How the War on Terrorism Did Russia a Favor

Russian troops patrol in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in April 2002

Πηγή: Time
By SIMON SHUSTER

Sep. 19 2011

Ten years ago, on Sept. 20, 2001, President George W. Bush announced for the first time that in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 the U.S. was starting a "war on terror," and he asked every nation to help. Four days later, against the advice of many of his generals, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed, creating a bond unlike any the U.S. and Russia had built since World War II. But as with many of the unlikely relationships the U.S. formed after 9/11, the reasoning behind this one was not just solidarity or common cause. Countries around the world realized the practical appeal of a war on terrorism. Over the past ten years, it has become a seemingly permanent call to arms, a kind of incantation used to dodge questions, build alliances and justify the use of force. No one, not even Bush, grasped this as quickly as Putin.

Even before Putin became Russia's President in early 2000, and long before the Twin Towers fell, he had invoked the idea of a war against global terrorism to justify Russia's war in Chechnya. The terrorism aspect, at least, was true. Chechen separatists, who renewed their centuries-old struggle for independence soon after the Soviet Union fell, had resorted to terrorism as early as 1995, when they seized a hospital in the Russian town of Budyonnovsk and held more than 1,500 people hostage. Then in 1999, a series of apartment bombings, also blamed on the Chechens, killed hundreds of people in Moscow and other Russian cities. Putin responded by launching Russia's second full-scale invasion of Chechnya in less than a decade. "He received carte blanche from the citizens of Russia," says Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Russia's Finance Minister at the time. "They simply closed their eyes and let him do whatever he wanted as long as he saved them from this threat."

There was scant evidence, however, that the Chechen rebels were part of some global Islamist terrorist network, as Putin and his government repeatedly claimed. The leader of the separatists at the time was Aslan Maskhadov, a former Red Army colonel who was closer to communism than Islamism, and there was no proof that he received much help from abroad. "Still, all official statements said that we are fighting a war against international terror," says Andrei Illarionov, who served as Putin's senior economic adviser between 2000 and '05. "Of course, nobody outside Russia bought it." In the West, Putin's war in Chechnya thus enjoyed little sympathy. The Chechen conflict was seen as part of a rebellion that Moscow was trying to crush, and the atrocities allegedly committed by both sides earned widespread condemnation.

In late 1999, when Bush was campaigning for the presidency, he vowed to start urging an end to the war. "Even as we support Russian reforms, we cannot support Russian brutality," he said during a speech at the Reagan Library in California. "When the Russian government attacks civilians, leaving orphans and refugees, it can no longer expect aid from international lending institutions." Some days later, Condoleezza Rice, who later became Bush's National Security Adviser after his election, reiterated the need for financial pressure against "what is really a quite brutal campaign against innocent women and children in Chechnya." And in the fall of 2000, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the U.N. that the Chechen war "has greatly damaged Russia's international standing and is isolating Russia from the international community."

But when Bush announced his own war on terrorism, all this rhetoric quickly evaporated. Putin, who had been the first to call Bush with his sympathy after learning of the 9/11 attacks, graciously offered to help with the invasion of Afghanistan. He let the U.S. ship supplies through Russian territory and did not object to the U.S. setting up bases in Central Asia, where the local despots quickly caught on to the opportunity. Uzbek President Islam Karimov, for instance, allowed the U.S. to build a permanent base, perhaps hoping that his new alliance with the war on terrorism would help reduce U.S. scrutiny of alleged human-rights abuses in Uzbekistan. "It all flowed naturally into the picture of a global war on terror," says Kasyanov, who by that time had been promoted to serve as Putin's Prime Minister. "There was no more criticism ... It just ceased to be a thorny issue."

By the summer of 2000, Russia had defeated the Chechen separatists and installed a puppet government led by the Kadyrov family, a Chechen clan loyal to the Kremlin. But claims of wholesale violations of human rights, including torture and extrajudicial killings, continued to surface as the Kadyrovs consolidated power in Chechnya. The need to remind the world that Russia was still fighting the war on terrorism remained, and Putin began to claim ever stronger links between Chechen rebels and the global jihad.

"Exaggeration of these links was one of the goals," Kasyanov recalls. During and after the 2004 terrorists siege of a school in the town of Beslan, where hundreds of hostages died, the Russian government claimed firm links between the Chechen terrorists and Islamist networks such as al-Qaeda. Soon after the siege, Putin said that nine of the hostage-takers were from the "Arab world," a claim that was never substantiated. Asked why he had decided to storm the building instead of trying to resolve the crisis through negotiations, Putin fumed: "I don't tell you to meet Osama bin Laden and invite him to Brussels or the White House for talks."

But the very idea of a war on terrorism had unnerved some officials inside Putin's own government. "Terrorism is a method of waging conflict," says Illarionov, Putin's former adviser. "How can you fight a war against a method? The very idea is nonsense. It's like announcing a war against tanks." In early 2005, Illarionov resigned from his post in the Kremlin, citing the rollback in democracy that followed the Beslan siege. Kasyanov had resigned in early 2004 for similar reasons, going on to join the opposition.

