In memory of Tomasz Merta (1965–2010)

The event known as Katyn began when the Red Army invaded Poland, along with the Wehrmacht, in September 1939. The Soviets took thousands of Polish officers prisoner and held them in the ruins of Orthodox monasteries. When these men were allowed to leave the camps, 70 years ago in April 1940, they expected that they would be returning home. Instead, they were taken to Kharkiv, or Tver, or Katyn. Over the course of a few days, 21,892 of these prisoners were shot in the base of the skull. The executioners were NKVD men, state policemen acting on the order of Stalin. One of them later recalled: “There was a clack, and that was the end.”

Katyn was part of a pattern of Soviet policies directed against the Polish nation. For ten years, Poles within the Soviet Union had been targets of particular repression. In 1930, as the Soviet state began to take control of agriculture—“collectivization”—Poles were the first subjects of Soviet ethnic cleansing. They were dispatched from the western Soviet Union to Kazakhstan, where they died in the tens of thousands as collectivization produced famine. Tens of thousands more Poles died in Stalin’s deliberate starvation of Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. During Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937–1938, more than 100,000 people were shot as putative spies for Poland. The baseless rationale for these mass executions was that Poland was planning an aggressive war against the Soviet Union as an ally of Germany. But, of course, it was Stalin who allied with Hitler in 1939, allowing World War II to begin with their joint invasion of Poland. The Polish officers killed by the NKVD in Katyn had been fighting Nazi Germany.

While the Soviets held the Polish officers in custody, they permitted the men to write their families—so that the NKVD could collect addresses. After their executions, their families were deported to the taiga of Siberia or the steppe of Kazakhstan, where many thousands of them died. They were among the more than 300,000 Polish citizens deported by the Soviets during the first two years of World War II.

Katyn was the beginning of a regime of lies that prevailed in Poland for 50 years. After Hitler betrayed Stalin and the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Poland and the Soviet Union became uneasy allies. Stalin released men from the Gulag and allowed them to fight in the west. (One of these was Ryszard Kaczorowski, who died in the plane crash near Smolensk last week that killed 96 people, including Polish President Lech Kaczyński. Kaczorowski took part in the courageous charges on Monte Cassino in the Italian campaign.) But the Polish government-in-exile noticed that thousands of officers were missing. The Soviets denied all knowledge of their fate. When the Germans uncovered the NKVD shooting site at Katyn in April 1943, Stalin used the occasion to break diplomatic relations with the Polish government. If Poland did not accept the Soviet lie that this was a German crime, Poles could expect the worst from Stalin. Washington and London urged the Poles to accept the untruth, which left them alone with the truth.

Once the Soviets defeated the Germans and installed their own government in postwar Poland, the lie about Katyn became the official history. The notion that the Germans rather than the Soviets had committed the crime was part of a larger story of the war, embraced in the communist world and also in the West, according to which the one aggressor and occupier had been Nazi Germany. The lie about Katyn was not only the propaganda keystone of communist control of Poland, it was essential to an entire scheme of history in which Soviet forces were liberators and nothing more.

In the decades after the war, Katyn was the main entry in the unwritten encyclopedia of Polish history that circulated during the decades of communism. More perhaps than any other event, Katyn generated the desire for what many in the Solidarity movement of the 1980s called truth. Most of the Polish dignitaries who died in the plane crash near Smolensk were heirs of Solidarity, and they were traveling to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of a crime whose history they have instead joined.

Anna Walentynowicz, who died in the crash, was a welder and crane operator at a shipyard in Gdańsk in communist Poland in the 1970s. She was fired in August 1980, a few months short of the time when she would have been eligible for her pension. Her colleagues protested, beginning the shipyard strike that soon spread throughout the country. The Solidarity movement, born then, was a joint creation of workers and intellectuals, such as the young lawyer Lech Kaczyński. Along with his brother Jarosław, he was a close adviser to Lech Wałęsa, the leader of the Solidarity movement. He was still among its chief organizers in the late 1980s, when Solidarity seized the opportunity provided by Gorbachev for peaceful and democratic change.

During the decade that followed communism, the former Solidarity advisers divided among themselves and founded political parties. Lech Kaczyński was among those most concerned to make a clear break with the communist past, and bring to light the truth about Polish history. Elected mayor of Warsaw in 2002, he oversaw the construction of a museum of the Warsaw uprising, the struggle of the Polish Home Army against the German occupation of the capital. Elected president in 2005, he conducted a foreign policy that bordered on the self-righteous. He was often called a “nationalist,” but this does not quite meet the case. He was a kind of provincial universalist. He did not know foreign languages or much about the outside world, but he did believe that all nations needed to learn their own past and that truth was the key to international reconciliation. As president he was oversensitive and ineffective—but also stubbornly principled and entirely uncorrupt. When he embarked for Russia, he was seeking reconciliation on the basis of the truth about Katyn which Moscow itself has finally recognized.

In the era of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s official position about the crimes of Stalinism has been, more or less, “This is our history, we were the victims, and so we can be the judges.” This is not quite right, and, after the crash, this position will be harder to maintain. Russians suffered enormously under Stalin, but they suffered less than the peoples of the Soviet periphery: Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Chechens, Poles. Consider the Great Terror in Leningrad, which prompted the most memorable poem of the Russian twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem.” Akhmatova recalled an “innocent Russia” writhing “beneath the bloody boots of the executioners, beneath the wheels of the black marias.” Innocent Russia was a multinational country, and Poles in her city were 30 times more likely to be shot than Russians.

The death of Lech Kaczyński in Russia may begin the Russian reckoning with Stalinism. Putin had already marked the change of course by agreeing to honor the anniversary of the Katyn massacre. By portraying Katyn as a crime committed by the Soviet regime rather than the Russian people, he has drawn a line between Stalinism and his own authority: a distinction he had previously been reluctant to make. And he reacted to the plane crash by choosing to call even more attention to the Katyn murders. Last week, Russian television broadcast a stirring film about Katyn by the Polish director Andrzej Wajda. Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev declared a national day of mourning. Ordinary Russians appeared with flowers, candles, and icons at the Polish embassy in Moscow and at the crash site at Smolensk. One Russian left a card asking for forgiveness for Katyn. Another left a line from a poem by the Polish poet Jan Twardowski: “Let us hurry to love people, they leave us so quickly.”

Russians are right to recall that the forests of Smolensk have seen other tragedies, and on a greater scale. Smolensk is the site of the last important battle the Wehrmacht won on its way to Moscow. One million Soviet soldiers died defending their capital city. Smolensk marks the outer reach of the Holocaust by bullets, whereby the Germans killed Jews in the east. By the time they revealed the burial site at Katyn, the Germans had left behind thousands of death pits of their own, full of the corpses of murdered Jews. Each of these events has its own scale, its own specific horrors. The particular cruelty of Katyn was the attempt to exterminate the intellectual leadership of a nation. These Polish officers were usually reserve officers, which meant they were men with university degrees. The victims at Katyn were botanists, agronomists, neurologists, lawyers, engineers, surgeons, poets. This is one of the reasons why the crash at Smolensk so pains Poles. It appears that once again the nation has been decapitated.

But this Polish elite, unlike any for two centuries, has left a healthy state and society to those who will follow. Although each of the victims is now missed and mourned, Polish politics can and will proceed without them. The truth about Katyn has now been accepted in Moscow and conveyed around the world. But, as Russian commentators have pointed out, no Russian politician has attended to the Russian victims of Stalinism the way that Kaczyński and others on that plane concerned themselves for its Polish victims. Putin and Medvedev now have an opening. They can guide Russia away from an official nostalgia for Stalin. Poles can help by recognizing and acknowledging that Katyn, despite its particular horror for the Polish nation, is but one of the crimes of the Stalinist era. The experience of Stalinism is, sadly, what Poles and Russians share. With these terrible deaths comes an opportunity to make better sense of a bitter past.

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His most recent book is The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke.

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Earlier this week, the small Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan erupted in violence. Days after protests broke out in a few small towns, thousands of people opposed to President Kurmanbek Bakiev's corrupt regime took to the streets of Bishkek, the capital city, and clashed with government forces. At least 75 people have died and hundreds more have been injured. Several government buildings have been set on fire, and countless businesses have been looted. Bakiev has fled to the southern part of the country, and an interim government, led by former foreign minister Roza Otunbayeva, has claimed power. Bakiev, however, says he remains president.

This isn't the first time Kyrgyzstan has experienced upheaval. In 2005, the Tulip Revolution forced then-President Askar Akaev, a notoriously despotic leader, from power and installed Bakiev, who promised to build a democracy. But he quickly broke that promise. When I visited Kyrgyzstan in 2007, just prior to its first parliamentary elections since the revolution, Bakiev was under fire for intimidating his opposition, rigging a referendum on constitutional reforms in his favor, and seeking to similarly engineer the upcoming vote. (He succeeded.) Since then, matters have only gotten worse, culminating in this week's violence.

