Today as we observe the 30th anniversary of the Soviet move into Kabul, it’s useful to think about the concept of ‘blowback’: a term that originally referred to the unwanted consequences of covert action and is now often used to describe the ways in which foreign policy choices of the past come back to haunt us.
The term gained currency after 9/11; those attacks were seen as ‘blowback’ from US support for the Afghan resistance and their foreign Islamic allies during their war against the Soviets. The Iranian revolution against the Shah has been called blowback from the U.S.-assisted overthrow of the Mossadegh government in 1953.
At one level I don’t have a problem with the term. Actions do have consequences, many of them both unforeseen and unwelcome. But the word has been used so foolishly and so broadly that in the words of the book of Job it “darkens counsel”; it confuses rather than explains.
Take the Cold War. In one sense the whole long and miserable Cold War was blowback from our support for Stalin during World War Two. If we hadn’t supported him and propped up his economy during the war, Hitler might well have beaten him.
No aid to Stalin, no Cold War. No aid to the Afghan freedom fighters, no worldwide terror threat today.
Well, maybe. But if we hadn’t aided Stalin against Hitler, we might well have ended up with something worse: Hitler in control of Europe. And if we hadn’t helped the Afghans fight the Soviets, the Cold War might have gone on much longer than it did, with God only knows what consequences for the world.
Just because it generates blowback does not mean that it’s a mistake.
The single most common error people make in thinking about foreign policy is to believe that the road to peace and stability is very simple. If well-intentioned people pursue morally good and practically sound policies with normal skill, the thinking runs, our international problems will wither away and war and injustice will disappear.
The truth is that we are always facing choices like the choices of 1941 and 1979. We are always having to hire Beelzebub to fight Satan. “If Hitler invaded Hell,” said Churchill, “I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil on the floor of the House of Commons.” You do what you can and must sometimes, and deal with the consequences later.
Somtimes it’s even worse. No matter how hard you try, you will never get foreign policy exactly right. You will sometimes be rude and insensitive; at times you will inevitably mistake the important for the trivial and the trivial for the important. Whether your country is democratic or not, your political process will not be a perfect one, and you have to work within its limits.
Nobody has a free hand to make foreign policy. There are old quarrels and unresolved claims with the neighbors. There are clashes of culture and clashes of interest. There is the lingering bitterness of past wars. There are the limits of the public’s patience and understanding. There are the constraints that come from working with allies or within international institutions. There is the fact that neither you nor anybody else really knows what the future holds, so that all your plans may rest on fundamentally mistaken beliefs about the way the world works and some of your beliefs (you just don’t know which) are certainly wrong.
Yet you still have to act, and as you act you have to make tough choices about how to use the limited political, economic and military resources that you have. You have to make choices about what to pay attention to and who to believe, what problems to address and what problems to ignore, what evils to fight and what evils to have over for dinner.
Given all this, blowback has to be accepted for what it is: a normal and inevitable part of life. If you want to win World War Two, you have to do things that may make a Cold War more likely. If you want to win the Cold War, you must make alliances that can come back to haunt you when the Cold War is won. These days we are cooperating with countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Egypt to fight terrorists. We can’t help that; without the help of these countries we would not be able to protect ourselves. Who knows what kind of blowback these alliances will ultimately produce?
People often blame our problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan today on our failure to stay engaged in the region when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. It sounds pretty likely — but are we really sure? On the one hand, Pakistan would likely be a deeply dysfunctional society with a spectacularly corrupt and ineffective political class and a proudly paranoid military no matter what we did or didn’t do. On the other hand, if we had spent less time, say, worrying about stabilizing and denuclearizing Uzbekistan, Ukraine and other ex-Soviet republics after the Cold War and more time and money on Afghanistan, Afghanistan might be stable and quiet today — while one or more of the old Soviet republics might be a nuclear state in the hands of religious extremists. If that universe, we’d all be sagely opining about how foolish it had been to ‘waste’ all those resources in Afghanistan when the real danger was to the north.
The problem with the concept of blowback is that it encourages us to think that somewhere out there are perfect choices and surefire policies — that a blowback-free foreign policy should be the norm rather than the lucky, rare exception. This delusion reduces our already painfully limited ability to think clearly about the world before us and the choices we must make; it also makes us excessively judgmental and self-righteous when a president, any president, does what they all do and gets something wrong.