Chechnya

Chechnya is a recurring geopolitical reference point in Noam Chomsky’s account of the Afghan war’s aftermath and the politics of the post-September 11 “war on terror.” It appears first as a destination for fighters who had been organized for the war against the Soviet Union, then as a case through which Russia sought international room to continue its campaign there. The contrast makes Chechnya more than a regional aside: it exposes how the same counterterrorism language can frame both a coalition’s policy and a government’s pursuit of its own war.

From the Afghan War to a Wider Field of Conflict

After the war in Afghanistan ended, Chomsky says, fighters commonly called “Afghans”—many of whom, including Osama bin Laden, were not Afghan—turned their attention elsewhere. Chechnya was among the places where they fought, alongside Bosnia. Chomsky argues that the United States at least tacitly supported them in these new theatres, and notes that regional governments welcomed them. In Bosnia, many Islamic volunteers received citizenship in recognition of their military actions. The movement of fighters thus outlasted the conflict for which they had originally been recruited and armed; Chechnya became part of a larger, dispersed field of struggle rather than a closed episode in Afghan history.

That itinerary was not limited to the Balkans and the Caucasus. Chomsky also identifies western China, the southern Philippines, North Africa, and other places as destinations where Islamists fought for causes they understood as their own. He describes them as confronting governments and, in some cases, turning against states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. This range matters to his account of Chechnya: the fighters’ engagement there belongs to a pattern of transnational mobilization whose participants and alliances shifted after the Soviet-Afghan war, rather than to a single, centrally directed campaign.

Chechnya in Osama bin Laden’s Stated Aims

Chomsky cautions against treating Osama bin Laden’s possible role in the September 11 attacks as settled. Citing Robert Fisk’s interviews, he describes bin Laden as sharing anger over the United States’ military presence in Saudi Arabia, its support for actions against Palestinians, and its role in the destruction of Iraqi civil society. Chomsky also reports doubts among people familiar with the subject that bin Laden could have planned an operation of extraordinary sophistication from a cave in Afghanistan. His network, he says, was decentralized and weakly hierarchical, with limited communication; bin Laden may have been telling the truth when he said he knew nothing about that particular operation.

Those qualifications do not, in Chomsky’s account, make bin Laden’s political aims obscure. In widely circulated recordings and interviews, bin Laden presented his network as supporting Muslims resisting “infidels” in multiple places, including Chechnya, Bosnia, Kashmir, western China, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. Chomsky describes the first target as Saudi Arabia and other repressive, corrupt Middle Eastern governments that bin Laden regarded as insufficiently Islamic, while also identifying the United States as a target because of its support for such regimes. The Afghan war supplied a precedent in this rhetoric: the fighters had driven the Russians out of Afghanistan, and bin Laden was especially determined to drive the Americans out of Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest sites. Chechnya appears within this declared, geographically broad cause, not as an isolated dispute.

Russia and the Post-September 11 Coalition

After the September 11 attacks, Chomsky argues, governments around the world used the crisis to introduce or intensify repressive policies. Russia joined the “coalition against terrorism” in the hope of gaining permission to continue its atrocities in Chechnya; Chomsky says it was not disappointed. The point is not simply that Russia entered an international coalition, but that the new counterterrorism framework could be used to recast an existing campaign and obtain greater latitude for it.

Chechnya therefore sits at the intersection of two forms of transnational politics in Chomsky’s account. In the earlier pattern, volunteers who had fought in Afghanistan moved into new conflicts, including Chechnya. In the later one, Russia invoked the international response to September 11 in pursuit of its own aims there. The location’s recurrence reveals how a conflict can be folded into competing narratives: resistance to Russian power for some fighters, and a campaign presented under the broad banner of counterterrorism for the Russian government.

State Power and the Selective Use of Counterterrorism

Chomsky places Russia’s conduct within a wider argument about how governments exploit a crisis to enlarge their power. He says China also joined the counterterrorism coalition, for similar reasons, while Turkey offered troops for the new phase of the U.S. campaign and its prime minister linked the offer to American support during Turkey’s severe repression of its Kurdish population. Israel, he adds, recognized that it could intensify its treatment of Palestinians with stronger U.S. backing. These cases are not descriptions of events in Chechnya, but they establish the comparative frame in which he discusses Russia: governments can align themselves with counterterrorism while seeking cover for coercion directed at populations they already fight.

The argument extends to the United States itself. Chomsky says the atmosphere of fear and demands for patriotism enabled measures to discipline the American public and enact laws hostile to popular interests. He characterizes the Bush administration as using the opening to advance the interests of large corporations that dominated it. In this framework, Chechnya is one instance in a global pattern in which an emergency designation can redistribute political permission: international attention turns toward fighting terrorism, while state violence by coalition partners risks being accepted or obscured.

Chomsky also challenges the moral distinction that would make such scrutiny unnecessary. He describes the premise that “we” are good and “they” are bad as a convenient assertion often assumed rather than argued, and asks readers to compare it against historical and contemporary conduct. Chechnya sharpens that challenge because Russia’s use of the coalition does not fit neatly into a story of counterterrorism as a neutral, uniformly applied standard. The case instead illustrates the article’s warning that powerful states may claim authority for their own violence while rejecting equivalent claims by others.

Strategic Geography and the Limits of the Account

Chechnya is also part of Chomsky’s discussion of the strategic pressures surrounding Afghanistan. He describes Central Asia as important not only for its resources but for the routes and military positions that could help the United States exert influence over them. Afghanistan, he says, was a comparatively minor piece on this board, though pipelines through it had been discussed for years as part of plans relating to Central Asian resources. To the north, he identifies unstable states, especially Uzbekistan, and describes Tajikistan as a major drug-transit hub whose northern border with Afghanistan was largely controlled by the Northern Alliance. These details situate Chechnya within a region where conflict, alliances, and strategic interests overlap, though Chomsky does not offer a detailed account of the Chechen war itself.

His later assessment of U.S. military bases makes the scale of that geopolitical argument explicit. The United States, he says, established major bases in Central Asia for the first time, linking them to the contemporary “Great Game,” multinational control of regional resources, and the encirclement of energy supplies concentrated around the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia had been the safest base in a U.S. system extending from the Pacific to the Azores; the new position, in Chomsky’s analysis, would make forceful intervention easier. Chechnya is not presented as the purpose of that base network, but its place in the surrounding field of conflicts helps show why local wars cannot be separated from wider contests over military reach and political influence.

The result is a deliberately comparative portrait rather than a local history. Chomsky links Chechnya to the movement of former Afghan-war fighters, to bin Laden’s stated call for resistance across multiple regions, and to Russia’s effort to use the post-September 11 coalition to continue its campaign. He also sets that effort beside other governments’ appeals to counterterrorism and the expansion of U.S. military reach. The recurring place name thus carries the article’s central tension: a language of security that claims universal force can be used selectively, in ways that protect some states’ actions from the scrutiny applied to others.