Socialist Action /October 2001
'Operation Blowback' for U.S. Policy
By PAUL SIEGEL
The U.S. government is accusing Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born millionaire
living in Afghanistan, of being the mastermind of the attack on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, and is preparing to attack Afghanistan. When
it does, it will be striking against its own creations, who have turned
against it.
Bin Laden's organization, relates Michael Moran of NBC on its website,
"was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, ... the CIA's
primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation"
of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
His forces, fanatically religious Muslims from all over the Middle East,
Moran continues, were trusted by the CIA more than the faction-ridden Afghans
who constituted the vast majority of the fighters. The Bin Laden forces
were therefore provided with "a fortune in covert funding and top-level
combat weaponry ... and most importantly, the knowledge of how to run a
war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower."
The support of the Bin Laden forces became what in CIA parlance is called
a "blowback," an operation that backfires. Such backfiring occurs
not infrequently in the unstable world of capitalism.
One instance of "blowback" was Noriega, a paid agent of the
CIA, who was later deposed as ruler of Panama by the U.S. military. Another
instance was Saddam Hussein, who was a client of the U.S. government and
supported by it in his war against Iran until he decided to invade Kuwait.
"Blowbacks" are not confined to U.S. actions. Israel, according
to The New York Times (Sept. 13, 2001, p. A18), "seeking a counterweight
to Mr. Arafat, assisted a fledgling group called the Islamic Resistance
Movement in the 1980s. The group is known better now by its Arabic shorthand,
Hamas." Hamas, of course, is the now militant organization which claims
responsibility for suicide bombings.
A military operation against Afghanistan could readily become a large-scale
"blowback," powerful as the U.S. government is and poor as Afghanistan
is. Afghanistan, a highly inaccessible mountainous country with fiercely
independent people, is not an easy victim, as the Soviet Union and previous
would-be conquerors learned.
The U.S. is threatening Pakistan, demanding bases for an attack on Afghanistan
and other forms of aid. However, if the Pakistani government accedes, it
may face an internal rebellion. As The New York Times, which is supporting
the drive to war but is wary of its consequences, stated on Sept. 15, "Any
American victories in Afghanistan would quickly turn into a catastrophic
defeat if the war there turned Pakistan, with its 142 million people and
nuclear weapons, into an Islamic fundamentalist state."
The perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
have, however, already suffered their own "blowback." The cause
for which they gave up their lives was grievously hurt by their act, which
was not only inhumane in its killing of thousands of innocent people but
counter-productive.
Presumably, they thought they were acting in behalf of the half-million
children who have died in Iraq as a result of U.S.-enforced sanctions, of
the Palestinians living in Middle Eastern refugee camps and suffering under
a brutal occupation enforced by U.S. arms, and of the miserable impoverished
masses of the Middle East and Asia groaning under corrupt regimes supported
by the United States.
Resentment against imperialist domination took the form of religious
objection to American troops near the holy sites in Saudi Arabia.
But Islamic fundamentalism cannot solve the problems of the masses influenced
by it. These can only be solved by a revival of an international socialist
movement that will give hope to the oppressed and the exploited everywhere
and inspire them to struggle in their own behalf, not rely on some self-appointed
martyrs whose actions repel potential allies.
Such a socialist revival is foreshadowed by the great demonstrations
in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Quebec, and Genoa that have been held against
the giant transnational corporations and the international agencies dominated
by the governments of the leading capitalist powers. In the meantime, those
opposed to a world that is a breeding-ground for hatred and intolerance
must organize to fight against a war that will bring destruction abroad
and repression at home.
Socialist Action /October 2001 |