DOES ANYONE REALLY THINK THE AFGHAN WAR KILLED FEWER KIDS?:

The Irrationality of Terror (Anne Applebaum, September 8, 2004, Washington Post)

Funerals for 334 people, half of them children. Hundreds more -- we may never know how many -- in hospitals or "missing," presumed dead. A town ravaged, a school destroyed, photographs of bloody children, wailing mothers. This is what the Chechen terrorists who attacked and destroyed a school in Beslan, southern Russia, achieved with their guns and bombs last week.

But did they "achieve" anything else? One of the hardest things to understand about tragedies such as the one in Beslan is the motivation of the murderers. At the moment little is known about their identities, except that they seem to have been led by local Chechens and Ingush. Officials claim some were Arabs, although former hostages have not yet confirmed that. Little is known about their stated aims, which allegedly included independence for the Russian republic of Chechnya, withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, and an end to the nearly 10 years of brutal Russian-Chechen conflict in Chechnya. The only certainty is that they will achieve none of them.

On the contrary: Far from helping the Chechens resist Russian invasion, they have deeply damaged that resistance. [...]

There are other examples of terrorist groups whose methods have had the opposite effect from what their leaders say they intend, the most obvious being the case of the Palestinians. Decades' worth of PLO terrorist attacks on crippled tourists and Olympic athletes achieved far less for the Palestinian people than television pictures of Palestinian children protesting in the streets. Even more was achieved, or almost achieved, when the Palestinians briefly ceased to use terrorism in the 1990s. By contrast, the resumption of Palestinian terrorism, and particularly the suicide bombing campaign, has led to a profound change of heart, a hardening of positions and, as in Russia, a much larger population of Israelis who assume that all Palestinians, whatever their views or background or grievances, are would-be terrorists.

But there are also examples of nations that have managed to repel invasions, or at least oppose them, while maintaining a degree of sympathy in the outside world, and even among the population against which they are fighting. Think of the Afghan rebels who fought the Soviet Union in the 1980s but didn't turn to terrorism.

Why don't we give the Chechens the same level of assistance we did the Afghans to fight the Russians. Then they wouldn't have to engage in quite such asymmetrical warfare.

MORE:
Our Friends the Russians: We may need an alliance with Moscow. But we should enter it with our eyes open. (CLAUDIA ROSETT, October 11, 2001, Wall Street Journal)

Terrorism looms as the urgent problem of our time, and I would not for a moment argue with President Bush's focus on it. We are of necessity deep into an awful drama in which there are definite villains, some clear lines between good and evil, and an obvious need to act.

But swirling around that central clarity are a host of complex issues, especially when it comes to making common cause against terrorism with nations less sterling than, say, Britain. In both China and Russia, to name two of the big ones, the fight against terrorism is entwined with long lists of other aims that range from stupid to terrifying and that would in no way bring us closer to a better, safer world. And while we must not let these matters paralyze us, they do bear noting.

History's big warning on this score is of course World War II, when Stalin's Soviet Union, after entering into an alliance with Hitler that included the joint invasion of Poland, played a crucial part in defeating the Nazis, only to confront us with the Cold War. Maybe that was unavoidable, and maybe to some it has begun to seem less ghastly now that it's over. But it ended only after more than 40 years in which Soviet expansionism and teachings warped the development of half the world, threatened the rest and left us today still trying to cope with the fallout. To take the detail nearest to hand, it was Soviet occupation that turned Afghanistan from what was in the mid-1970s at least a functional Third World country into a blasted hell from which, ultimately, Osama bin Laden could work his schemes.

In 1989, defeated and demoralized, the Soviet troops retreated, leaving their hand-picked dictator, Najibullah, to hold the fort. In 1992, the Afghan mujahideen finally toppled Najibullah and some turned to fighting each other over the spoils. Around that time I made a reporting trip to the capital, Kabul. The war, fought mainly in the provinces, had killed some two million Afghans since the 1979 Soviet invasion and had at that stage evolved into a battle in the capital. Today many of those groups are heading back towards Kabul as the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

Kabul was a zone of fear, gunfire and rocket attacks. I remember during a blackout one evening reading by candlelight a guidebook that seemed grounded in an entirely different universe. Published a few years before the Soviet invasion, the book was "An Historical Guide to Afghanistan" by Nancy Hatch Dupree. It described Kabul of the early 1970s as "a fast-growing city where tall modern buildings nuzzle against bustling bazaars and wide avenues fill with brilliant flowing turbans, . . . mini-skirted schoolgirls, a multitude of handsome faces and streams of whizzing traffic."

Such were the changes wrought by Soviet brutality that when I asked a group of young Afghan fighters what they would like to do in peacetime, their answer was that they knew nothing but war. They would do, said one young man, "whatever our commanders tell us to do."

All right, the Soviet Union is now 10 years down the memory hole. Why re-hash yesterday's horrors?

Well, perhaps because a similar wreck is still under way in part of post-Soviet Russia, the same modern Russia in which President Vladimir Putin has now announced himself our friend in the war against terrorism. I am speaking of Chechnya, the secessionist republic in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 9, 2004 2:17 PM