Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

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Nouvel Observateur: “And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?”

Brzezinski: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

Brzezinski, Carter, and their successors in the Reagan administration, including George H. W. Bush, Gates, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Armitage, and Powell—none of whom has come forward to draw attention to this history—all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land mines that followed from their decisions, as well as the “collateral damage” that befell New York City in September 2001 from an organization they helped create during the years of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance.

The CIA supported Osama bin Laden, like so many other extreme fundamentalists among the mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at least 1984 on. In 1986 it built for him the training complex and weapons storage tunnels around the Afghan city of Khost where he trained many of the 35,000 “Arab Afghans.” Bin Laden’s men constituted a sort of Islamic Abraham Lincoln Brigade of young volunteers from around the Muslim world who wanted to fight on the side of the Afghans against the Soviet Union. In August 1998, on President Bill Clinton’s orders, the Khost complex was hit with cruise missiles, in retaliation for bin Laden’s attacks that month on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. For once the CIA knew exactly where the targets were, since it had built them.

Osama bin Laden, the well-connected, rich young Saudi (he was born around 1957), was well positioned to become a close ally with other friends of the CIA: Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, and Lieutenant General Hameed Gul, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which America used to funnel money and weapons to the mujahideen in order to maintain a facade of deniability with the Soviet Union. Since 1982, the ISI also took the lead in recruiting radical Muslims to come to Pakistan, receive training, and fight on the Afghan side.

It was only after the Russians had bombed Afghanistan back to the stone age and suffered a Vietnam-like defeat, and the United States had walked away from the death and destruction the CIA had helped cause, that Osama bin Laden turned against his American supporters. The last straw as far as he was concerned was the way that “infidel” American troops—around 35,000 of them—remained in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War to prop up that decadent, fiercely authoritarian regime. Devoutly Muslim citizens of that kingdom saw the troops’ presence as a humiliation to the country and an affront to their religion. Dissident Saudis began to launch attacks against Americans and against the Saudi regime itself. In June 1996, terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden bombed the Khobar Towers apartments near Dhahran airport, killing nineteen American airmen and wounding scores more.

That same year, the international relations commentator William Pfaff offered the reasonable prediction, “Within 15 years at most, if present American and Saudi Arabian policies are pursued, the Saudi monarchy will be overturned and a radical and anti-American government will take power in Riyadh.”⁶ Such a course of events has occurred elsewhere many times before—in Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Greece, the Philippines, and South Korea, where indigenous peoples fought hard to free themselves from American-backed dictatorships. Yet American foreign policy remained on autopilot, instead of withdrawing from a place where a U.S. presence was only making a dangerous situation worse. Only after the defeat of Iraq in the spring of 2003 did the United States announce that it would withdraw most of its forces from Saudi Arabia. By then, however, the gesture was meaningless. The United States has massive military forces concentrated in nearby Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Republics, and Oman, not to mention its newly acquired bases in such Muslim countries as Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Djibouti, and in territories with large Muslim populations such as Kosovo, Serbia. All of this suggests future blowback against the United States.

The Nature of Political Terrorism

The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as political leaders and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders, whose innocence is, of course, no different from that of the civilians killed by American bombs in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It was probably the most striking instance in the history of international relations of the use of political terrorism to influence events.

Political terrorism is usually defined by its strategic objectives. Its first goal is normally to turn those domestic or international conditions terrorists perceive to be unjust into unstable revolutionary situations. To a wavering population, terrorist acts are intended to demonstrate that the monopoly of force exercised by incumbent authorities can be broken. The essential idea is to disorient that population “by demonstrating through apparently indiscriminate violence that the existing regime cannot protect the people nominally under its authority. The effect on the individual is supposedly not only anxiety, but withdrawal from the relationships making up the established order of society.”⁷

Of course, such a strategy rarely works as intended: it usually has the opposite effect of encouraging people to support any strong reassertion of authority. That was indeed what happened within the United States following the attacks of September 11, but not necessarily throughout the Islamic world, where the terrorists’ objective of displaying America’s vulnerabilities and destabilizing the world of the advanced capitalist nations was all too effective.

A second strategic objective of revolutionary terrorism is to provoke ruling elites into a disastrous overreaction, thereby creating widespread resentment against them. This is a classic strategy, and when it works, the impact can be devastating. As explained by Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerrilla leader whose writings influenced political terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s, if a government can be provoked into a purely military response to terrorism, its overreaction will alienate the masses, causing them to “revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.”⁸ The second Palestinian Intifada of 2000-03 illustrates the dynamic: terrorist attacks elicited powerful and disproportionate Israeli military reactions that led to an escalating cycle of more attacks and more retaliation, completely militarizing relations between the two peoples.

In our globalizing world, the masses alienated by such overreactions may be anything but domestic. The bombing of Afghanistan that the United States launched on October 7, 2001, inflicted great misery on many innocent civilians, a pattern repeated in Iraq, where the death toll of civilians as of August 2003 stood at well over 3,000, a figure that informed observers think may go as high as 10,000 as more evidence is collected.⁹ Altogether, instead of acting to resolve the post 9/11 crisis, the United States exacerbated it with massive military assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq, two ill-advised and unnecessary wars that inflamed passions throughout the Islamic world and repelled huge majorities in every democratic country on earth.

Afghanistan and Iraq

The two wars that the United States launched preemptively were the pet projects of special interest groups that used the attacks of 9/11 as a cover to hijack American foreign policy and implement their private agendas. These interest groups include the military-industrial complex and the professional armed forces, close American supporters of and advisers to the Likud Party in Israel, and neoconservative enthusiasts for the creation of an American empire. This latter group, concentrated in right-wing foundations and think tanks in Washington D.C., is composed of “chicken-hawk” war lovers (that is, soi-disant military strategists with no experience of either the armed forces or war) who seized on the national sense of bewilderment after 9/11 to push the Bush administration into conflicts that were neither relevant to nor successful in destroying al-Qaeda. Instead, the wars accelerated the recruitment of more suicidal terrorists and promoted nuclear proliferation in countries hoping to deter similar preemptive attacks by the United States. Two years after 9/11, America is unquestionably in greater danger of serious terrorist threats than it has ever been before.