Now, it's important to examine several questions: What exactly prompted the crisis? Is this a second Tulip Revolution? Is the U.S. military base outside Bishkek, featured prominently in international coverage of the events, really at risk? And, most importantly, what will happen next? Here are some early answers.

What are the roots of the crisis?

Bakiev was never really committed to democracy; from the start, he ruled his country with an eye toward authoritarianism and nepotism. In addition to rigging elections and doctoring legislation to benefit his regime, Bakiev "established a government based on family rule,” Bakyt Beshimov, a former opposition MP in the Kyrgyz parliament, told TNR on Thursday. Bakiev handed the reins of the Central Agency for Development, Investment, and Innovation—a body created to essentially run the country’s economy—to his youngest son Maksim and made his brother Janysh head of the country’s security service. "He set up a very corrupt regime in a very short time," Beshimov says.

He has also set up a violent regime. For his own opposition, Beshimov says he was almost assassinated—twice. "They targeted me … threatened members of my family. For one year, I lived life in hell," he said. Beshimov fled to the United States in 2009; he now lives in exile in Boston. Miriam Lanskoy, senior program officer for Central Asia and the Caucasus at the National Endowment for Democracy, notes that high-profile cases like Beshimov’s offered “real, tangible stories of corruption” that the Kyrgyz public used to form negative judgments about Bakiev. In March 2009, Medet Sadyrkulov, a former Bakiev aide who had become an opposition leader, was killed in a fiery car accident the government is believed to have orchestrated. Then, in December, journalist Gennady Pavluk, who had been critical of the administration, died after being thrown from an apartment building in Kazakhstan, reportedly by members of the Kyrgyz security service. (And these were only the more recent and severe incidents in a years-long campaign of harassment and violence directed at Bakiev's opponents.)

In the months leading up to this week’s violence, the government suspended publication of several newspapers and blocked access to certain news websites. It also hiked utility prices in February—a move that angered many people in poor, rural areas, driving them to protest publicly. There were also protests in Bishkek in mid-March. “These are typical sins of the region, but it was growing, it was overflowing the banks,” Lanskoy says.

Is this a “color revolution”?

Some observers were quick to compare this week's events to movements in other former Soviet states (the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia) that ousted corrupt regimes and ushered in democracy. But one factor in particular separates this upheaval from the so-called "color revolutions": the use of force. Events in Ukraine and Georgia were relatively nonviolent. What’s more, this doesn't seem to be a repeat of the Tulip Revolution. In 2005, politicians who wanted then-President Akaev out of office—so that they could take control of the country—urged their supporters to protest. In contrast, this week’s events, according to an op-ed published by Transitions Online, were more spontaneous and uncoordinated, which led to more violence and uncertainty about who controls the country.

Yet the upheaval “contains within it the possibility of reform,” Lanskoy says, even though its methods thus far have been ugly. “If indeed Bakiev does in the end step down and they are able to form a new government, it may turn out that, having seen the various failure of the Tulip Revolution, they will now build better institutions."

Who exactly is the opposition?

The people who took to the streets of Bishkek aren’t all of the same mind. Some are political opponents of the regime—members of several different political parties. (Otunbayeva is in the Social Democratic Party.) Others are just angry citizens or opportunistic looters. Beshimov says it won’t be clear who will dominate the interim authority until order is restored. Adds Lanskoy, “One of the questions is how long they will be able to be together in this government and to what degree they will compete with each other.”

What will happen to the U.S. base?

U.S. media have focused heavily on what this week’s events mean for Manas, a military base outside Bishkek that is critical to U.S. operations in Afghanistan. The short answer is that no one really knows. Otunbayeva has said the interim government will review the contract that permits the United States to use the base, and Beshimov says its fate depends on who ends up dominating the interim government (some members of the opposition are for the base, while others are against it). But Lanskoy says any Kyrgyz government would be foolish to force the United States to vacate Manas because it would go against the country's national interests. Eviction would severely damage Kyrgyzstan's relationship with the United States—and there are security concerns as well. “If the Taliban succeeds in Afghanistan, it will negatively affect all of Central Asia,” adds Beshimov, pointing out that Afghan militants have infiltrated Kyrgyzstan’s borders before. “[I]t is important to set up very prudent, stable, and long-term relations with the U.S. government.”

What's Russia's game here?

Some observers have said Russia played a key role in the upheaval. “Russia has now added to its repertoire of tools used in the former Soviet states the ability to pull off its own style of color revolution with the toppling of the Kyrgyz government,” a Stratfor Intelligence report said on Friday. Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, sits in an important strategic position, nestled among other Central Asian states with abundant energy resources. Russia has long sought to control the region, and it was angered when, in 2009, Bakiev recanted on his plan to evict the United States from Manas. Bakiev announced the eviction after Russia gave Kyrgyzstan $2 billion in loans, and he retracted it after the United States pledged to pay a much higher rent for the base, along with more aid for economic development, fighting drug trafficking, and renovating Bishkek’s airport. “He tried to manipulate the situation,” Beshimov says. In recent months, Russian media covered Bakiev’s government negatively, and Moscow increased customs duties on the fuel it exports to Kyrgyzstan—all of which put pressure on Bakiev's regime.

A Kyrgyz opposition leader reported meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin just prior to this week's events, and Russia was quick to recognize the interim government. (The United States has not.) Otunbayeva has also thanked Moscow “for its role in ousting Bakiev.” Still, many observers say Russia didn't orchestrate the upheaval; rather, Moscow sees in the Kyrgyz opposition the best chance for the country to stabilize. "Russian support of [Bakiev] pretty much seemed at an end," says Monika Shepherd, Program Manager of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy at Boston University. "They're preserving their own interests by trying to promote a more or less peaceful situation in the country."

What happens next?

So far, Bakiev has insisted that he won’t resign. And, if he doesn’t, there could be more violence. Bakiev is more popular in the southern part of the country, where he has taken refuge, than in the north, where this week’s protests were born. If Bakiev decides to gather forces to defend himself, there could be a civil war. Bakiev could also come to an agreement with the interim authority, such that they can hold power together—although that scenario seems unlikely, given public outrage at Bakiev's crimes. "A lot of members of the opposition and the republic are angry with him and would probably prefer to bring him to trial," Shepherd explains.

Most observers hope that the interim authority prevails, that Bakiev will be forced out of power, and that, as Otunbayeva has promised, Kyrgyzstan will hold new elections in six months—the first step toward building a new democracy.

The most important thing this new government could do would be to stabilize the country—not just Bishkek, but the regions as well. Shepherd points out that, in 2005, Bakiev's new government never fully established control at the local level. "That may be one of the things that began to turn public sentiment against the new government," Shepherd says. "People were out in the regions living in a state of lawlessness."

After restoring order, Beshimov says the government must commit to democratization by discerning who are serious democrats and who might want to build another lucrative, Bakiev-like regime—and then allowing only those that fall into the former group to gain political power. "I believe that she [Otunbayeva] will follow this priority of democratization, but her own personal effort is not enough," says Beshimov.

Shepherd adds that the new government must address the country's energy crisis. Powerful neighbors, namely Uzbekistan, have made it impossible for the country to develop a strong energy sector. People throughout the country are often plagued by shortages and plunged into blackouts—and Bakiev's government did little to assuage the situation, focusing on hydropower development that never really went anywhere. "The West could … try and give support to companies that want to manufacture alternative ways of producing energy," Shepherd says.

What else should the West do to help Kyrgyzstan?

Soon after the Tulip Revolution, Kyrgyzstan fell off the West's radar. The small state didn't have resources—namely, oil and gas—that other countries wanted. What's more, it seemed in relatively good shape compared to its Central Asian neighbors: Turkmenistan ranks up with Burma and North Korea as one of the world's most totalitarian states, Uzbekistan has reportedly boiled opposition members alive, and Kazakhstan is rife with political and economic corruption. "There was the expectation that Kyrgyzstan was doing OK," says Lanskoy. "They had had their breakthrough."

Beshimov says the West was mostly concerned with security in Kyrgyzstan, not democratization. This time around, observers agree that the West should do more to help the country build a strong, free government and civil society—offering financial and logistical support to the state, NGOs, and energy companies eager to create a sustainable way of life for the Kyrgyz people. "Democracies should share their experiences and help fragile countries," Beshimov says. "If this time the Kyrgyz government does not follow a path into real democratization—oh, it will be a tragic story for Kyrgyzstan."

Seyward Darby is assistant managing editor of The New Republic.

