Our Friends the Russians

Our Friends the Russians
We may need an alliance with Moscow. But we should enter it with our eyes open.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, October 11, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

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. The original problem predates not only Osama bin Laden but the Soviet Union itself. Conquered by the czars in the 19th century, the ethnically distinct and fiercely independent-minded Chechens, most of whom are Muslims, probably never should have been forced under Russian rule in the first place.

Compounding the trouble is a piece of history that almost every Chechen tends to recite if you ask about anything more substantial than the weather. During World War II, the Chechens tried to turn the Nazi advance into an opportunity to free themselves from the brutalities of Soviet rule. Stalin responded by deporting the entire Chechen population by rail to Central Asia. During the 1950s and 1960s, they made their way back to Chechnya, only to find many of their homes occupied by ethnic Russians. And in the course of these events, about one-third of the Chechen population died.

With the crackup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechens tried to break away. In 1994 President Boris Yeltsin responded, first with grossly unsuccessful covert operations, then with a brutal war that has flared off and on ever since, now under the administration of Mr. Putin.

As that war broke out, in late 1994, I twice visited Chechnya, where it was clear that people were prepared to die for what was not a terrorist or even a religious cause but a nationalist one. For substantial reasons, they had no faith in Moscow. Nothing has happened since then to reassure them. Moscow has bombed the Chechen capital of Grozny into rubble and killed tens of thousands of Chechens, mostly civilians. While Mr. Putin now speaks of sending humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Chechen refugees are living in southern Russia itself in desperate, wretched conditions--and still the fighting goes on.

In keeping with the boldface threat of our day, Mr. Putin is depicting Chechnya as a hotbed of terrorism. Given the lawless misery of the place, that has now become more likely, though the Russian government has produced no credible public evidence, and most Chechens themselves have no sympathy for foreign forms of Islam. But Russian rule, in all its assorted ugly manifestations right up to the present, has produced a situation there that will be hideously difficult to solve.

I cannot claim to have an answer--apart from the far-off hope that Russia will eventually better focus its energies on evolving into a nation to which it is more rewarding to belong.

For now, however, it may be of some use in other parts of the world to note that whether it is Soviet or Russian rule that we are talking about, the effects are still not healthy. We should by all means accept Moscow's help and cooperation, but we should weigh very carefully the price of allowing Russia any say in how we actually confront terrorist threats or try to mend the agony of fractured societies for which Russia itself did much to prepare the ground.

Likewise for China, where Mr. Bush is scheduled to visit nine days from now, for a summit in Shanghai of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. China and the U.S. are expected to express solidarity in opposing terrorism--which is all to the good. But it is important that we do not for a moment forget that China is home to a tyranny that may yet spill over to inflict other brands of horror upon the world. The Muslim separatists in western China have not so far spawned terrorists intent on troubling our own shores. But this is a country that along with visiting vast brutalities upon its own people has recently played hostage politics with some of our scholars and that keeps missiles targeted on democratic Taiwan. China is now presumed, thanks in part to theft of U.S. technology, to have the ability to target Los Angeles, and has just been home to unseemly celebrations over the devastation in New York.

How to deal with such stuff entails big questions, for which there may be no instant clear answers. But as we go forward with this war on terrorism and the shaping of a new world order, it is important that we at least keep asking.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."