1 May, 2013
The US’s Narrow-Minded Anti-Terrorism Strategy: Blowback and the Cycle of Violence
The United States and the Central Intelligence Agency have never acknowledged the potential for “blowback,” or negative fallout, from their military and covert actions. The Watergate burglary by the veterans of the Bay of Pigs was an obvious example of blowback. CIA’s support for the anti-Soviet mujahideen in the 1980s proved particularly damaging, because the mujahideen provided weaponry to fuel conflicts in the Balkans and the Sudan and trained the terrorists who would attack us at home, including the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
Former CIA director Robert Gates may believe that support to the mujahideen was the CIA’s “greatest success,” but don’t tell that to U.S. soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan who have had to deal with former mujahideen forces, such as the Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks, for the past decade. The United States inadvertently created, trained, and sustained an infrastructure of terror that exported terror wrapped in the language of religious war.
Read the rest: The US’s Narrow-Minded Anti-Terrorism Strategy: Blowback and the Cycle of Violence.
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