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In February, as part of a delegation from the Save Darfur Coalition, I met Mustafa Ismail in Khartoum. Ismail is the country’s former foreign minister and current presidential adviser to President Omar Al Bashir. He thanked us for our “timely visit,” then proceeded to speak almost uninterrupted for close to an hour about the Sudanese regime’s new commitment to democracy, peace, and development. To that end, he urged the international community to endorse the country’s upcoming nationwide elections and stop “inflaming” the situation in Sudan with false accusations.

Now, with the Sudanese vote set to begin this weekend, the Obama administration seems to be doing exactly what Ismail had wanted. Last month, Scott Gration, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, said that “significant preparations have been made to ensure that the elections will really reflect the will of the people” (although he added that there were “logistical challenges” still to resolve). Then, last weekend—after the presidential candidate of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the major party that represents southern Sudan, withdrew from the race, citing the prospect of massive fraud and intimidation—Gration said that members of Sudan’s electoral commission had “given [him] confidence that the elections … would be as free and as fair as possible,” adding that they “have gone to great lengths to ensure that the people of Sudan will have access to polling places and that the procedures and processes will ensure transparency.”

Gration’s optimism is baffling. As I learned during my recent four-week trip to Sudan—when I visited Khartoum, the southern part of the country, and Darfur—there is no chance that these elections will be even remotely free or fair. For one thing, the government has been harassing its opponents for months. Three weeks ago, an 18-year-old activist associated with the youth group Girifna—“We are fed up” in Arabic—said that he had been kidnapped and tortured by government agents. This followed the arrest in early March of three Girifna members who had been taking part in a voter mobilization effort sponsored by the group. Another youth activist has said he was kidnapped and tortured by national intelligence agents back in December. That month, three leading members of the SPLM were briefly arrested. And, on the same day in February when I met Ismail and heard his protestations about the regime’s commitment to democracy, a Darfuri student activist named Mohamed Musa was abducted from the University of Khartoum; he was later found dead. (While no one knows for sure who killed him, the government behaved oddly in the wake of his death—detaining his father at the airport in Khartoum, for instance—and many suspect the Sudanese security services were responsible for the murder.)

It is true that Sudan is not a totalitarian state like North Korea or Burma, and the aftermath of Musa’s death in some ways demonstrated—in the words of one leading opposition figure—the “margin of freedom” available to political parties in advance of these elections. More than 1,000 Darfuris and other Sudanese protested as part of the funeral proceedings in Khartoum (albeit under the watchful eye of what one attendee said were over 700 security forces and 30 trucks with heavy artillery mounted on the back). An opposition leader attended the funeral and hailed Musa as “one of our martyrs.” The next day, a few papers even covered the story.

But there is a catch—and it is this catch that makes Gration’s optimism look truly ridiculous: While some political space has opened in the country’s northern and southern states over the past few years, things are quite different in Darfur to the west. There, politics of even the narrow variety remain generally impossible, as sporadic violence against civilians continues and a general atmosphere of intimidation prevails.

The official campaign season had just begun during the week I spent in the three state capitals of Darfur. But the region remains under a state of emergency and heavily militarized: Checkpoints restrict most travel outside of the three major cities, and, around the time I arrived, the government launched an offensive against rebels in the mountainous area of Jebel Marra. An estimated 100,000 people were displaced by the fighting.

Every opposition party member I spoke to in Sudan mentioned how the state of emergency severely constrains campaigning in Darfur. What is legal or illegal changes by the day and the mood of the nearest group of men with guns and pickup trucks. The omnipresence of uniformed men throughout the region makes a recent recommendation from the Carter Center—one of the international organizations in charge of election monitoring—to the Sudanese government seem completely disconnected from reality. What, exactly, would it mean for the regime to “take all necessary steps to avoid the unnecessary militarization of polling stations” when all of Darfur remains firmly in the hands of either the state security apparatus or rebel movements?

Not surprisingly, during my time in Darfur, I saw only a few opposition campaign posters amid a sea of pro-government propaganda. I heard about the recent detention and harassment of political leaders and human rights activists by government officials. One night in a private home, I listened to female opposition politicians and human rights activists speak about their suspicion that security agents will target those who campaign or vote against Bashir’s party. As the curfew of 10 p.m. drew near, they rushed through a litany of electoral and human rights violations—including the closure of opposition party meetings and the detention of opposition party members. Finishing the meeting, one woman warned, “Darfur is a time-bomb about to go off.”

In Khartoum, a leading columnist spoke about being forced from a newspaper because of a recent article he wrote on Darfur that was critical of the government’s policies. The former prime minister, Sadiq Al Mahdi, told me that he and his party could not pass up this opportunity to change the government and therefore were fielding candidates nationwide, including in Darfur; but, two weeks later, state radio refused to air a campaign speech in which he referenced the International Criminal Court’s outstanding arrest warrant for Bashir—an arrest warrant that was obviously quite popular in Darfur. (Two days ago, Al Mahdi announced that his party would now boycott the elections.)

No wonder that a senior peacekeeping official in Nyala—Darfur’s largest city—told me that the majority of Darfuris are not interested in the upcoming vote. The more than two million displaced people in camps generally boycotted the registration process. Sitting under a tent in one camp in West Darfur with a group of almost twenty sheikhs, I asked about the upcoming elections. One of them shook his head and declared that there were no candidates on the ballot who represented their interests. The whole process, he said, makes us “feel like we don’t belong to this country.”

In all likelihood, Bashir’s government will soon declare victory in the elections. It will ask the world to believe that, despite a decades-long record of genocide and repression, it has earned a mandate from the people it governs. Perhaps the world and the Obama administration—desperate for some sign of progress in Sudan—will choose to believe it.

This would be a major mistake. Whatever the outcome, the elections are almost certain to leave Darfuris excluded from the politics of Sudan. More than two million of them will still live in displaced persons camps, unable to return home. Meanwhile, even in the relatively freer parts of the country, the harassment, intimidation, and torture of activists and political opponents is sure to continue. Should there be an outcry by these reformers after the election—something along the lines of what happened after last June’s election in Iran—the Obama administration must be prepared to stand with them. And under no circumstances should it legitimize what is guaranteed to be a deeply un-democratic vote.

Sean Brooks is a policy analyst at the Save Darfur Coalition.

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The following is adapted from a talk delivered at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., on March 19, 2010.

One of the greatest ironies of the past decade's debates over political Islam has been that, on the whole, the most passionate and emphatic rejections of radical Islamism in this country came from President Bush and his supporters—that is, conservatives. This is peculiar because the various forms of radical Islamism represent the third major form of totalitarian ideology and politics in modern world history. While it seeks to benefit from the pathos of Third Worldist rhetoric, its ideological themes have more in common with fascism and Nazism than with Marxism-Leninism. One would think that here in Washington, its most natural and passionate opponents would be less the heirs of Ronald Reagan than of Franklin Roosevelt. Now, over a year into the Obama administration, I hope we are at a moment when this irony will be modified, and the center-left will raise a clear and strong voice in the war of ideas with radical Islamism.

Twenty-four years ago, I published a book about some aspects of German ideologies that contributed to Nazi thought. It was titled Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. The term “reactionary modernism” referred to Nazism’s simultaneous rejection of liberal political and cultural modernity combined with enthusiasm for modern technology. It described the way that the Nazis embraced the machine but remained true to what they regarded as the German soul. They, along with the Italian Fascists and the Japanese dictatorship, all demonstrated that the embrace of modern technology did not necessarily mean the embrace of ideas about democracy, individual rights, and equality of all persons. At that time, Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the most significant political and cultural reactionaries of the twentieth century, was using tape cassettes to call for the abandonment of Iranian modernity in favor of a society built on premodern religious notions. The term "reactionary modernism" was equally applicable on September 11, when Al Qaeda-trained engineering students flew jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Today, Khomeini's successors reject the modern world even as they race toward the possession of nuclear weapons. Yet American liberals have been slow to place the reactionary nature of these extremists at the center of their analysis about the proper response.

Though political Islamism is not identical to Nazism and Fascism, the lineages and continuities are significant. One of the most obvious continuities is hatred of the Jews and the anti-Zionism it inspires. Islamists of various ideological camps all share in the conspiracy theorizing that was at the heart of Nazi ideology. In their German-language propaganda aimed at a domestic audience, the Nazi propagandists claimed that “international Jewry” started World War II in order to exterminate the German people. They publicly assured the German audience that they would exterminate the Jews before the Jews had a chance to exterminate them. At the same time, in their Arabic-language propaganda for North Africa and the Middle East, Nazi propagandists claimed that the Jews had driven the United States into World War II in order to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, dominate the entire Middle East and destroy the religion of Islam. The echoes of these arguments come across loud and clear in the Hamas covenant of 1988, bin Laden’s declaration of war against the “Zionist-Crusader alliance,” Ahmadinejad’s calls to wipe out the state of Israel, and TV programs in Arab countries that reproduce new versions of anti-Semitic blood libels.

