America's intelligence agencies, the CIA and its rivals in the Pentagon, have a history of creating neologisms to describe our world that cover up more than they reveal. There have been lofty coinages such as "host-nation support," meaning that foreign countries pay for our troops based on their soil; scientific sounding phrases such as "exo-atmospheric kill vehicle," which, in plainer English, describe weapons that have never killed anything but are unimaginably expensive; and military jargon like "low-intensity warfare" that repackages the most brutal strife in the antiseptic language of the global strategist.
The Pentagon says it trains the armed forces of our client regimes in "foreign internal defense," but this often amounts to little more than state terrorism against their own people. Among the most assiduous recent graduates of such American training programs were the armed forces of Indonesia, which over the past two years managed to oust a president, rape or kill a thousand Chinese shopkeepers in Jakarta, and give democracy a truly bad name in East Timor. We were training them up until Sept. 9, 1999, even as they were killing their own unarmed citizens.
New word
Every now and then, however, a new word emerges from the labyrinth of our secret services for which we might be thankful. The American press has recently started to use the term "blowback." Central Intelligence Agency officials coined it for internal use in the wake of decisions by the Carter and Reagan administrations to plunge the agency deep into the civil war in Afghanistan. It wasn't long before the agency was secretly arming every mujahideen volunteer in sight, without considering who they were or what their politics might be -- all in the name of ensuring that the Soviet Union had its own Vietnam-like experience. The US public may believe that the destabilization of the Soviet Union was worth the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, the 2.6 million refugees, and the 10 million land mines left in the ground there-but it does not yet know about all the "blowback" its Afghan adventure has unleashed.
Not so many years later, these Afghan "freedom fighters" began to turn up in unexpected places. They bombed the World Trade Center in New York City, murdered several CIA employees on their way to work in Virginia as well as some American businessmen in Pakistan who just happened to become symbolic targets, and gave support to Osama bin Laden, a prime CIA "asset" back when our national security advisers thought giving guns to religious fundamentalists was a great idea.
In this context, "blowback" came to be shorthand for the unintended consequences of American policies kept secret from the American people. In fact, to CIA officials and an increasing number of American international relations pundits, "blowback" has become a term of art acknowledging that the unconstrained, often illegal, invariably secret acts of the "last remaining superpower" in other people's countries can result in retaliation against innocent American citizens. The dirty tricks agencies are at pains never to draw this connection between what they do and what sometimes happens to the people who ultimately pay their salaries. So we are supposed to believe that the bombings of American embassies in East Africa in 1998, the proliferation of sophisticated weapons around the world, or the crack cocaine epidemic in American cities are simply examples of "terrorism," the work of "unscrupulous arms dealers," "drug lords," "ancient hatreds," "rogue states" -- anything unconnected to America's global policies.
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