Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia

The engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible and could be accomplished with the resources available. - Report of May 1963 to Joint Chiefs of StaffOn September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States. Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance – areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.