Washington has been using the war against terror, which started after the disastrous attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001, in the interests of military sector moguls, argues war correspondent Keith Harmon Snow.
A decade on from the 9/11 events, the world’s number one terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, has been eliminated and the United States has not seen a single terrorist attack since. So some might think the American war against terrorism has succeeded.
But Keith Harmon Snow, an American war correspondent and independent investigator, says Washington has been pursuing goals not remotely connected to basic human virtues.
“Beyond the psychological operation war and propaganda behind 9/11 is the reality that we have a permanent warfare economy. And that does not serve the economy very well,” says the correspondent.
The spread of international terrorism was advanced significantly after 9/11, continues Keith Harmon Snow. This caused a surge in military hardware manufacture in the US, specifically in the production of drones.
“The defense industry exploded after 9/11,” says Snow. “Donald Rumsfeld had a bill passed immediately allowing these defense contracts to be spread around. In terms of the Pentagon and some big business, it was a very successive war.”
The people of Afghanistan are quite aware that the reason why US troops are in their lands is oil and poppies, he concludes.
However the initial point of the now decade-long invasion of Afghanistan was lost once the US government diverted its attention to Iraq, claims Michael Maloof, a former Pentagon official. And that “fatal error in the US strategic judgment” could now cause much bigger problems, he says.
“We should have focused on Afghanistan and helped to develop that country, train the people – the things we are trying to do now under an extremely tight deadline and probably will not succeed in time because the Taliban has been able to resurrect itself and it’s also being joined by foreign forces which ultimately could be threatening Central Asia as well as the North Caucasus. So it’s potentially a much more serious problem than it was just ten years ago,” Maloof says.