Russia

Russia is presented in Noam Chomsky’s account as more than a former Cold War opponent: it is a state caught in the consequences of the Afghan war and, after September 11, a participant in a coalition whose counterterrorism language could help shield its own violence. The account links the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the militant forces assembled against it, and Russia’s campaign in Chechnya, then places Russia within a larger argument about strategic power, selective condemnation, and the expansion of U.S. military reach.

Afghanistan and the origins of the conflict

Chomsky distinguishes support for resistance to the Soviet invasion from the prior effort to induce that invasion. He recalls Zbigniew Brzezinski’s claim that the United States had set a “trap” for Russia in 1979, and argues that encouraging an invasion was different from aiding Afghans after it began. In the account’s telling, U.S. policy and its allies helped assemble a force of perhaps one hundred thousand or more militants, recruited from outside Afghanistan as well as within it. The men were called “Afghans,” although many, like Osama bin Laden, came from elsewhere.

That force fought a holy war against the Russian occupiers and committed acts of terrorism on Russian territory. In 1989, it prevailed and the Russian forces were driven out. Chomsky treats the victory not as the end of the story but as a turning point: the organization and networks that had been built for one conflict persisted beyond it, while the political alignments around them changed.

From wartime networks to new enemies

Osama bin Laden joined the forces during the 1980s and became involved in financial networks that Chomsky says probably continued to exist. The postwar movement did not confine its violence to Afghanistan. Chomsky connects people drawing on these same groups to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the 1983 suicide bombing that helped prompt the U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon, and later attacks in multiple regions. These examples form part of his account of how a force organized against Russia became a wider transnational network.

The reversal was explicit after the United States established a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden and his associates described that presence as comparable to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and turned their weapons against the United States. Chomsky notes that a similar reversal had already occurred in Lebanon in 1983, when U.S. troops were present there. In this account, Russia is thus both the target of the earlier holy war and the power against which militants had already carried out attacks; the later U.S. confrontation with those networks followed an older pattern of foreign military presence becoming a stated justification for resistance.

Russia after September 11

Following September 11, Russia eagerly joined the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism, hoping to obtain permission to continue its campaign in Chechnya. Chomsky says it was not disappointed. He groups Russia with China and Turkey as governments that used the new international campaign to advance or legitimize harsh policies against internal opponents. The coalition therefore appears not only as a response to attacks, but also as an opportunity for states to recast existing conflicts in the language of counterterrorism and seek external support for them.

Russia’s position is complicated by the Afghan networks themselves. Chomsky observes that the same “Afghans” who had fought Russia were now active in Chechnya, and suggests that they may also have carried out terrorist acts inside Russia. The result is a sharply asymmetric picture: Russia sought the coalition’s backing against militants while some of those militants’ history began in a war in which the United States had helped organize a force against Russian troops. Chomsky uses that history to challenge accounts that isolate current violence from earlier policy choices.

Power, military access, and strategic geography

Russia also figures in Chomsky’s analysis of the geopolitical stakes surrounding Afghanistan. He describes Washington as proceeding cautiously because the world’s major energy reserves lie chiefly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, with significant reserves in Central Asia as well. Afghanistan, he argues, was a relatively minor piece of that larger strategic landscape, though proposed pipelines through the country had long been discussed as a way to support U.S. efforts to influence Central Asian resources. Russia’s involvement in the coalition consequently sits alongside a contest over regional access, energy, and military positioning—not apart from it.

After the war in Afghanistan, the United States established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time, according to Chomsky. He connects those installations to the effort to secure influence over the region’s resources and to a broader network of bases directed toward the Gulf. Before the Afghanistan war, he says, the safest base in that system was Diego Garcia; afterward, the United States’ position had improved and intervention could be made easier. Russia’s entry into the coalition forms part of this altered regional setting, even as the account does not reduce the country’s motives to a single strategic calculation.

Repression and the logic of intervention

Chomsky places Russia’s campaign in Chechnya within a critique of the selective standards applied to state violence. He argues that the United States was trying to build an alliance with states including Russia, China, Indonesia, Egypt, and Algeria, whose governments could welcome an international order that permitted them to carry out their own atrocities. Russia, in particular, could expect U.S. backing in its “murderous” war in Chechnya. The coalition’s political effect, in this reading, was to make counterterrorism a framework through which states could gain room to pursue internal wars, even when those policies were themselves violent.

The same critique extends to the broader use of force. Chomsky recalls that President Bill Clinton had told the United Nations in 1993 that the United States would act multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary, a position later repeated by Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen. The coalition formed after September 11 might soften the rhetoric, he argues, without materially changing policy: its members were expected to support U.S. action rather than shape it, while Washington retained the right to act as it chose. Russia’s coalition role therefore illustrates a wider tension in the account between the declared pursuit of common security and the use of alliances to accommodate powerful states’ own policies.

Chomsky’s comparison of the Afghanistan bombings with NATO’s bombing of Serbia sharpens that point. He suggests, without claiming access to classified documents, that the Afghanistan campaign may have been intended in part to demonstrate U.S. capabilities and warn others against challenging the rules of the U.S.-led order. He says the Serbia bombing had likewise been justified chiefly as a way to ensure NATO’s credibility, as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had explained. In that argument, Russia belongs to a history in which military action is defended through public claims of security or credibility while also serving larger purposes of power and influence.