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Seymour Hersh on Obama's Legacy in the Middle East: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden Featured in Harper's

Sam Smith10 May 2016

Image for blog post entitled Seymour Hersh on Obama's Legacy in the Middle East: <i>The Killing of Osama Bin Laden</i> Featured in <i>Harper's</i>
Harper's has published an extract from The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, Seymour Hersh's investigation into the Obama administration's machinations in Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East. The book, which began as a series of essays in the London Review of Books, has ignited a firestorm of controversy in the world media.


(Abbottabad at Sunset. Via Flickr)

In Harper's, Hersh delivers a scathing and incisive analysis of the White House's lies about the continued deployment of special forces and the administration's strategic continuation of the “war on terror.”

Obama had described Afghanistan as “the right war” during his campaign and talked about the need for more troops on the ground there. Many of his supporters were not listening, or chose not to hear. I was told that within three weeks of taking office he informed his senior advisers at a secret National Security Council meeting of his plan to send an additional 17,000 American troops to join the more than 30,000 already stationed there. This outcome was not the product of an interagency staff decision, but a unilateral action taken by Obama and retired Marine Corps general James Jones, the national security adviser at the time. Obama and Jones were said to believe that the focus of American foreign policy needed to be on Pakistan, a nuclear power supporting and harboring the Taliban troops that had become the main opponent in Afghanistan after Al Qaeda’s retreat. There was much hubris and — as usual in new administrations — not much consideration of what had gone before. Furthermore, I was told by someone in a position to know that Jones had explained at one meeting, in essence, that “Afghanistan is not in our national security interest, but we don’t want to betray the good men who went there before. We will not abandon Afghanistan, but we will not let it get worse.”

Visit Harper's to read the extract in full.

The Killing of Osama Bin Laden is out now.

Filed under: us-politics, war-on-terror