A second set of continuities lies in the rejection of cultural modernity, especially the extension of rights to women and homosexuals. Fascism and Nazism in Europe were, in part, a reaction against efforts to bring about both. Like the paramilitary organizations of the Fascist and Nazi street fighters, the Islamic terrorist organizations are also militant “brotherhoods” that celebrate an absurd but familiar cult of hyper-masculinity. Where fascism and Nazism sought to restore the position of women to the subordinate status they held before World War I, the Islamists view the proper position of women as something out of pre-modern times. Here again, the fundamentally reactionary nature of political Islamism is evident. It is fitting that some of the bravest and most eloquent Muslim critics of the Islamists are women.

Yet neither the left nor the right has been interested in making the deeply conservative nature of Islamist ideology and politics the leitmotif of American foreign policy. Part of Khomeini’s political genius was to combine left-wing rhetoric about anti-imperialism with the reactionary core of his vision of an Islamicized Iran. Yet while the Communists fostered a cult of martyrdom, they did not make a virtue of their own death. They wanted to make a global revolution on this earth, not to depart from it for a religiously inspired heavenly paradise. Because the Communists possessed this modicum of rationality, it was possible for the West to arrive at a nuclear stalemate and even nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Nuclear deterrence rested on the assumption that both players preferred survival to self-destruction.

The now hundreds, perhaps thousands, of episodes of suicide bombings aimed at murdering civilians are the most telling evidence that radical Islamists have a very different view of their own death than did the Communists. In view of the religious fanaticism that inspires these acts, the possession of nuclear weapons in the hands of radical Islamists, including in the hands of the current Iranian regime, would not only represent an existential threat to the state of Israel. It would cross a Rubicon on world history. This is so both because Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe Israel off the map and because a nuclear Iran would be a nuclear weapons state whose religious visions of the next world could make it less likely than other atomic nations to be deterred by the prospect of nuclear retaliation, however massive. The idea that the prospect of massive retaliation will enforce rationality on this Iranian regime as it did with the Communists underestimates the depth of their ideological convictions. Nuclear weapons in the Islamic state of Pakistan are compatible with deterrence with India. Pakistan has never declared that its aim is to destroy or wipe out India. Yet the rhetoric from Tehran both about Israel and about the prospects of coming religious apocalypse is something altogether different.

Perhaps one reason for our reticence about discussing, specifically, the connection between Islamism and terrorism is the fear that doing so will offend Muslims who reject terrorism. In recent years, a reluctance to offend, and a desire to avoid the appearance of religious intolerance, sometimes called “Islamophobia,” has led the United States to substitute famous euphemisms for accurate speech about the identity of those who are waging war against us. The terms “war on terror” or, more recently, the offensive against “violent extremism” have been used in place of accurate terms that describe the enemy we are facing. The concern not to offend has made it impossible to speak truthfully about who our enemies are and what motivates them. Yet we must find a way to draw attention to the impact of religion without offending those millions of Muslims who reject the Islamists.

The third issue regarding similarities and differences between radical Islam and Nazism concerns the importance of religion. Radical Islamists tell us that they have a deep and important connection to the religion of Islam as they choose to interpret it. And it is true that the Koran is more central to them than the New Testament was to the Nazis. Yet it is important to recall that religion was important for the Nazis as well. Historians of the Nazi regime have long understood that there was no straight line leading from the Christian assertion that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus to Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic essays to the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we know that however crooked it was, the line was there. No matter how modern Nazism was, however secular its radical anti-Semitism, it also drew on a radicalization of already existing anti-Semitic currents in Christianity. Though anti-Christian themes also played an important role in Nazi ideology, so too did efforts to create what Susannah Heschel has called “Aryan Jesus” or what Saul Friedlander described as “redemptive anti-Semitism.”

During World War II, American diplomats in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo documented the fusion of Nazism and political Islam, as expressed in Arabic-language shortwave radio broadcasts aimed at the Middle East. The broadcasts were the product of collaboration between officials in the German foreign ministry and the pro-Nazi Arab and Muslim collaborators, including Haj Amin El Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Three elements of these Nazi appeals are of particular importance. First, they offered a secular form of anti-imperialism aimed against British presence in the region and against Zionist goals in Palestine. Second, German foreign ministry officials concluded that the most effective way to fan anti-Americanism in the region was to associate the United States and President Roosevelt in particular, with the Jews and with Zionism. Third, the Arabic-language propaganda made explicit appeals to Muslims as Muslims, that is, as believers in the religion of Islam. The Nazi officials and their Arab and Islamist collaborators agreed that a particular reading of passages from the Koran offered the key point of entry to a very hard-to-ascertain number of Muslim hearts and minds.

The alliance between the Nazis and the Arab and Islamist collaborators in wartime Berlin was not simply one of convenience based on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Rather, collaboration rested just as much on shared values, namely rejection of liberal democracy and, above all, hatred of the Jews and of Zionist aspirations. Though the meeting of hearts and minds in wartime Berlin was relatively short, it was an important chapter in the much longer history of political Islamism. It was there that a cultural fusion of Nazism and political Islamism took place. Husseini’s ideological contribution was to offer a religious foundation for hatred of the Jews as Jews, and for a rejection of Zionism. His hatreds were both ancient and modern, based on both the Koran and the traditions of Islam as he understood them, and on secular conspiracy theories of twentieth-century anti-Semitism. His Nazi allies agreed with him that Islam–like Christianity–was an inherently anti-Jewish religion.

The ideological aftereffects of this fusion fed directly into the development of Islamic radicalism as it is formulated today. They are evident in the public statements of Hassan Al Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood; the essays of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist ideologue who was so important for the inspiration of leaders of Al Qaeda; and in Husseini’s postwar political prominence. Of course, Islam, like any other major cultural phenomenon, can be interpreted in different ways. It cannot be the task of American foreign policy to foment a Reformation and Enlightenment in the Muslim world. That is beyond our abilities. But it is within our ability to call a spade a spade. This means we should call our enemies by their proper names and avoid euphemisms.

The policy implications of this analysis include the following. First, liberals should be willing to devote more efforts to the moral and political delegitimation of radical Islamism. It is a form of totalitarian ideology. It is profoundly reactionary and deeply anti-Semitic and, in this sense, racist. It draws on a radicalization and selective reading of the religion of Islam. During both World War II and the cold war, the United States derived great strategic value from naming its adversaries and publicly discussing and denouncing their ideologies. It fought wars of ideas that accompanied the force of arms. We need to understand the importance of doing that today as well.

One way to accomplish this would be to apply the term “war crime” to the intentional murder of civilians, including Muslims. Suicide bombings or remotely controlled bombings whose purpose is first and foremost to kill civilians are war crimes. Their perpetrators are war criminals. The attacks of September 11 and those in London, Madrid, and Israel were war crimes. So, too, are the hundreds of attacks directed against Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. We should remind world public opinion that a majority of Islamist attacks on civilians have been aimed at Muslims, often denounced as “infidels” and “unbelievers.” The United States should publish and prominently feature the number and identities of Muslims who have been murdered by the Islamists. Either the International Criminal Court in the Hague or American military tribunals should try those who commit these attacks as war criminals. What stronger signal of “engagement” could the United States send than one that expresses our determination to give due weight to specifically Muslim victims of Islamist terror?

Likewise, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be indicted for incitement to genocide. His public statements are violations of Article Three of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

And, crucially, the United States must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It seems highly unlikely that even targeted, severe economic sanctions will accomplish that goal. The prospects for regime change may be remote, but the United States should declare its support for the Iranian opposition and aid it in the ways it aided dissident and opposition groups in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. During the last decades of the cold war, Eastern European dissidents made the important point that peace in Europe was inseparable from freedom and liberal democracy in its eastern half. The same principles should be applied to Iran.

However, time is passing quickly, and the Iranian opposition may be unable to end the rule of radical Islamists in Tehran. My work as a historian of the Nazis has led me to conclude that when fanatical political leaders publicly threaten mass murder, they mean what they say. A bomb in the hands of the Iranian regime raises the possibility to unacceptable levels both of a second Holocaust against the Jews and of attacks with nuclear weapons on our own country. It raises the possibility that a bomb will wind up in the hands of terrorists. Given modern history, there is little reason to believe that  things will work out for the best if people with these beliefs get a hold of such weapons. Thus, conventional military strikes by the United States and our allies against Iran’s nuclear program should remain a serious option.

For almost a decade, the United States has been at war with reactionary enemies whose ideological inspiration it has been reluctant to name. The time is long overdue to break with this reticence.

Jeffrey Herf is the author most recently of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, and he has written extensively for The New Republic. He is a professor of modern European history at the University of Maryland in College Park.

