policy consensus about America's goals and role in Afghanistan.So we wanted to address the forest rather than the individual trees. There are a number of resources we provide for people who have specific concerns about economic issues , about issues relating to international terrorism, issues relating to women's rights, issues relating to the politics of this issue whether internal to the United States or whether internal to Afghanistan or whether on an international level .
The purpose of this group is to actually change policy. We didn't just want to be an organization sponsored by a couple of think tanks that just puts out publications and doesn't actually do anything. Everybody who is a member of this organization actually wants to change policy for a variety of different reasons.
Some people see this in a grand foreign policy perspective. . . I've heard from a senior retired congressman who said "this is sucking the guts out of us." It is distracting us from other issues around the world. We're putting all our emphasis, all our time and energy, on Afghanistan, and it's frankly not that important to us.
There are people who are concerned with the economic interests of it. I heard the other day Amtrak has a plan to put high-speed rail from D.C. to Boston. It's going to take 30 years. . It's going to triple capacity, and it'll go about 250 mph so you can get from here to New York in an hour. Anyone who is taking travel off this Northeast corridor knows we need something like that. The cost: $117 billion dollars. . . The projected cost for FY11 (fiscal year 2011) for the Afghanistan war is $119 billion dollars.
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These are wars that we're going to have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on per year for the rest of our lives. So there is an economic cost. And there are other costs, too. As Paul spoke, we're fighting Taliban in Afghanistan, we're not fighting al-Qaeda. They are a dispersed, decentralized organization around the world that is not affected by army or marine brigades occupying ground. . . We don't affect them.
And then there is a moral perspective on this. Should the U.S. have young marines and soldiers fighting and dying for a kleptocratic and fraudulent government that has stolen two elections in a row. Is there any moral worth in that? Is that going to be a shame on us 15 years from now?
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Our marines and soldiers are going to do anything we ask them. Anything. But it's incumbent upon us to make sure we're asking them to do what's actually in interest to this country.
So there is a variety of reasons why people have signed on to this, why people support us, and we're not doctrinal. Like I said before, this is a consensus document. I'm the director of this project, I agree with about 80-85 percent of the document, okay. So what we're trying to do is build this foundation of people who are saying "Hey, after nine years, hundreds of billions of dollars, almost 1300 lives lost, it's not affecting al-Qaeda, it's not making us safer, it's destabilizing the region, we need to shift strategy.' "
It is hard to publicly defend a war against a terrorist organization that was created by America's own intelligence community. Al-Qaeda is literally an imaginary enemy. America's war on terror is about chasing shadows in the mountains. What you have in Afghanistan is something like duck hunting season or a turkey shoot, but not a war. Even Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that there are less than 100 Al-Qaeda fighters [read: CIA trained operatives] in Afghanistan.
History will remember America's war in Afghanistan as another episode of an empire mass murdering innocent civilians. The threat of terrorism never existed.
Konstantin Sivkov, first vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, said in an interview in September 2010 on Russian television that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) could become a strategic and economic counterweight to NATO in Eurasia. He said:
"The phenomenon of terrorism as such is blown out of proportion for a reason. Over the last ten years, the losses from terrorism are not more than seven to ten thousand people, whereas the toll from U.S. expansion in Iraq and Afghanistan is several times higher. The United States is exaggerating the threat of terrorism in a bid to justify its military expansion and secure its military supremacy in the world.So far, Washington's criminal war on terror has not met much resistance from countries like Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China.
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We should clearly realize that U.S. secret services are actively trying to strengthen their position in the post-Soviet space, not shying away from any methods, so the emergence of the SCO with its efforts to suppress these activities is enough ground for the West's concern."
But what happens when America and Pakistan go to war? Or when America stops tiptoeing around in Iran and drops the gloves for real?
How many millions of dead bodies are we looking at when the blood-soaked tyrants in Washington are finished with the world? Two million? Four? Ten? Twenty?
If the psychopaths in Washington, Tel Aviv, and London continue to have their way in the region and start new criminal wars, the Middle East will become a graveyard.
The question is: what happens then?
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