Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova take a look at Russia's war on terrorism, pegged to the suicide bombing of Moscow’s Domodedovo airport last week. Dick Cheney famously foreshadowed the Bush administration's use of torture and warrantless surveillance with his remark that the U.S. would have to go to "the dark side" to fight al-Qaeda. Matthews and Nemtsova write that as president, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was all but given democratic consent to go the full Darth Vader. The result is a nation trapped in an escalating cycle of violence with homegrown terrorists. They write that "government moves against suspected terrorists sometimes justified and sometimes not, have only provoked lethal retaliation. There were 29 suicide attacks in Russia over the past 12 months; 108 Russians were killed by terrorists, compared with only nine Israelis in the same period."
But there's one thing that Russia's national-security state has excelled at:
Putin has built a police state that's good at cracking down on dissent but bad at delivering security. Although last week he once again promised “the inevitable retaliation” against the Domodedovo perpetrators, a decade of failure has shown how useless violence has been against the terrorists. Domodedovo represents two of post-Soviet Russia’s proudest achievements: the country’s unprecedented prosperity and its people’s newfound freedom to travel. But last week the airport also reflected one of present-day Russia’s worst failures. Moscow’s colonial war in Chechnya has degenerated into a cycle of deadly paybacks, in which desperate terrorists seek to show Moscow what it’s like to live in a killing ground and government forces keep trying to raise the stakes in the Caucasus. No one seems able to escape the treadmill. Which means that unless the Kremlin addresses the brutality of its own local security forces and the corruption of the state’s employees, Russians can count on a long and painful future of Domodedovo-style bombings.
Russia offers an experiment in a country giving itself over fully to the most heavy-handed of responses to terrorism. Putin was given the freedom to achieve security by any means -- and Russians have ended up with a state that is less secure and less free. There are strategic reasons for adhering to the rule of law, beyond actually preserving the kind of society that terrorists seek to destroy. Even when liberals make that case, though, as Obama did during the 2008 election, we've fallen short at actually following through on those ideals. The U.S. is not Russia, but in Russia's example, we might learn a few things about the limits of unrestrained force alone in defeating terrorism.
