The conventional wisdom of Imperial powers since World War Two has been rather than fighting real or imagined enemies face to face, it is better to fund those within the target country to do your will, or at least annoy the government you don't like.
Now the government in place may be not to your liking, or funded by those you term to be enemies on ideological grounds. Therefore you seek out groups that oppose said regime within the target country. Rather than battling on an ideological front by proving your idea correct you take a more direct approach, topple the government that earned your displeasure.
The funny thing is the people you fund present their case via the muzzle of a gun and a strategically placed bomb, or perhaps they just strap one to their chest and go for martyrdom.
The crazy thing is once you have obtained your wish and the government of which you so righteously disapproved has been toppled, you now expect the new regime to be reasonable and to love you with every bit of their teensy weeny hearts.
You Twits!
The world is littered with the wreckage of such idiotic thinking, the finance we need to recover from right wing financial misadventures has been frittered away in meaningless wars of our own manufacture.
Rather than keeping us safe in our beds our covert operations have created more resentment than ever before. Our belief that people capable of bloody revolution will turn around and cuddle our children is mindbogglingly misplaced. We are naively surprised when they turn around and savage the hand that fed them, and yet still we end up bogged down on a foreign battlefield creating more resentment for the future.
Yet we repeat this cycle of lunacy at every opportunity, lets send an exploding cigar to the leader we despise, lets fund a group of fundamentalist bandits to overthrow our enemies puppet government.
You know the thanks we will get?
9-11 or 7-7 ring any bells?
So then we have to suppress our own freedoms for fucking about in a world we fail miserably to understand.
Hell what harm have our black operations ever caused, why would anyone resent such blatant interference? I mean why would they ever consider turning against us, we are the good ones!
I'm afraid pragmatism and hubris make unwilling bedfellows and the blow-back can have high costs, whilst hegemony quite frankly does not work.
An interesting article that sparked this little rant,
The attacks of 9/11 and 7/7 have made Britain revise but not end its secret affair with radical Islam. In the occupation of southern Iraq, Britain's weak position led to conniving with Shia militias. Liberal, secular forces were bypassed after the invasion, and when Britain withdrew its combat forces it in effect handed responsibility for "security" to these militias. The irony is that Britain's favoured collaborator, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, has long been Iran's favoured vehicle for its policy in Iraq. Britain also continues its deep alliance with a Pakistan that is the main protector of the Taliban, and does little to press Islamabad to end its support for the jihad in Kashmir. Thus, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Whitehall has been in the bizarre situation of being allied to its enemy.
We have been no less naive, just remember how our involvement in Vietnam started, as for the Middle East; how about we start at the nub of the problem that we always refuse to face equitably?
Until we realize we cannot have our cake and eat it too, there will be many who resent our hogging of the plate.
So remember:
A history of funding another mans terrorists has consequences, and can lead to decades of scrabbling around in blood soaked sand.