“US eroded by own terror crusade’

There is no evidence the US fight against terrorism has made it less potent, whereas America has been significantly eroded over the course of the past decade, American counter-terrorism expert and attorney Daveed Gartenstein-Ross told RT.

“When you look at Al-Qaeda’s goal to economically undermine the US, the conclusion is not that they’ve destroyed America, but they have been more effective in undermining the enemy’s economy than a lot of people would like to believe,” argued Gartenstein-Ross.“War is sometimes necessary, often not,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross said, but “The counter terrorist war is very inefficient one.""There are so many different secret programs, so many different cooks in the kitchen that it is difficult to have any one individual who can determine that there is not a duplicated effort,” Gartenstein-Ross claimed.In times of the Soviet Union fighting in Afghanistan, the war did have an impact on the USSR, though the expert doubts it could have become the major reason for the country’s collapse.Still, “it certainly did not help Soviet Union,” whereas the US has spent in Afghanistan and the War on Terror in general many times more than the USSR spent there.Daveed Gartenstein-Ross doubts the US expect any monetary gain from the wars.“The US quite simply underestimated what is going to happen in terms of expenditures,” he acknowledged.As for the operation in Libya – there was almost no strategic American interests in this country because Colonel Gaddafi neither supported terrorist groups, nor pursuing any kind of weapons of mass destruction programs. The main outcome of the Libyan intervention will be “a humanitarian crisis the international community is powerless to do anything about,” radical Islamists fleeing prisons and jihadists getting their hands on Gaddafi’s arsenal, while Gaddafi loyalists starting an insurgency.Speaking about building anti-terror resilience in the US, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross pointed out that to help community deal with a terrorist attack or natural disaster is incorporating individual citizens into emergency response models.“This is something to help citizens be less afraid and also to feel like if something goes wrong – they can play a role. It is important to build resilience not only in terms of infrastructure, but also psychological resilience, so that we are not sitting afraid of what happens but understand that if something bad happens – we can play a role in fixing it in terms of helping fellow citizens,” he concluded.