The United States has yet to prove it's "serious" about fighting the Islamic State (ISIS), and has failed to build an effective coalition against the jihadist militants, according to Col. Derek Harvey.
In an interview with "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth on
Newsmax TV Monday, the former senior intelligence officer and adviser to Gen. David Petraeus said the United States needs to "direct operations on the ground" in both Syria and Iraq.
"And we need to go after the affiliates that are expanding into places like Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Nigeria, and also into Afghanistan now," he urged.
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"By not being serious and searching out for ways to have effective means on the ground, taking action on the ground, with more air, more Special Operations, direct action in a serious way, we're not going to bring along a coalition of Saudis, the Turks, and others."
"We've been unable to build a coalition, sustain it in an aggressive way, and that's in part because we are not serious," Harvey declared. "We do not have a coherent strategy, it's not resourced, and it's not well-led."
Cautioning against making too much of
the report that ISIS-affiliated hackers are threatening to do something "surprising" to frighten America, Harvey said the nation has to "wait and see."
"It's not necessarily calling wolf, it could be just a test, it could be a prank, it did get a lot of news coverage — and that's what ISIS does desire."
Harvey also debunked journalist
Seymour Hersh's claim that Osama bin Laden wasn't killed in a Navy Seals operation in 2011, and that Pakistan's military had been holding the al-Qaida terror leader.
"Sy Hersh is, to be kind, a very creative writer in imagining things and I think he's being spun by a number of his Pakistani contacts," Harvey said, adding that of Hersh's unnamed sources, "we have no way of contacting or verifying what they did or did not say."
He also praised the way the corpse of the terrorist was handled.
"The administration and the Special Operations Command jointly along with other input made a decision about taking photographs and the DNA [of bin Laden], and they decided they did not want to make a bigger scene over the body and how it was handled, and make a media story out of the disposition of the body," he said. "That was a good call because when you look back on it, it did not become a bigger story simply because of how they handled that."
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