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MOSCOW—Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, has been in court for so long that only the hardy, like the wall-eyed man haunting the courthouse in a Che Guevara-style Khodorkovsky t-shirt and the “Free Khodorkovsky” plastic shopping bag, have dared to follow his case. “I’ve spent seven years this way,” says Marina Khodorkovsky, the ex-tycoon’s mother, a bright-eyed former metals engineer. First, there was the year and a half of legal proceedings after her son’s dramatic October 2003 arrest, when special forces stormed his private jet in Siberia. That culminated in a 600-something-page guilty verdict that took the judge fifteen days to read aloud from the bench. Khodorkovsky was then sentenced to a nine year lockup and taken to a Siberian prison, where he was attacked in his sleep for allegedly sexually harassing his cellmate. Then, as talk started to turn to his possible parole and even release in the fall of 2011, the state Prosecutor General slapped Khodorkovsky with charges of stealing 350 million tons of oil and more charges of money laundering and embezzlement, these carrying a sentence of over 20 years.

The moon-faced, salt-haired 46-year-old—Russia’s most famous political prisoner—has lived through a tectonic reversal of fortune. Once a reviled robber baron who made billions in the banking and energy sectors during the lawless ’90s and who went to jail for only partly political reasons, Khodorkovsky has become a martyr and a fundamental pillar of the liberal anti-Putin establishment: the very people who once hated him.

Monday, after prosecutors finished the year-long process of reading their indictment into the record and trotting out ambivalent witnesses, Khodorkovsky was finally allowed to speak in his own defense. The courtroom stirred. It was stuffed beyond capacity, which the Kalashnikov-toting special forces made sure to reduce. People were hanging off of bench corners and sitting in each other’s laps. (A colleague joked that he was “sitting in a fat man.”) It was an older crowd of family and supporters from the Russian opposition. In the best of Russian traditions, some of them brought flowers for the defense team. Outside, the overflow grandmothers kept out of the courtroom soon began to yell at the guards that the simulcast in the simulcast room wasn’t working. A handful of Khodorkovsky lawyers and public relations specialists flitted about the courthouse, which looks like a dilapidated Stalin-era schoolhouse full of peeling ochre linoleum.

It was the last day of Passover, and Khodorkovsky, who is Jewish, decided to make the day an instructive—and festive—one. “Oil, your honor, is a liquid,” a calm Khodorkovsky began from his fish tank, a bulletproof glass-and-metal cage he shares with his co-defendant and former business partner, Platon Lebedev, who appeared, as always, in his signature black Adidas tracksuit. Given that premise, Khodorkovsky wondered aloud, how could anyone steal 350 million tons of oil?

And that’s when his lawyer, Vadim Klyuvgant, reached under his desk and placed a three-liter bottle of crude on the defense table. With its gold and black layers, it looked like separated balsamic vinaigrette and smelled like a gas station.

Khodorkovsky summoned Klyuvgant to the cage, accepted from him a pink piece of paper, and explained that they had just performed an oil trade wherein Khodorkovsky now owned the oil, which remained physically with Klyuvgant. So how could Khodorkovsky steal oil that he did not physically have?

The rhetorical exercise was lost on the presiding Judge Danilkin, who declined Khodorkovsky’s motion to perform an experiment to steal massive volumes of liquid. “Get that flammable substance out of here!” he screamed. “You don’t have any gasoline in there, do you?!” The courtroom erupted in laughter. “I don’t see anything funny about this,” Danilkin shouted at them.

The oil was removed and, after a brief recess, replaced with water, “which, I hope, will not offend anyone,” Khodorkovsky said. It didn’t, but any sense—if any existed—that this was a court of law and a place of serious business was irreparably broken. For the next five hours, Khodorkovsky coolly, quietly argued his case: how did I steal more oil than my company produced, while simultaneously transporting, delivering, and earning profits on it? And how in the world could I just take 350 million tons of oil and what could I possibly do with them? And where are the documents that prove I had personally done this? To all the nodding gray heads in the courtroom, they seemed to be very reasonable questions.

In a steady drone, Khodorkovsky read from a long stack of printed pages. At one point he whipped out slides showing tangles of oil pipelines and oil transport schemes, which consternated the prosecution: were pictures allowed? They were, as was Khodorkovsky’s laser pointer, which ricocheted off the bullet-proof glass. Khodorkovsky, as if lecturing a classroom, didn’t seem to notice. He wove in and out of abstruse technical detail and said he was the only one qualified to give it. “You’re dealing with an expert in this field,” he said, noting that he had been doing this for over 20 years since graduating from a Moscow oil institute “with excellent grades.” He dove into legal jargon and obscure citations, calmly berating the prosecutor Valery Lakhtin whenever he interrupted him. “If he’s going to keep interrupting me, he may as well make an objection,” Khodorkovsky said. And the judge, when he wasn’t laughing or rolling his eyes at the defense team, often helped. Sometimes he told Lakhtin which rule he should cite.

Next to Khodorkovsky, Lebedev listened and took notes, and looked mostly like a spare in a dugout: feet up, haunches drawn, smacking his gum with a double-jointed jaw. Periodically, he would indulge in an outburst, like when the judge announced yet another recess. Lebedev jumped from the bench and shouted into the microphone, “What recess! This is just how you stall!” The judge disregarded him, so Lebedev called to his lawyer. “Lena!” he screamed. “My Talmud!”

Khodorkovsky‘s point, it seemed, was to explain in emotionally empty, hyper-rational terms—and with the counterweight of Lebedev’s grimacing mockery—that the prosecution’s case was “politically motivated” and “bogus,” and that its arguments amounted to “legal schizophrenia.” “I would call it a tragifarce,” one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers told me outside the courtroom. “It was important not just to put forward these motions, but to show that there was no reasonable answer to them. We understood this perfectly—they have nothing to say.”

And Khodorkovsky has the megaphone to tell the world whatever he wants. Much of his wealth is gone and his family has been notched far below their prior opulence, but he still has a press center, lawyers to spare, and several PR agencies around the world working to make sure reporters keep writing about the story, that Russian and Western newspapers keep publishing his political manifestoes, and that dissidents, pro-democracy advocates, and President Barack Obama keep Khodorkovsky’s plight in mind. Even actor Richard Schiff, who played Toby on “The West Wing,” has taken up the cause, visiting Moscow to spend time with Khodorkovsky’s defense team.

In trying to improve his public profile while shining a spotlight on the incompetent, corrupt, and politically motivated Russian judicial system, Khodorkovsky and his supporters are hoping to fast track his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which can then put some pressure on the Kremlin. It is classic Khodorkovsky: a consummate government insider during perestroika and the Yeltsin era, Khodorkovsky used his knowledge of the system’s wiring to make it work for him. Now, he is using his knowledge of the Putin regime to free himself, or, if he can’t do that, further discredit the man who destroyed his life. (In 2005, for example, he decided to run for the Russian parliament to take advantage of a legal loophole: convicts can’t run, but his case was on appeal, so he wasn’t yet technically a felon yet. Then, as a member of parliament, he could snuggle up in his legal immunity and forget the uranium mines of Siberia.)

And Monday Khodorkovsky showed, once again, that he hasn’t lost his operator’s touch. It’s a talent he’ll need to keep fighting the decidedly vague, odd charges against him—charges no one, including his mother, thinks he has much of a chance of defeating.

And if he loses?

“Keep fighting,” she says. “The Exodus took 40 years.”

Julia Ioffe is a writer living in Moscow.

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When it comes to war, it is a natural human tendency to identify good guys and bad guys—and sometimes, it is a sensible one. Around the world, there are, and always have been, conflicts in which the preponderance of evil clearly lies on one side: World War II, for example, or the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

And then, there are conflicts like the one unfolding in Chechnya, where a government, having killed hundreds of thousands of civilians since 1994, is now running an authoritarian police state of the most brutal kind—and the other side is responding by murdering children and commuters.

I had only recently returned from Chechnya when, last week, Chechen insurgents sent two suicide bombers to blow themselves up in the Moscow subway system during the Monday-morning rush hour, killing 39 people. The chilling footage of that carnage brought me back to 2005, when I made a pilgrimage to the site of the massacre at an elementary school in Beslan, Russia. In the aftermath of that tragedy—in which more than 330 people, most of them children, were killed in a storm of explosions—I saw pieces of dried-up human flesh hanging from the walls where a female suicide bomber had blown herself up; I saw notes that parents had written to their murdered children begging forgiveness; and I saw scores of little boys’ blazers, which had belonged to the victims, lying in a stack. Ten months after the bloodbath, one woman, whose apartment faced the school, told me she would never open her windows again. “If I opened them the wind would carry particles of burnt children into my apartment,” she said.

