August 5, 2012 Best of TomDispatch: Chalmers Johnson, The CIA and a Blowback World
Everyone has their hits and faves from the past like the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time (with Citizen Kane
at #1). TomDispatch is no exception. While the AFI has 100 years of
film to work with, we have a more modest 10 years of “Tomgrams,” but
that doesn’t stop us. Each summer as the heat builds and vacation time
arrives, we offer a few TD “classics”
of our own. Think of many of them as part of a series with a rubric
like: the top 10 nightmares of our truncated “American Century.”
Without any question, among them, the late, great Chalmers Johnson’s 2004 account of how we fought our first Afghan war and so created a world ripe for our second Afghan War (still ongoing) ranks high. After all, seldom has anyone answered better than Johnson did seven and a half years ago questions like: Why, for 20 of the last 32 years, have we ended up fighting wars in a country to which few Americans had previously paid the slightest attention? How could we have armed and supported a whole crew of Islamic fundamentalists in the first of those wars who would be our enemies in the second? How did we end up with hijacked planes taking down towers on American soil in 2001? How, in response, did we launch a “global war on terror” that shows no sign of ending? And here’s the saddest part of the story, if you even care to think about it (and these days few Americans do): we’re not done yet. The Afghan War goes on and on. Yes, the security forces we’re building up in that country are regularly deserting or blowing away our trainers and advisers; our reconstruction projects are, as they’ve long been, as they were in Iraq, a joke; the U.S. military has proven incapable of suppressing the minority insurgency it faces; and the corruption our money has engendered is staggering in an otherwise still poverty-stricken land. And yet our leaders are planning to leave U.S. trainers, advisors, and bases in Afghanistan until at least 2020. We’re living amid the detritus of a world changed radically by Washington’s Afghan decisions of the 1980s, and who knows whom exactly we’re arming at staggering cost (or blowing away) these days, laying the groundwork for yet more nightmares. Too bad no one listened to Johnson, who would have been 81 on August 6th, when he first put the word “blowback,” originally a term of CIA tradecraft, into our vocabularies with his trademark bestselling book of the same name. If he were alive today, he would be grimly amused by a nation that preferred the possible road to bankruptcy and disaster to calling it quits and licking its wounds. He, like Gore Vidal, was a crucial analyst of of American imperial decline and he’s sorely missed. But today, briefly, he’s back with us, offering a history that, sadly, is as relevant now as it was in 2004. Tom Abolish the CIA! By Chalmers Johnson |
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