But still, 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 [bold mine-DL]. ~Michael Goldfarb

The Chechens weren’t fighting against the Red Army in Afghanistan.  This is why I tend not to read The Weekly Standard‘s blog very often, because it is just full of nonsense.  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.  Foreign mujahideen fighting with the Afghans were overwhelmingly Arab and Pakistani.  Indeed, until the Chechen wars opened Chechnya to the influence of jihadis, Chechen separatism was principally a case of post-Soviet ethnonationalism and backlash fueled by long-standing resentment against the mass slaughter and relocation of Chechens that Stalin had carried out decades before.  The radical Islamicisation of the Chechen cause, typified by the rise of the bloody terrorist Shamil Basayev (ethnically Chechen, born in Chechnya) as one of the leaders of the Chechens (whose adopted name was meant to invoke Shamil, the major guerrilla leader against Tsarist Russia from the 19th century), has not stopped many of Goldfarb’s confreres and others making excuses for Chechen terrorism.  But to say that the Chechen terrorism of the late 1990s and early 2000s was some kind of blowback for the war in Afghanistan (or even more incredibly that withdrawal from Afghanistan is what invited Chechen terrorism) reflects just staggering ignorance.  There have been individuals, such as Khattab, who had fought in Afghanistan and who also fought with the Chechens, but the terrorist acts Goldfarb refers to were carried out by Chechens.

P.S. Another rather obvious point is that Chechen terrorism is a vicious part of the rebellion against Russian control of Chechnya and a response (not a legitimate one, but a response all the same) to the well-known brutal policies that Moscow has used to repress the rebellion there.  Russian brutality in Chechnya does offer a model for pacifying an insurgency, but it requires tactics that Americans would not and should not contemplate.

Update: Goldfarb also writes in this post:

And there’s no doubt that the shift in Chechnya from nationalist to religious-based opposition to Russian rule was heavily influenced by the success of the jihadists in Afghanistan.

Actually, it was heavily influenced by the influx of Saudi money and Arab volunteers.  You can argue that the radicalisation of the Chechen cause in some sense parallels the response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but you can’t argue that the radicalised native Chechens who committed these atrocities were “people who fought against the Red Army in Afghanistan.”  If anything, Beslan, the hostage-taking at the Moscow theater and the apartment bombings are all evidence of the terrible cost of persisting in a policy of occupation.  Indeed, the Soviet experience after withdrawing from Afghanistan might have provided a model for Russian policy towards Chechnya.  The lesson seems clear: refusal to yield control of territory will result in terrorist acts, while withdrawal has no particularly noticeable after-effects for the state that withdraws that happen because of the withdrawal.

Second Update: Goldfarb responds:

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.

Well, it seemed as if you needed it, Mike.  As I acknowledged, there were some Arabs who had previously fought in Afghanistan and then fought alongside the Chechens.  But that isn’t the same as committing acts of terrorism on Russian soil, which is what Goldfarb said they had done, when on the whole these were the acts carried out by Basayev and ethnic Chechens.  There are individual exceptions to this rule (mostly on the financing end), but the implication of Goldfarb’s original post was that these attacks were the result of withdrawing from Afghanistan (hence the title “they follow you home”), when they are, in fact, a result of continuing to control Chechnya.  Had there been no Chechen war, and no brutal repression of Chechnya, none of those attacks would have happened in any case.  In other words, the mujahideen who had fought in Afghanistan would have had absolutely no interest in striking at targets in Moscow or anywhere else in Russia but for an entirely new, different conflict involving Russia and a Muslim population.  Goldfarb has found a coincidence and thinks he has discovered something significant.  There is no reason to think that Basayev would not have employed terrorist tactics had no mujahideen from the war in Afghanistan ever set foot in Chechnya.  The example Goldfarb cites is simply evidence that jihadis tend to go wherever Muslims are fighting and not that “they follow you home.”       

Finally, I should also add that saying that “the mujahideen followed the Red Army back to Moscow after the war” is a statement that invites derision and misinterpretation, since the vast majority of mujahideen in Afghanistan were Afghans or Pashtuns from the Pakistani side, who stayed right where they were when the war was over, which suggests that the vast majority of insurgents and terrorists in Iraq would either stay in Iraq or return to their home countries.  A handful of die-hard jihadis who bounce from one firefight to the next would move on to the next conflict, and conceivably they might even target Western interests, but you can’t make decisions about a war policy based on what some handful of the most fanatical people will or will not do; given the depth of their fanaticism, they aren’t going to stop fighting and plotting attacks under any circumstances.  U.S. foreign policy cannot be dependent on the what the Al-Saifs and Khattabs of the world might theoretically do ten or fifteen years in the future.  It certainly makes no sense to use their example as part of an argument for prolonging a conflict that we know to have a radicalising effect.  To state the obvious, for every Al-Saif that may be killed through the continuation of a war there are a dozen more ready to take his place because of the ongoing war. 

Had Goldfarb said what he can actually support–that there were a handful of Arab mujahideen who later went to Chechnya–there would have been nothing objectionable in it, but then it also wouldn’t support the notion that “they follow you home.”