The man believed to have masterminded the Beslan massacre was Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov. The self-proclaimed “Emir of the Caucasus Emirate,” he is one of the few surviving Chechen chieftains who have fought against the Russians since 1994, when the Kremlin sent troops into the secessionist region, commencing the first of two brutal wars. Russia officially declared the second conflict over last year—but neither side has really stopped fighting. Umarov’s aim is to establish an Islamic caliphate that would be independent from Russia, would be governed by strict sharia law, and would span several republics of Russia’s restive and mostly Muslim North Caucasus. For months now, Umarov has been pledging to attack Russian cities. Days after the Moscow subway bombings, he surfaced to claim credit.

Umarov’s insurgency is not an isolated movement. For years, international jihadists have fought and died in Chechnya, and foreign fighters are believed to run Taliban-style training camps in southern Chechnya’s nearly unassailable mountains. Meanwhile, American troops in Afghanistan say they have faced off against Chechen fighters.

But, if Umarov and his followers are both depraved and dangerous, their nemeses are hardly better. Presiding over Chechnya is a Kremlin-appointed strongman named Ramzan Kadyrov; most Chechens, employing the strained familiarity that subjects often reserve for despots, call him simply Ramzan. I met Ramzan back in 2004, when his father was president of Chechnya. At the time, he was in charge of several thousand armed men responsible for his father’s security. Both Kadyrovs were former separatists who had switched sides in 1999; the Kremlin, which had been looking for a loyal leader to represent its interests in Chechnya, embraced them. (Both Ramzan and the rebels are Muslim.)

My interview with Ramzan was scheduled to take place in a gym. When I arrived, the future president was boxing. He boxed for an hour, throwing punches at some guy in the ring, while I and several other Western journalists stood waiting in the sweaty air. Several Chechens had told me that Ramzan and his forces were operating torture pits and secret prisons, like Liberia’s Charles “Chuckie” Taylor Jr., or Iraq’s Qusay Hussein. Specifically, I had been told that Kadyrov occasionally tortured his victims personally, sometimes using them as human punching bags. 

“If I had a private prison, I wouldn’t tell you,” Ramzan said, grinning, when he had finally finished sparring and graced us with the promised interview. Was it true that he executed detainees? “Naturally, if they resist, then ...”—he whistled and gave the air a quick double punch—“salaam aleikum!”

A few months after our meeting, a bomb detonated beneath the grandstand from which Ramzan’s father was watching a military parade, killing him. At age 27, Ramzan more or less inherited Chechnya, first as deputy prime minister, then as prime minister. Vladimir Putin appointed Ramzan president when he turned 30, the minimum age required by the Chechen constitution to hold the post.

Now 33, Ramzan rules Chechnya like a warlord-in-chief. On a whim, he creates laws and introduces holidays aimed at bringing the region in line with the practices of an Islamic state. Ignoring Russian law, he has allowed polygamy in Chechnya and mandated that all female civil servants wear headscarves to work. At the same time, he viciously persecutes anyone he suspects of radical Islamism. Ramzan is committed neither to secularism nor to fundamentalist Islam; his prime commitment is to stamping his own authority on every aspect of life in Chechnya. “No one dares peep,” says Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, a researcher at the Russian human rights group Memorial. “He controls everything: business, culture, what women wear.”

Over a brutal approach to governing, Ramzan has plastered a creepy façade of normalcy—which I saw when I returned to Chechnya this year, for the first time since 2004. The capital, Grozny, features sushi bars, pizza parlors, and Internet cafés. Ramzan cuts ribbons at new roads and movie theaters, all opened with funding that comes partially from the Kremlin and partially from a special fund he named after his father. The holdings and sources of the fund are kept secret. Several Chechen businessmen told me, on condition that their names not be published, that a lot of the fund’s money is extorted from local businessmen and wealthy members of Chechen families living outside the region.

I also saw the human cost of Ramzan’s iron fist. One of the people I visited was a woman named Khava, whose son, Alikhan Markuev, had disappeared last August. One night, two unmarked cars carrying armed men in black ski masks cut off the sedan in which Khava and Alikhan were heading home. Alikhan—a skinny young man with dark, wide-set eyes—was in the back; Khava was in the front passenger seat, and another son was driving. The men dragged Alikhan out of the car, shoved him into one of theirs, and sped off. Witnesses who watched from their homes later told the family that they saw the cars head into a police station just a few short blocks from the scene of the abduction.

Family members searched for Alikhan for more than three months, filing countless reports and petitions with the police and the prosecutor’s office, but no one would say where he was. Then, in late November, the police summoned Khava to identify her son’s body. He was wearing a camouflage jacket, the kind often worn by Chechen rebels. Like a rebel, too, he had a long beard. He had been shot in the shoulder; his face was bruised. His eyes were open.

Law enforcement officials told Khava that her son had been a separatist fighter and was killed during a raid. They said they had evidence that Alikhan was a rebel. The evidence was the ringtone on his cell phone: the howl of a wolf, a symbol of the Chechen insurgency.

Alikhan did have a brief history with the rebel movement. In 2007, when he was 19, he had joined the insurgents. But Khava insists that her son surrendered to the police a year after joining the rebels, and she has government amnesty papers to prove it. “Cleared of all responsibility,” declares the 2008 document she thrust into my hands. After that, say relatives and human rights workers familiar with his case, Alikhan had stayed away from the rebels.

It is impossible to verify the accusation put forth by Alikhan’s family and human rights activists—that Chechen government forces kidnapped him, made him grow a beard, dressed him up as a rebel fighter, and executed him so that they could use his death as an example of their success in wiping out the separatists—but their account is a plausible one. “There is a fight going on against terror,” says Kheda Saratova, a Chechen human rights worker who visited Khava with me. “Of course you have to show some results. These fake, created, and killed so-called fighters are the main proof.” But, whatever the particulars surrounding Alikhan’s death, there is little doubt in the mind of human rights activists that the government was to blame. “All the circumstances of this case leave no doubt that Alikhan Markuev was abducted and killed by officers of law enforcement agencies,” wrote Svetlana Gannushkina, one of the founders of Memorial, in a recent open letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. “The death of Alikhan Sultanovich Markuev is not an exceptional event in the North Caucasus, but a commonplace one.”

Alikhan’s story was not the only one I heard. An old man was executed in front of his neighbors last summer because he may have fed the rebels. Other victims have included relatives of suspected insurgents. I met one such man, Denilbek Askhabov, a 70-year-old tomato farmer from Shali. Last May, commandos gunned down one of his sons, who they said was a rebel leader, and kicked and beat the old man with rifle butts until he suffered a concussion and a heart attack. Three months later, the commandos returned to arrest Askhabov’s other son, a legally blind greenhouse worker. Askhabov has not heard any news of this son since and assumes that he, too, has been killed.

Memorial recorded the abductions of at least 86 people in one-third of Chechnya during the first nine months of 2009—more than twice as many as in all of 2008, and nearly three times as many as in the year before. Some of these disappeared eventually turn up dead. “There used to be trials,” Sokiryanskaya, the Memorial researcher, told me. “Now, they are simply shot.”

Who is the lesser evil in this fight: the fanatical separatists or the fanatical dictator? It is an impossible question to answer. Yet it is abundantly clear who the victims are. The Kremlin says the war is over. The victims—in Chechnya and Moscow—know otherwise.

Anna Badkhen’s book about war and food, Peace Meals, will be published in October. Her trip to Chechnya this year was made possible by a grant from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

It has become a sign of spring: as swallows crowd the sky over Madrid, Real is eliminated at the knock-out stage of the European Champions League. Yet again, the richest club in the world has spent obscene amounts of money with the sole intention of winning the most important club competition in the world, but on March 10, they were knocked out from the last 16 for the sixth year in a row (in 2003, they were eliminated from the last eight). This time, they were brought low by Olympic Lyon, who beat them at home and tied them in Madrid. Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo, the FIFA World Players of the Year 2007 and 2008 respectively, who cost Real $205 milliion last summer, exited the Champions League with barely a whimper. Florentino Perez, president of Real Madrid, orchestrated the purchase, making Ronaldo the most expensive signing at the price of $105 for a six year contract, with a $1 billion buy-out clause. The spending spree eventually amounted to $350 million. Perez had already served a tour as Real’s President from 2000-2006, masterminding the galacticos approach to club management—buying the world’s best players at any price, regardless of the team’s actual needs, which is why Real always had a surplus of forwards and a shortage of defenders. Recently reelected (unopposed) on the platform of assembling a new galacticos team, Perez promised winning the decima—the tenth European Champions title for Real—to his Madridista constituency ever tormented by the mismatch between their delusions of greatness and Real’s seasonal failures. This spring, Real was eliminated with a goal by Miralem Pjanic, a nineteen-year old Bosnian who grew up in Luxembourg and probably cost Lyon less than Real’s starting line-up annually spends on hair care.

