Not so many years later, these “freedom fighters” began to turn up in unexpected places. It wasn’t long before the CIA was secretly arming every moujahedeen volunteer in sight, without considering who they were or what their politics might be-all in the name of ensuring that the Soviet Union had its own Vietnam-like experience. The American media recently started to use the term “blowback.” Central Intelligence Agency officials coined it for internal use in the wake of decisions by the Carter and Reagan administrations to plunge the agency deep into the civil war in Afghanistan. There have been lofty coinages like “host-nation support,” meaning foreign countries pay to base our troops on their soil, and military jargon like “low-intensity warfare” that repackages the most brutal strife in antiseptic language.Įvery now and then, however, a useful new word emerges from the labyrinth of our secret services. Our intelligence agencies-the CIA and its rivals in the Pentagon-have a history of creating neologisms to describe our world that cover up more than they reveal.
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