Blowback, Boomerangs, and the Imperial Doom Loop
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Imperial doom loop is a concept for our dark times.
On November 26, Rahmanullah Lakanwal—an Afghan refugee who worked for a CIA death squad in his home country—killed two US National Guard troops who were occupying Washington, DC.1 Fatuously, Trump used these killings to immediately announce that he’ll accelerate fashioning American life into a white nationalist social order (I wish that was hyperbole).
What we have here is a CIA-groomed killer overseas come to the US to kill some more. It’s a self-inflicted wound of US foreign policy if ever there was one, and yet the Trump presidency is using it as an excuse to end immigration as we know it and ethnically cleanse the country through the euphemism of “remigration.”
Conceptually, some would call this blowback, others would call it the imperial boomerang. There’s something to both characterizations, but it’s worth 1) not conflating them and 2) clarifying how they’re different.
And yet, a still more profitable way to make sense of the Lakanwal murders is as what I’ve been calling the imperial doom loop.
Blowback
Blowback is a term of CIA vintage, originally meant to describe unintended consequences from covert action. Chalmers Johnson’s work popularized the idea of blowback in a book at the dawn of the War on Terror, as well as in a journal article that’s just as good as the book.
Once blowback entered common parlance—it’s now the name of a fantastic, wildly successful podcast—it came to mean unintended consequences of violence or state power generally, not just in relation to covert action. The concept is most potent when the costs it highlights negate, undermine, or subvert the value hoped for from the original action.
9/11 was the ideal-typical blowback, and, ironically, it was our militarized response to 9/11 that led to the creation of so-called Zero Units in Afghanistan (paramilitary death squads that the CIA recruited to conduct extrajudicial terrorism and assassinations).
To characterize the Lakanwal shootings as blowback is to understand that the two National Guard troops he shot in DC were casualties of America’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The incident must thus be piled onto the already staggering body count of both the Afghanistan invasion and the War on Terror. Historians will be adding bodies to that pyre for decades, which means it’ll be a long time before we can fully comprehend just how destructive those Bush-era choices really were.
Even though blowback is inherent to militarized violence, those who direct the violence find it hardest to foresee. But once you account for it, only rarely does the original brutality actually appear worthwhile.
Imperial Boomerang
Imperial boomerang has many points of origin—Aimee Cesaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, even to some extent Edmund Burke. But it’s Michel Foucault who often gets credited with the concept. It describes how techniques of repression designed for foreign wars, plunder, and colonial control “boomerang” back in the form of use against a government’s own citizens.
Examples of the boomerang abound. The techniques of counter-insurgency that arose from US colonialism of the Philippines now plague the world, including the US. World War One—an inter-imperialist war—was an event that redirected inward the militaries constructed for pacifying and administering foreign colonies. More recently, the hypermilitarization of American police—and the dramatic rise of far-right militia violence—is often understood as the Global War on Terror coming home.
And of course, decades of US funding for Israeli primacy in the Middle East has made it possible for Israel to corral, surveil, suborn, terrorize, and ultimately dispose of Palestinians. The book The Palestine Laboratory allows us to see how Israel’s US-enabled experiments with surveillance and control targeting Palestinians not only forms the basis of Israel’s military-industrial complex, which Jeffrey Epstein helped export to the global South. The technologies of repression perfected against Palestinians have become stock tools of the US national security state’s surveillance apparatus, which are now being used to repress US civil society. Boom. Er. Ang.
The Lakanwal murders can be thought of as the imperial boomerang insofar as US foreign policy raised him to be a killer; he is the perfected technique of repression come home. Lakanwal was five years old when America invaded Afghanistan. He grew up with no real economic prospects in a country occupied by a foreign military. A victim of both the poverty draft and alien rule, the CIA then recruited Lakanwal into a Zero Unit as a teenager. He reportedly ended up with mental health problems—as one would—from the cruelty his American overseers directed him to inflict on his countrymen.
In essence, Lakanwal became a gun for America, and when he came to America he turned that gun on Americans. Doesn’t get more boomerang than that.
Imperial Doom Loop
Blowback is a crucial concept, but it doesn’t illuminate how or why blowback arises; it’s just a particular kind of depraved negative externality. The boomerang concept too is imperfect, in part because it implies that the self-harm we commit by doing violence abroad would be prevented if we just didn’t do the violence abroad. And that’s true as far as it goes, but that’s like saying we achieve peace by not doing war. It verges on tautology.
How can we prevent our craven, corrupt, oligarchy-intensifying politicians from waging unaccountable wars with the grandest machinery of death the world has ever known? The shoddy judgment of national security policymakers is not a series of isolated incidents but a long-running pattern of bed-shitting; we need a way to account for all the poo that’s accumulated on the Stars and Stripes.
I think imperial doom loop illuminates poo-as-pattern. Its kernel is in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s opposition to the Vietnam War when he said:
The bombs in Vietnam explode at home, they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.
This is not exactly a reference to the imperial boomerang, nor to blowback, though it rhymes with both.
Taken in context, King is talking about the dark form of worldmaking that militarized violence prefigures. That is, violence abroad mutually constitutes violent pathologies at home. The predatory way that we relate to the world reflects not the world as it is, nor some rational choice on our part; rather, it reflects who we are, and what we refuse to confront about ourselves. And by relating to others abroad violently, we reify the worst aspects of our domestic reality, suffocating the possibilities for a decent America.
We’re in a situation now where AI-powered surveillance tech companies—specifically Palantir and Dataminr—are clamoring to put their services to work for the continued genocide of Palestinians. These agents of death-tech are expressions of US militarism abroad, and they have only grown the past two decades because national-security spending is a fix to an ongoing crisis of capital accumulation—a very homegrown origin story. At the same time, these Palantir-type companies profit more than any others off of a dark world where US foreign policy both uses and causes violence.
And yet, these companies now want to promote and profit from the death-dealing in Gaza and elsewhere that in turn generates both more blowback against the US and the Palestine Laboratory-style repressive boomerang.
Trump’s ethnic-cleansing response to the Lakanwal murders in Washington, DC—his narrowing of who gets to pretend that they still live in a democracy—is part of the imperial doom loop. America is trapped in a self-reinforcing negative cycle, each act of harm building on the previous and making the next act even worse. All the while, it makes less and less sense to attempt to think about the foreign and the domestic as separate spheres (as blowback and boomerang do).
There’s a recursive quality to what’s happening that epitomizes what a doom loop is: Our drives to violence, exclusion, and hierarchy at home end up articulating abroad in a violent, exclusionary, and hierarchical foreign policy, which in turn creates conditions that lead to still more acute forms of violence, exclusion, and hierarchy at home.
Tragically, the old, elite American belief that republicanism at home might require imperialism abroad means that this doom loop is baked into the DNA of the United States as an experiment. If there is hope, it’s that the first step to breaking a doom loop is to recognize you’re in one. The second step is to reframe the situation; to rewire the experiment. Who among our politicians can see what’s going on and is willing to rewire the experiment?
Over at The Bang-Bang Podcast, our most-downloaded episode ever was for a film that happened to feature both blowback and the imperial boomerang concepts as key story elements. 1998’s The Siege, starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Annette Benning, and many more, depicted martial law and a military occupation of New York following a series of terrorist attacks that occurred in response to US Middle East policy. Must-watch.
According to the New York Times, Lakanwal was one of 76,000 Afghan refugees who resettled in the US during the Biden administration following the US withdrawal.