Yet the idea of a global war on terrorism remains one of Putin's key political narratives. It is trotted out to this day after every terrorist attack in the Russian heartland and during most discussions with Western leaders, who see it as a firm bond in their alliances with Moscow. Since Bush left office, President Barack Obama has let the term fade from White House rhetoric, usually preferring to name a specific enemy of the U.S. But the use of the phrase has spread far and wide. During this year's Arab Spring revolts, besieged dictators from Egypt to Libya and Syria have claimed that the revolutionaries trying to overthrow them are in fact foreign terrorists with links to the global jihad. Few Western governments have taken these claims seriously. But 10 years on, Bush's idea of a global war on terrorism is still more often used for propaganda than to prevent more attacks like 9/11. Changing that could take many more years.

COINTELPRO II: Hunting Terrorists by Making Them

Πηγή: CATO
By Julian Sanchez


A new study from the RAND Corporation looks at the threat of homegrown terrorism and concludes that our so-called “lone wolves” look a lot more like “stray dogs”—and stray dogs with more bark than bite, at that:

The 82 cases [i.e., investigations culminating in prosecution for some form of support for jihadist terrorism] since 9/11 involved 32 plots. Few of these 32 got much beyond the discussion stage. Only 10 developed anything resembling an operational plan that identified a specific target, developed the means of attack, and offered a sequence of steps to carry out the planned action. Of these, six were Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stings. Only two individuals actually attempted to build devices on their own. One was arrested while doing so, and the other’s device failed. The rest of the would-be terrorists only talked about bombs. In only two cases did jihadist terrorists actually succeed in killing someone, and both of these cases, which occurred in 2009, involved lone gunmen. [Emphasis added.]

That assessment dovetails with the portrait painted by an important package of feature stories in the latest issue of Mother Jones examining the FBI’s pursuit of the War on Terror, and in particular the way the Bureau has established a vast network of informants. In many recent high profile cases, the FBI or its “assets” appear to have gone beyond trying to detect terror plots to playing a substantial role in manufacturing them. In line with the findings of the the RAND report, Mother Jones’ survey of domestic War on Terror success stories shows that many of the highest-profile ones, including all but one of the supposed subway bomb plots “foiled” by the FBI, had first been orchestrated by FBI assets. While the targets of those operations were clearly boiling over with anger at the United States, it’s not clear how many of them would have translated their rage into violent action absent the government’s prodding.

The author of the Mother Jones article compares the contemporary hunt for “lone wolves” and domestic terror cells to another notorious FBI initiative: COINTELPRO, a series of covert projects, stretching over three decades during the Cold War, that targeted domestic “subversive” groups for infiltration. But the aggressive use of informants and infiltrators is not the only interesting parallel here. COINTELPRO projects like Operation Chaos targeted activist groups, especially anti-war groups, suspected of being controlled by foreign governments, consistently failing to turn up proof of foreign control. But Lyndon Johnson was convinced that the link had to be there—and the failure to uncover it only underscored how insidious and dangerous the adversary must be. Thus, over time, the bar for what counted as foreign “ties” was lowered, the program’s scope expanded to include civil rights and women’s liberation groups, and its methods grew more aggressive. Because the foreign communist control had to be there, failure to detect it was regarded as failure, period.

The attempt to detect “lone wolf” terrorists presents a similar—and perhaps in some ways a still more daunting—problem. The last decade has seen a drastic expansion of government surveillance powers in the name of “connecting the dots” to identify the affiliates of foreign terror groups. This has inevitably involved the monitoring of many innocent people, but that project is, in one way, finite: Investigators begin with a set of known starting points—people, phone numbers, Internet addresses, bank accounts, etc., that are believed to be tied to a group like Al Qaeda, and then begin tracing the links in search of unknown allies. As investigators learn more about the target group through capture, infiltration, or surveillance, they can begin to develop estimates of how many operatives might reasonably remain at large—and in particular, how many of those might have made it into the United States.

But a true lone wolf won’t be located that way since, by definition, he’ll lack the necessary links to known terror groups. And there’s no reliable way to know in advance how many solitary angry individuals might be plotting violence. The effort to preempt lone wolves, then, leads to much broader attempts to detect “suspicious behavior,” leading to the compilation of dossiers on many innocent people. But it’s hard to justify the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of additional spending on a vast national security state since 9/11 without a few scalps. Pressure naturally mounts on informants to come up with the lone wolves the government just knows must be out there—even if some of them need a little push, a little help getting a plan together or a working bomb produced. Call it supply and demand: When billions are available to fight a terrorist enemy, you can be confident we’ll come up with enough scary terrorist enemies to keep the money flowing. Even if we have to make them.