Hank
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Poster: Hank @ Fri Aug 19, 2011 7:51 pm
A headline on BBC grabbed my attention yesterday. Ex-Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev commented that Russian Prime Minister (and once and future President) V. Putin was "literally castrating" Russia's democratic system. His glaringly incorrect use of the word "literally" aside, that's some provocative talk.
Everybody has known that Putin is a bloodthirsty KGB thug with autocratic ambitions since the get-go. No revelation there; in fact, the Russian people wanted somebody like that to wipe out those pesky folks up in Chechnya. But the statement was bold and impolitic, maybe dangerous, even for Gorbachev. Of course, the blotchy ex-President is aged 80 this year, and that's about 500 in vodka-swilling Russkie years, so he surely knows that he's not going to see the decade out anyhow -- he has little reason to fear a fate like Alex Litvinenko's or Anna Politkovskaya's.
Haven't heard much about those poor blighters lately, huh? I got to thinking about them. Politkovskaya incessantly railed against Putin's efforts to turn the Russian state into a crime-sodden Mafioso version of the old Soviet regime, and there wasn't a lot of surprise when she turned up murdered on Putin's birthday -- a present, it was said, to Putin from some simpering vicious cur named Kadyrov.
As for Litvinenko, he was prancing quite merrily in London until a smarmy stranger slipped Polonium-210 into his cup of Darjeeling. In a note in English supposedly drafted by his lawyer at his request shortly before his death a couple weeks later, he openly accused Putin of ordering the hit.
Litvenenko was a KGB / FSB fixer and part-time goon-for-hire until he jumped the shark and held a press conference accusing his superiors of ordering the murder of his other boss, the apelike oligarch Boris Berezovsky. After that, he was mostly a professional pot-stirrer, blackmailer, and font of conspiracy theory while temping for the English security agency MI6. The sensational accusations of Litvinenko aimed at his former spook pals seemed inexhaustible, and, like the delightfully fantastic accounts of ex-Soviet Spetsnaz soldier Victor Suvarov, completely impossible to either prove or disprove.
Most of them are merely interesting, accusing the Russian government of orchestrating terror attacks on its own people for political gain, among other things, but there's one in particular that suddenly rang a bell with me when I read it again, years after the original allegation was made. Back then, being of the opinion that the dissolution of the Soviet Union and our own dalliances in the Middle East had thrust us into a chaotic era of distributed, decentralized terrorism, I laughed at it. But today, with our economy being equivalent to a pile of garbage, our global political standing severely damaged, and our defense posture compromised laughably by involvement in -- count 'em -- three wars of choice, it suddenly crystallizes and rings true.
Litinvenko's trenchant words were that "the center of global terrorism is not in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or the Chechen Republic. The terrorism infection creeps away worldwide from the cabinets of the Lubyanka Square and the Kremlin."
The key is the Afghan war. All politics junkies thought that it was plum insane when Bush decided to invade Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Didn't that chuckling little blue-tie boozehound know that the Soviets, who do not back down very often, had just fled in defeated shame after a long war there? And didn't he recall that it was us who had trained and armed the fighters and planners that became the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? They were called "Mujahideen" back then, and we loved them to pieces for willingly fighting a proxy war against our Red enemies for us. Then, once the Soviets had high-tailed it out of there, we said "Okey doke, thanks for killing some Russkies -- see you crazy Arabs later!" and left the Afghans to deal with the war's aftermath all on their lonesome.
The ex-Mujahideen were left with a desolate, befouled country with a population that was desperate, ill-fed, disease-stricken, and uneducated. As always happens in these situations, radical nationalist pricks took the scene over and started behaving in really beastly ways. After winning a nasty civil war, these guys -- now smirkingly calling themselves Taliban, "the students" -- cooked up an especially brutish version of Islamic law that took the worst elements of Wahabism and turned them up to 11. Through threats, propaganda, buy-offs of local warlords, and dumb violence, these whip-crazy clowns lorded it over the people like monstrous school bullies. But as do their greasy Italian peers the Mafia, they provided some public services, so that communities begrudgingly relied on them. The Taliban and the people at large were pretty miffed at the Americans for using them to fight a war and then splitting without helping to put their country back in livable shape.