So, swallows twitter over Madrid, the air is full of vernal fragrances, and the local newspapers are viciously demanding the head of Real’s coach. This time around, the unfortunate head belongs to Manuel Pellegrini, a capable Chilean who was pried away from Villareal, which he had turned from a small-town club to a European contender—in 2006 they lost in the Champions League semifinals against Arsenal. To think that Pellegrini is to blame for this year’s debacle you have to be a habitually delusional Madridista, or live and feed inside Perez’s colon, or have failed to see the game against Lyon. After producing some chances in the first half—a few of them missed by Gonzalo Higuaín who wastes at least two for every goal he scores—Real was adrift in the second half, apparently expecting Lyon players to lie down and die before galactic greatness, and was promptly outrun and outperformed by the disciplined, committed Lyon team. Visible was the deflation of Real’s desire, embarrassing the lack of tactical discipline, palpable the absence of the team spirit. While Lyon made necessary strategic adjustments in the second half, playing like a re-tuned orchestra, Real’s galacticos indulged in tedious, off-key solos. Even the midfielder Guti (a divinity among Madridistas because of his fanatical club loyalty and meticulous hair care) noted afterwards the shortage of “team ethic.” And when Pellegrini, in an attempt to change the game dynamic, withdrew the ineffectual Kaka (whose season has been widely deemed as disappointing), Kaka’s agent pretty much instantly declared Pellegrini “a coward” in a tweet.

A non-delusional non-Madridista would expect that, after seven successive years of disappointment, some useful lessons could be sucked out of the sucking experience. Say, this: defenders matter because defending matters, so investing a chunk in a serious, rather than a cut-rate (Garay? Arbeola?), defender might be a good idea. Or this: managerial stability might be conducive to team spirit. In the twenty-four years during which Sir Alex Ferguson has been at the helm of Manchester United, Real Madrid has appointed 24 coaches, a few of them fired only to be hired again a few years later. Or this: hair care is vastly overrated. Witness Cris, the hairless Lyon defender who in the Madrid game put Ronaldo and Higuaín in his combless pocket.

There are so many lessons from the spring humiliation that could be learned by Señor Perez and Real, but learned they will be not. The galacticos approach always reminded me of what I read once about the ways they catch monkeys in some parts of Africa: a piece of juicy fruit is placed in a jug with a narrow opening, which is then left near the monkey feeding ground. The sucker monkey smells the fruit, finds the jug, puts the hand in it and grabs the fruit, but then cannot take the fruit out. Incapable of letting the fruit go, the monkey cannot run with a jug and is easily captured. Even if the monkey breaks the jug and escapes, it is likely to forget the experience and return for another piece of fruit, as do Perez and Real. For years now, one of the joys of following European soccer has been watching Real stick its hand in the jug, over and over again.

But this spring might be the last one for my seasonal schadenfreude. Real’s monkey business approach might be a model, alas, for the bleak future of European soccer. Many clubs, including a few big ones, are tottering under the weight of immense debt. When money was cheap, huge loans were taken out to finance the purchase of players at prices insanely inflated by the likes of Real and Chelsea. In England clubs took to courting investors, many of whom would borrow the money to buy the club and then transfer the debt onto it. The Glazer family thus purchased Manchester United which is now burdened with a billion dollar debt. Liverpool FC, now owned by Hicks and Gillette (not a Vegas comedy duo, actually), needs to find more than $100 million by July to service the loan they took out to buy the club. If they don’t find the money, which they probably won’t, there might by a fire sale of players—Chelsea is already sniffing around Fernando Torres, and Real might be interested in Steven Gerrard.

After the collapse of the global financial market, the flow of cheap—or any money—has dried up and insolvency is rampant among European soccer clubs. Many bubbles are bursting, and after the suds have dried there will be only a few big boys left standing, with the majority of valuable soccer talent on their books. The big Euro clubs might form something along the lines of the G14 group—an association of the wealthiest clubs that a few years ago threatened to form its own Euro league but was dismantled under the UEFA pressure. The big boys would form their own Euro league everyone would have to buy into, akin to the American sports franchise leagues (NBA, NFL, NHL), and then make exclusive TV and sponsorship deals, sucking the money out of the diminished market. Countless clubs with history and tradition but no access to money or TV would whither in oblivion. The same set of players and coaches would rotate through the limited number of clubs year after year, no club would ever be relegated, there would be few shock eliminations, and the sport of soccer would become entirely reliant on spectacle, celebrity, and hair care.

Thus Perez and Real might be in a very good position. Real is loaded with player assets, it is too big to fail, and even if the shaky Spanish economy collapses, Real’s monkey business might well outlive it, as the club is the biggest global brand name in soccer, not least because of the galactic fame of its stars. Perez’s consistent ignoring of the spring lessons might thus turn out to be visionary consistency. Real Madrid might just be on the verge of eternal summer: a juicy fruit on every branch, all the jugs broken, moneyed monkeys ruling the world.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project and Love and Obstacles. He will be writing many more soccer columns for The New Republic and will participate in our upcoming World Cup blog.

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JERUSALEM—Suddenly, my city feels again like a war zone. Since the suicide bombings ended in 2005, life in Jerusalem has been for the most part relatively calm. The worst disruptions have been the traffic jams resulting from construction of a light rail, just like in a normal city. But now, again, there are clusters of helmeted border police near the gates of the Old City, black smoke from burning tires in the Arab village across from my porch, young men marching with green Islamist flags toward my neighborhood, ambulances parked at strategic places ready for this city's ultimate nightmare.

The return of menace to Jerusalem is not because a mid-level bureaucrat announced stage four of a seven-stage process in the eventual construction of 1,600 apartments in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighborhood in northeast Jerusalem. Such announcements and building projects have become so routine over the years that Palestinians have scarcely responded, let alone violently. In negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, the permanence of Ramat Shlomo, and other Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, has been a given. Ramat Shlomo, located between the Jewish neighborhoods of French Hill and Ramot, will remain within the boundaries of Israeli Jerusalem according to every peace plan. Unlike the small Jewish enclaves inserted into Arab neighborhoods, on which Israelis are strongly divided, building in the established Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem defines the national consensus.

Why, then, the outbreak of violence now? Why Hamas's "day of rage" over Jerusalem and the Palestinian Authority's call to gather on the Temple Mount to "save" the Dome of the Rock from non-existent plans to build the Third Temple? Why the sudden outrage over rebuilding a synagogue, destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948, in the Old City's Jewish Quarter, when dozens of synagogues and yeshivas have been built in the quarter without incident?

The answer lies not in Jerusalem but in Washington. By placing the issue of building in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem at the center of the peace process, President Obama has inadvertently challenged the Palestinians to do no less.

Astonishingly, Obama is repeating the key tactical mistake of his failed efforts to restart Middle East peace talks over the last year. Though Obama's insistence on a settlement freeze to help restart negotiations was legitimate, he went a step too far by including building in East Jerusalem. Every Israeli government over the last four decades has built in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; no government, let alone one headed by the Likud, could possibly agree to a freeze there. Obama made resumption of negotiations hostage to a demand that could not be met. The result was that Palestinian leaders were forced to adjust their demands accordingly.

Obama is directly responsible for one of the most absurd turns in the history of Middle East negotiations. Though Palestinian leaders negotiated with Israeli governments that built extensively in the West Bank, they now refused to sit down with the first Israeli government to actually agree to a suspension of building. Obama's demand for a building freeze in Jerusalem led to a freeze in negotiations.

Finally, after intensive efforts, the administration produced the pathetic achievement of "proximity talks"—setting Palestinian-Israeli negotiations back a generation, to the time when Palestinian leaders refused to sit at the same table with Israelis.

That Obama could be guilty of such amateurishness was perhaps forgivable because he was, after all, an amateur. But he has now taken his failed policy and intensified it. By demanding that Israel stop building in Ramat Shlomo and elsewhere in East Jerusalem—and placing that demand at the center of American-Israeli relations—he's ensured that the Palestinians won't show up even to proximity talks. This is no longer amateurishness; it is pique disguised as policy.

Initially, when the announcement about building in Ramat Shlomo was made, Israelis shared Vice President Biden's humiliation and were outraged at their government's incompetence. The widespread sense here was that Netanyahu deserved the administration's condemnation, not because of what he did but because of what he didn't do: He failed to convey to all parts of his government the need for caution during Biden's visit, symptomatic of his chaotic style of governing generally.

But not even the opposition accused Netanyahu of a deliberate provocation. These are not the days of Yitzhak Shamir, the former Israeli prime minister who used to greet a visit from Secretary of State James Baker with an announcement of the creation of another West Bank settlement. Netanyahu has placed the need for strategic cooperation with the U.S. on the Iranian threat ahead of the right-wing political agenda. That's why he included the Labor Party into his coalition, and why he accepted a two-state solution—an historic achievement that set the Likud, however reluctantly, within the mainstream consensus supporting Palestinian statehood. The last thing Netanyahu wanted was to embarrass Biden during his goodwill visit and trigger a clash with Obama over an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.

