There are two plausible hypotheses about the terrorist attack near Moscow

There are two plausible hypotheses about Friday’s terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall near Moscow, which killed at least 139 people. The first is that it is a inside job used to be; the action could have been orchestrated by the Russian security services or they could at least have been aware of the plans. The second plausible hypothesis is that it was not an inside job.

In open societies, conspiracy theories are fodder for weirdos. However, in closed societies it is normal that people sometimes resort to posting political phenomena, even if they do not always turn out to be correct.

In 1999, more than 300 Russians were killed and 1,700 injured in a series of apartment bombings that authorities blamed on Chechen terrorists. The bombings served as a pretext for Vladimir Putin – who had quickly risen from second-rate apparatchik to director of the FSB and then to prime minister – to start the Second Chechen War.

But then something strange happened. Police found three huge bags of white powder in the basement of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan, connected to a detonator and a timer set to go off at 5:30 in the morning. Initial tests showed that the powder contained hexogen, the explosive used in the other bombings.

Police soon arrested the perpetrators who planted the bags; they turned out to be employees of the FSB. The Russian government later stated that the bags were filled with sugar and left in the buildings as part of an exercise. But as historian David Satter and others have documented, this claim borders on the absurd. Numerous journalists and politicians who wanted to investigate the incident were also poisoned or shot dead.

Why is this history important? Because it shows that Putin “is not allergic to bloodshed, either among Russians or others, if it helps him achieve his goals,” as Garry Kasparov noted in The Wall Street Journal.

History of Islamist terrorism

Tellingly, Putin almost immediately identified Ukraine as responsible for last Friday’s massacre; Suddenly this provided a possible motive for a false flag operation. The accusations were absurd; Ukraine would immediately lose credibility with its Western partners if it had any connection to the event.

Also telling is the fact that the attack came just after Putin’s re-election in this month’s sham elections, at a time when he is looking to mobilize tens of thousands of new troops for the war in Ukraine. What better way can he achieve this than by sowing panic on the home front? It is a proven recipe.

At least, that’s the first hypothesis.

However, Russia has a long history of Islamist terrorism, and the United States warned Moscow on March 7 (just as it warned Iran of an IS attack in January) that an attack was imminent. In both cases the warning was ignored. Putin dismissed it as “an attempt to frighten and destabilize our society,” perhaps because cynical regimes find it difficult to imagine that altruistic motives are possible.

This suggests what we already knew: Putin’s regime is as incompetent as it is ruthless. And with the enemies it has, it doesn’t have to concoct a fictional conspiracy between Western powers and the “Nazi regime” in Kiev. Russia will never solve its internal weaknesses – a shrinking population, feuding ethnic minorities, a brain drain and an energy-dependent economy – with foreign conquest.

But it also shows something else: five years after IS’s so-called caliphate fell in northern Iraq and Syria, the group and its offshoots are far from gone.

About 9,000 hardened IS fighters are being held as prisoners in various camps in Syria, guarded by Kurdish forces, with American help (which Donald Trump tried to stop). The Islamic State branch accused of the Moscow attacks has an estimated 6,000 fighters at large, mainly in Afghanistan. Other Islamic State affiliates operate across Africa, where U.S. counterterrorism efforts have been hampered by local unrest.

In other words, as Washington stopped dealing with global disorder (or was forced to do so), the disorder grew. What happened in Moscow is reminiscent of what happened in 2015 at the Bataclan in Paris, when 90 people were murdered. IS appears to have a predilection for attacks on concert halls.

‘Shift focus’

The phrase “shifting the focus” is widely used in foreign policy discussions; the Obama administration “shifted the focus to Asia”, Trump and Biden “shifted the focus to competition among great powers”. The lesson of the first shift in focus is that we have neglected NATO and European security at our peril, the lesson of the second is that the idea that the days of Islamist terror were largely behind us was an illusion. As Israel learned firsthand on October 7, a country’s mortal enemies are not tamed or defeated just because leaders change their priorities.

Today’s American security challenges are global: a resurgent IS, a revanchistic China, a regionally aggressive Iran and a Russia where the lines between megalomania and paranoia are blurring. Whether what happened in Russia was Islamist terror, an FSB conspiracy, or a horrible combination of the two, it does not bode well for the US.

_{© The New York Times}