Années 1980

The 1980s occupy a central place in Noam Chomsky’s account of the politics of terrorism: they are at once the era of a declared campaign to eradicate international terrorism and a period in which the United States supported violent operations and recruited, armed, and trained radical Islamist fighters. The decade’s contradictions underpin his wider argument that political language distinguishes allies from enemies as much as it describes violence, and that the interests served by policy can persist beneath changing public explanations.

The announced war and its contradictions

The Reagan administration came to power declaring “international terrorism” the greatest threat to the United States, its allies, and its friends. It described the danger as a cancer or scourge that required an uncompromising war. Chomsky sets that rhetoric against the administration’s record: he argues that the United States itself organized large-scale international terrorist campaigns, leading to a condemnation by the International Court of Justice, and supported other operations that caused extensive destruction. In his account, the anti-terror campaign reached its peak in the mid-1980s, when the United States and its allies were, by his measure, among the most prominent sources of the violence they claimed should be eradicated.

This contrast is not simply between words and deeds. It is also about who gets to define the deed. Chomsky distinguishes the literal meaning of terrorism—calculated violence or the threat of violence for political, religious, or ideological ends—from a propagandistic usage that reserves the label for violence committed by an enemy. Under the latter convention, governments can condemn terrorism while describing comparable actions by themselves or their allies as counterterrorism, coercive diplomacy, or another form of policy. The 1980s, in his analysis, make that asymmetry especially visible.

Afghanistan and the making of an armed network

During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the CIA joined Pakistan’s intelligence services and those of Saudi Arabia, Britain, and other countries in recruiting, training, and arming some of the most extreme Islamist fighters available. The stated purpose was to wage a holy war against the Soviet invaders. Chomsky emphasizes the scale and political character of this assistance: the fighters were favored not because of a general U.S. objection to religious fundamentalism, but because they were considered useful against the Soviet Union.

The policy’s consequences extended beyond the immediate conflict. Once that war ended, fighters described collectively as “Afghans”—although many, including Osama bin Laden, were not Afghan—turned their attention to other places, among them Chechnya and Bosnia. Chomsky says that they received at least tacit U.S. support in those settings and were welcomed by local governments. In Bosnia, many Islamic volunteers received citizenship in recognition of their military service. The network created for one strategic purpose therefore remained relevant after its original target had disappeared.

Chomsky also challenges the later portrayal of the United States as an innocent observer of these developments. Citing John Cooley’s book Unholy Wars, he argues that efforts to cleanse the historical record obscured the earlier recruitment and assistance. His point is not merely that a policy had unintended consequences; it is that the militants’ later prominence cannot be separated from the relationships built during the anti-Soviet campaign.

Allies, enemies, and the shifting labels

The Afghan case belongs to a broader argument about the selection of enemies. Chomsky rejects the idea that the West opposes religious fundamentalism as such. He points to the United States’ support for Saudi Arabia, which he describes as an exceptionally fundamentalist state and a U.S. client from its beginnings, and to the recruitment of radical Islamists during the 1980s. In this account, the decisive test was not religious identity but political submission and service to power.

The same test, he argues, explains the difference between public descriptions of U.S. conduct and its allies’ conduct. In 1980s policy, Islamist fighters could be valued as effective forces against the Soviets, while violence carried out by declared enemies could be named terrorism. Chomsky’s comparison is deliberately structural: the label does not follow a consistent standard of violence and political purpose, but changes with the identity of the actor and the strategic relationship at stake.

He makes the comparison concrete through Kosovo. The Kosovo Liberation Army had been officially condemned by the United States as a terrorist force in 1998 because of attacks on Serbian police and civilians. By the time the United States and Britain decided to attack Serbia in 1999, the same fighters were being described as freedom fighters; after the war, they were again called terrorists, thugs, and criminals as they pursued similar actions in Macedonia. The episode comes later than the 1980s, but it sharpens the decade’s lesson: political alignment can change the name attached to violence without a corresponding change in the conduct being described.

A precedent for later policy

Chomsky presents the 1980s as a precedent for the later “war on terror,” not as a closed chapter. He argues that Reagan-era policy established a pattern in which governments denounced terrorism while backing campaigns that fit the literal definition they invoked against their adversaries. In his reading, the familiar institutional and political aims largely survived, even as circumstances produced tactical adjustments and new language.

That continuity also informs his interpretation of the post-September 11 period. He links the earlier campaign against international terrorism to the Bush administration’s later effort to consolidate U.S. military superiority and expand its global reach. The contrast between declared purpose and strategic practice, already evident in the 1980s, becomes the lens through which he assesses subsequent policy: official labels may present a new war, while established power relations and objectives continue beneath them.