Nor is it likely that there was a deliberate provocation from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, which runs the interior ministry that oversees building procedures. Shas, which supports peace talks and territorial compromise, is not a nationalist party. Its interest is providing housing for its constituents, like the future residents of Ramat Shlomo; provoking international incidents is not its style.
Finally, the very ordinariness of the building procedure—the fact that construction in Jewish East Jerusalem is considered by Israelis routine—is perhaps the best proof that there was no intentional ambush of Biden. Apparently no one in the interior ministry could imagine that a long-term plan over Ramat Shlomo would sabotage a state visit.

In turning an incident into a crisis, Obama has convinced many Israelis that he was merely seeking a pretext to pick a fight with Israel. Netanyahu was inadvertently shabby; Obama, deliberately so.
According to a banner headline in the newspaper Ma'ariv, senior Likud officials believe that Obama's goal is to topple the Netanyahu government, by encouraging those in the Labor Party who want to quit the coalition.

The popular assumption is that Obama is seeking to prove his resolve as a leader by getting tough with Israel. Given his ineffectiveness against Iran and his tendency to violate his own self-imposed deadlines for sanctions, the Israeli public is not likely to be impressed. Indeed, Israelis' initial anger at Netanyahu has turned to anger against Obama. According to an Israel Radio poll on March 16, 62 percent of Israelis blame the Obama administration for the crisis, while 20 percent blame Netanyahu. (Another 17 percent blame Shas leader Eli Yishai.)

In the last year, the administration has not once publicly condemned the Palestinians for lack of good faith—even though the Palestinian Authority media has, for example, been waging a months-long campaign denying the Jews' historic roots in Jerusalem. Just after Biden left Ramallah, Palestinian officials held a ceremony naming a square in the city after a terrorist responsible for the massacre of 38 Israeli civilians. (To its credit, yesterday, the administration did condemn the Palestinian Authority for inciting violence in Jerusalem.)

Obama's one-sided public pressure against Israel could intensify the atmosphere of "open season" against Israel internationally. Indeed, the European Union has reaffirmed it is linking improved economic relations with Israel to the resumption of the peace process—as if it's Israel rather than the Palestinians that has refused to come to the table.

If the administration's main tactical error in Middle East negotiating was emphasizing building in Jerusalem, its main strategic error was assuming that a two-state solution was within easy reach. Shortly after Obama took office, Rahm Emanuel was quoted in the Israeli press insisting that a Palestinian state would be created within Obama's first term. Instead, a year later, we are in the era of suspended proximity talks. Now the administration is demanding that Israel negotiate over final status issues in proximity talks as a way of convincing the Palestinians to agree to those talks--as if Israelis would agree to discuss the future of Jerusalem when Palestinian leaders refuse to even sit with them.

To insist on the imminent possibility of a two-state solution requires amnesia. Biden's plea to Israelis to consider a withdrawal to an approximation of the 1967 borders in exchange for peace ignored the fact that Israel made that offer twice in the last decade: first, when Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted the Clinton Proposals of December 2000, and then more recently when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert renewed the offer to Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas, says Olmert, never replied.

The reason for Palestinian rejection of a two-state solution is because a deal would require Palestinians to confine the return of the descendants of the 1948 refugees to Palestine rather than to Israel. That would prevent a two-state solution from devolving into a bi-national, one-state solution. Israel's insistence on survival remains the obstacle to peace.

To achieve eventual peace, the international community needs to pressure Palestinian leaders to forgo their claim to Haifa and Jaffa and confine their people's right of return to a future Palestinian state—just as the Jews will need to forgo their claim to Hebron and Bethlehem and confine their people's right of return to the state of Israel. That is the only possible deal: conceding my right of return to Greater Israel in exchange for your right of return to Greater Palestine. A majority of Israelis—along with the political system—has accepted that principle. On the Palestinian side, the political system has rejected it.

In the absence of Palestinian willingness to compromise on the right of return, negotiations should not focus on a two-state solution but on more limited goals.

There have been positive signs of change on the Palestinian side in the last few years. The rise of Hamas has created panic within Fatah, and the result is, for the first time, genuine security cooperation with Israel. Also, the emergence of Salam Fayyad as Palestinian prime minister marks a shift from ideological to pragmatic leadership (though Fayyad still lacks a power base). Finally, the West Bank economy is growing, thanks in part to Israel's removal of dozens of roadblocks. The goal of negotiations at this point in the conflict should be to encourage those trends.

But by focusing on building in Jerusalem, Obama has undermined that possibility too. To the fictitious notion of a peace process, Obama has now added the fiction of an intransigent Israel blocking the peace process.

The administration, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Yedito Aharonot, is making an even more insidious accusation against Israel. During his visit, wrote Yediot Aharanot, Biden told Israeli leaders that their policies are endangering American lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. The report has been denied in the White House. Whether or not the remark was made, what is clear today in Jerusalem is that Obama's recklessness is endangering Israeli--and Palestinian--lives. As I listen to police sirens outside my window, Obama's political intifada against Netanyahu seems to be turning into a third intifada over Jerusalem.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and a contributing editor of The New Republic.

“Let’s talk about why you plan to kill me.” It was March 1987, and Milt Bearden was sitting in a spare interview room at the Islamabad headquarters of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Bearden was then the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, serving as the link between Washington and the U.S.-funded Afghan rebels bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan. He had come to see the mujahedin’s most lethal warlord, a radical Islamist named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. No other Afghan leader had received more money from the United States than Hekmatyar, yet he showed his Western patrons precious little gratitude. He claimed to despise the United States as much as the Soviet Union, and, while visiting the United Nations two years earlier, he had refused an invitation to meet Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office. Now Bearden was hearing grumbling from Washington about why the United States was financing an anti-American zealot known for splashing acid in the faces of unveiled women. He decided it was time to confront a man he considered “the darkest” of the Afghan warlords. And Hekmatyar was convinced he’d come to snuff him.

Hekmatyar, then about 40, fingered a strand of agate prayer beads. He had been summoned by the ISI, which served as the conduit for U.S. aid to the Afghan rebels. He has a long thin face, dark eyes, and a long beard, and is typically clad in a black turban and robes. His appearance has been described as feline, but the façade is misleading. As Bearden would later recall in his memoir, The Main Enemy, Hekmatyar “thought nothing of ordering an execution for a slight breach of party discipline.” On this day, he was sullen, and the two men squabbled about Hekmatyar’s reputation for brutality, which the warlord alternately denied and dismissed as unimportant. Then Hekmatyar cut to the chase: “I know what you’re planning to do,” he said. “You’re armed. I can see that.” Bearden opened his jacket to show that he wasn’t carrying a gun. (Although he was--in the small of his back.) He asked Hekmatyar why the CIA would want to eliminate its most valuable anti-Soviet fighter. Because, Hekmatyar replied, the United States understood that the Soviets were already done for. Hekmatyar had now defeated one superpower, and the Americans feared what he might do to them. Addressing Hekmatyar by the title he had acquired from Kabul University, Bearden said: “I think the engineer flatters himself.”

Only prematurely. Fifteen years later, in May 2002, a CIA-operated aerial drone circling near Kabul shot a Hellfire anti-tank missile at a convoy on the ground. The explosion killed several men, but failed to claim its target: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. By then, the Afghan warlord was on Washington’s most-wanted list as a leader of the post-2001 Afghan insurgency. But, eight years later, circumstances have changed once again. The United States is now considering whether it’s time to stop trying to kill Hekmatyar and start negotiating with him--a choice that could have crucial implications for Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan.

The United States is not fighting one enemy in Afghanistan. While the media often equate “insurgency” with “Taliban,” there are, in fact, three major insurgent groups. The biggest is the Quetta Shura Taliban. Led by the famous one-eyed cleric Mullah Omar, this group is based in the Pakistani city of Quetta and fights mainly in the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Another is the Haqqani network, run by the father-and-son team of Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani from Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas. The Haqqanis and their Al Qaeda allies sow chaos in Afghanistan’s east and were likely behind the double-agent suicide bomb at a CIA base near Khost this winter.

Then there is Hekmatyar. His beard now half gray, he is again tormenting foreign infidels. His Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin--which translates roughly as “Gulbuddin’s Islamic Party,” shorthanded as HIG by the U.S. military--may be the smallest of the three insurgent wings, but it is “no less lethal” than the others, as the American commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, recently put it. That was clear last October 3, when over 150 insurgents overwhelmed a remote outpost in Nuristan Province, killing eight American soldiers and wounding 24. