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Blowback is the term that the CIA uses to describe a situation when a some operative, a terrorist, or some situation that they\'ve created gets out of their control and comes back to haunt them. It\'s a situation where the scientist (Frankenstein) creates a monster that \"blows back\" on its creator.
Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden are all pretty good examples of blowback. They were all nurtured for many years by the CIA, the US military or military intelligence.
During the Reagan years, the CIA ran nearly two dozen covert operations against various governments. Of these, Afghanistan was by far the biggest; it was, in fact, the biggest CIA operation of all time, both in terms of dollars spent (US$5 to US$6 billion) and personnel involved.
As for the CIA, its aim was simply to humiliate the Soviets by arming anyone who would fight against them. The agency funneled cash and weapons to over a dozen guerrilla groups, many of whom had been staging raids from Pakistan years before the Soviet invasion. For many years, long after the Soviets left Afghanistan, most of these groups were still fighting each other for control of the country.
From 1986 to 1989, the CIA distributed more than a thousand of these surface-to-air missiles to the Afghan mujihadeen, who used some of them to bring down 270 Soviet aircraft. The U.S. is still looking for the Stinger missiles, fearing they may be in the hands of Islamic extremists, like Osama bin Laden, or hostile foreign governments.
In a covert buy-back scheme, funded by the U.S. Congress, the CIA has offered up to $US175,000 apiece, five times their original cost, to get the missiles back. The scheme initially provoked a flood of responses from Afghan warlords and shady Pakistani middlemen. Hundreds of Stingers are believed to be still unaccounted for.
The CIA succeeded in creating chaos, but never developed a plan for ending it. When the ten-year war was over, a million people were dead, and Afghan heroin had captured 60% of the U.S. market. CIA-supported mujahedeen engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society. The CIA\'s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a major heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. They provided up to half of the heroin used annually in the U.S. and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation. In 1993, an official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.
Not so many years later, the \"freedom fighters\", the CIA had supported, began to turn up in unexpected places. They bombed the World Trade Center in New York City, murdered several CIA employees in Virginia and some American businessmen in Pakistan and gave support to Osama bin Laden, a prime CIA \"asset\" back when our national security advisors had no qualms about giving guns to religious fundamentalists.
This was when Americaīs WAR ON TERROR started. Within two or three weeks Afghanistan was contolled by the US and itīs natural resources could be used.
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