Jon Taplin’s Blog

The first time I ever heard the term “Blowback” was in Chalmers Johnson’s book of the same title, about the consequences of U.S. financing of the Mujahideen in the Afghan war to drive out the Soviets. Although the movie of Charley Wilson’s War (not George Crile’s book) makes this part of our recent history seem like a romp, the consequences of the CIA & the Saudi government funnelling millions to Osama Bin Laden and his cronies to do our dirty work had obvious tragic consequences. As Johnson says in the introduction,

The evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War, the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation. The world is not a safer place as a result.

“Blowback,” a term coined by the CIA to denote the unintended consequences of policies that were in many cases kept secret from the American public, is the focus of a very good piece in the New York Times this morning on Pakistan’s intelligence agency known as the ISI. This time the problem comes from the fact that we also used the ISI as one of the conduits to the Mujahideen and once we stopped financing the Muj directly in 1989, the ISI continued to feed money to the Jihadis, using them to harass India in Kashmir. Even after 9/11 their funding of the militants continued.

Former American intelligence officials have argued that Mr. Musharraf and the ISI never fully jettisoned their militant protégés, and instead carried on a “double-game.” They say Mr. Musharraf cooperated with American intelligence agencies to track down foreign Qaeda members while holding Taliban commanders and Kashmiri militants in reserve.

In order to undercut major opposition parties, he wooed religious conservatives, according to analysts. And instead of carrying out a crackdown, Mr. Musharraf took half-measures.

Now the chickens have come home to roost. The ISI has lost control of their proxies, who probably killed Bhutto.

“We could not control them,” said one former senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We indoctrinated them and told them, ‘You will go to heaven.’ You cannot turn it around so suddenly.”

At the same time that this depressing news from Pakistan spoils our breakfast, we are also greeted by the Iraqi Defense Minister’s appraisal that American troops will be needed in Iraq until 2018 or 2020. At the same time the Pentagon has announced the formation of Africom, the new unified command for future U.S. Military incursions into Africa. Why is this all happening? Its all about oil. We plan to get 25% of our oil imports from Africa in the next ten years and so the sad history of blowback will repeat itself.  As Alan Greenspan recently noted, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”  But oil is just a fungible commodity represented by the digital marks on the computer screens of oil traders around the globe. The Chinese and Japanese, who have no investment in the Iraq Occupation that will cost America $2 trillion, buy that oil from those same traders at the same price Exxon Mobil pays. The notion that we need to hold territory to get access to oil, seems a peculiar throwback to Imperialism, in a digital age of free market oil trading.

Since 1917, when President Wilson vowed to “make the world safe for democracy”, American presidents have been engaged in a messianic foreign policy.  As Henry Kissinger once observed, “It is to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism that American foreign policy has marched since his watershed presidency, and continues to march to this day.” Although contemporary politicians have used the shattering events of September 2001 to explain that everything has changed, their neoconservative mentors know the real story. “America did not change on September 11,” Robert Kagan wrote. “It only became more itself.” He went on to note that “over the last six decades, it is an objective fact that Americans have been expanding their power and influence in ever widening arcs.” Though historians could reach back to the British retreat from Kabul in 1882 to point to the perils of such expansive empires, the past seems to be lost to our country’s leaders. The effective result of this was a permanent militarization of American policy in a way that now puts us in peril economically and culturally.

In a Presidential Election year, we have to confront this reality.If 79% of the population say we are on “the wrong track”, part of that is because we continue to think of our power in military terms, rather than economic and cultural terms. Over the next few weeks I am going to try to lay out an alternative path. Hopefully the dialogue with you my readers will be fruitful.