"It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat."...

The volatile situation in many countries is proof that international terrorism is still active and is vehemently working. Terrorists often choose the time and place most suitable to them, such as the north of Mali or the south of Yemen, with complete disregard for the security measures being taken by the targeted countries. The measures taken by the US administration to wipe out terrorism.....

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."...

The U.S. paid off Afghan warlords to capture people they suspected of having a role in terrorism. The payments ranged from $3,000 to 25,000, according to the Associated Press. The U.S. also gave money to Pakistani security forces to do the same. The AP article on bounties for people who ended up at Guantanamo reported that “a detainee who said he was a Saudi businessman claimed, ‘The Pakistani police sold me for money to the Americans.’...

A hundred prisoners are taking part in the hunger strike at Guantánamo now—a hundred angry men, or ones who are in a state of despair. There may be more, since that is the military’s count, and the lawyers for the prisoners have been saying for some time that the number is higher. There are not, it should be said, a hundred prisoners at Guantánamo who even the United States government considers dangerous enemy combatants;....

Americans also are more aware of how such attacks are used to justify abuses of their own rights. Immediately, the bombings began to be cited by some leaders as a call to limit constitutional rights. Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have called for the surviving suspect....

The same could be said of Iraq, where Britain tacked a Kurdish minority in the north on to the traditionally Arab land of Mesopotamia to create the modern state. It was the sort of shotgun marriage to which colonial administrators were dangerously addicted and it's possible that in the chaos of the modern Middle East, that Kurdish region is working quietly towards a kind of undeclared independence...

The US President invited ire by his initial reluctance to call Monday’s Boston bombing an “act of terror.” He did the same last year, by appearing unwilling to label an attack on the US embassy in Libya―in which the American ambassador was killed―as “terrorism.” What explains his fear of the T-word?....

The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defence Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews. It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations...

The enemy, domestic or foreign, is not packing up after this bloodshed; it will try to repeat its attempts. The Terrorists have no defined patterns which are going to show us predetermined paths for violence as some commentators naively pretend. Once inside “the belly of the beast,” as the enemy perceives America, every aspect of our lives can be targeted. We need to adapt and win....

By the count of the New America Foundation, a research group that tries to track targeted killing, the United States has carried out 422 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, 373 of them since Mr. Obama took office in 2009, in addition to a handful in Somalia. The foundation estimates the number of deaths resulting from the strikes to be between 2,426 and 3,969, of which about 10 percent were of civilians and nearly as many of which were identified as “unknown.”...

They may indeed be a crew of Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in the cult of terror and global war.  They live in the Cathedral of the Enemy.  They were the first believers and they will undoubtedly be the last ones as well.  They are invested in the importance of the enemy.  It’s their religion.  They are, after all, the enemy-industrial complex and if we are in their grip, so are they.....

This policy on targeted killing, according to experts on counterterrorism inside and outside the government, is shaped by several factors: the availability of a weapon that does not risk American casualties; the resistance of the authorities in Pakistan and Yemen to even brief incursions by American troops; and the decreasing urgency of interrogation at a time when the terrorist threat has diminished and the United States has deep intelligence on its enemies....

However, even despite this being the fourth year of drone strikes in Pakistan, with so many Al-Qaeda and Tehreek-e-Taliban leaders allegedly killed in strikes in past years, terrorists were nevertheless able to still carry out 652 attacks killing 1,007 people and injuring 2,687. Not only were they able to kill more, they were also able to expand their ambit of operations into other parts of Pakistan...

A much-quoted line from the movie Apocalypse Now captured the insanity of the American air war in Vietnam.  “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” says an Air Cav commander played by Robert Duvall.  “Smelled like... victory.”  Updated for drone warfare, this line might read: “I love the sound of drones in the morning.  Sounds like... victory.”  But will we say the same when armed drones are hovering, not only above our enemies’ heads...