Daniel Larison responds to this post from earlier today in which I asserted that "there is no doubt that the mujahideen followed the Red Army back to Moscow after the war. The slaughter at Beslan, the apartment bombings in Moscow--there have been any number of terrorist acts perpetrated on Russian soil by people who fought against the Red Army in Afghanistan." Larison's response:
It may come as some surprise to Goldfarb, but Chechnya belonged to the Soviet Union, Chechens were Soviets and it is more likely that there were ethnically Chechen conscripts in the Red Army fighting on the Soviet side than Chechens fighting alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
Thanks for the geography lesson, Dan. But I was vaguely aware of this fact. I was referring to people who fought in Afghanistan, like say Abu Omar al-Saif, and later took their jihad to Chechnya. Al-Saif, a Saudi, was connected to the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow as well as the slaughter of several hundred children at Beslan (he financed the operation). As I said, there were any number of Arabs who fought against the Red Army in Afghanistan and, in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal, continued their war against Russia--taking the fight all the way to Moscow in this case. It doesn't strike me as particularly "ignorant" to wonder if the Russians might not have been better served by killing the guy in Afghanistan when they had the chance, rather than in Dagestan in 2005--but hey, terrorists don't follow you home, right? I know some of the folks at the American Conservative think that rolling up in the fetal position and playing dead is the best response to international terrorism. I think it'd be just swell if they took the same approach to blogging.