Here's what I think happened then : After the collapse of the Soviet government and subsequent fragmenting of its territory, the Russian power stucture still had an obvious strategic interest in combating American influence -- a greater interest, in fact, since in the absence of credible opposition, the USA would become a global heregmon. However, the Russians now lacked both the resources and the political will to continue with their long-standing strategy of sapping our abilities using conventional proxy wars initiated by openly Commie revolutionaries (e.g., Korea, Vietnam, all that crazy ish down in Central and South America, etc). Most of the guys who assumed power had history as Soviet apparatchiks, so all the old desires, grudges, and mindsets remained, frustrated, under a different and waaay less-cool banner.
So they called up their former enemies the Afghans and said "Hey guys, sorry about that whole invasion thing. It was all that crazy Brezhnev and weird Gorbachev, we fired them. So you're mad at the Americans, right? They really gave you guys a raw deal, skipping out like that. Now they've invaded your brethren in Iraq. Guess they really like to screw Muslims over." The sweaty, seething Afghans said "You're darn tootin' they gave us a raw deal. We'd sure like to give them a piece of our minds, but we can't even pay for enough bullets to shoot our own adulteresses, much less get back at the Yanks."
The sleek-headed Russians replied "How about this : we'll give you guys some dough, plenty of weapons, and lots of training in covert operations if you promise to use them to really give the Americans hell -- on their own turf."
"Well hot damn!" said the Afghans. "Don't have to ask us twice. Let's get crackin'!"
So it was that the Russians cleverly changed Al-Qaeda from a loosely-organized asymmetrical-warfare unit designed to combat Soviet conventional warfare to a tool using which they could wage a worldwide proxy war on American interests. And -- bonus! -- they could now strike in American territory without fear of triggering a global thermonuclear war.
And strike, they did. In 1993, just two years after the 'fall' of the Soviet Union, the first terrorist attack on American soil since the Second World War was executed -- the World Trade Center bombing. This was followed by the Oklahoma City bombing and attacks against US interests in Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Yemen, all leading up to the era-defining attacks that demolished the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon on 9/11, killing 3000 people.
The 9/11 attacks created a situation that the Soviets could only have dreamed of : the USA miring itself in two enormously expensive, destabilizing, and diplomatically disastrous wars while organically creating a nearly limitless supply of fearless new jihadists, all at very little cost to the Russians and with practically zero political traceability to the Kremlin.
We slogged hard and unprepared through the Afghan war, being confounded by warlords and picked off by desert snipers just as the Soviets had less than a generation earlier. We bombed the living daylights out of where we figured the terrorists to be. More terrorist attacks, attempted attacks, and new small wars occurred, as the US government passed laws that greatly increased state power over individuals and caused discontent and division on the home front. The harder we tried to fight back against our attackers, the more Muslim civilians we killed, and the more vengeful resentment was incubated in the global Muslim population.
Meanwhile, completely uncontrolled war spending combined with essentially unconcealed corporate dictation of government policy combined to put the USA in the worst economic and social condition it had been in since the Great Depression.
So in less than 20 years, Russia had gone from being completely incapable of bugging its old enemy to having a more or less unstoppable way to constantly harrass, demoralize, upset, and drain the US. And after a break-in period, it was self-sustaining, requiring practically no maintenance since we handled the whole "fueling people's desire to be undeterrable suicide terrorists" thing.
Unlike Russian troops or even your garden-variety nationalist insurgents, jihadis would actually rather die than not die, which makes it impossible to convince them to sit down and be quiet. They need practically no expensive equipment; they can make bombs out of just about anything. They target civilians with impunity and can cause hundreds of deaths with each of theirs. Meanwhile, our political apparatus is distracted and inattentive as the Russian leadership solidifies its plan to burst out of its flimsy republican cocoon and spread its wings as a cackling drunken butterfly of Mafia-infused statism, free of any ideology but a raw lust for power.
The only thing left for us to do is to keep an eye on Russia, even as their autonomous jihadi robots spread ever further to do their bloody work. China is already in the business of securing a strategic advantage against the US by economic and colonial means; Russia aims to bleed us until our resources and will are stretched so thin that we have none left to resist their reassumption of parity. Then they can partner with any of the other numerous governments we've pissed off lately to further erode our interests and capacity. Putin, in a Freudian slip, has accused the Russian Mafia of involvement with Al-Qaeda. The kicker, of course, is that the mafia is indistinguishable from the government.
Of course, it could be that Litvinenko is wrong and that Russia is trying to go on the straight and narrow while dealing with its homegrown terrorist problem. If there's one thing the past decade has taught us, though, it's that the worst outcome is the most likely, and the most shocking possibility is usually true. And when the hideous nesting doll of modern terrorism is finally disassembled, I think we'll see a tiny, grinning, fundamental Putin.
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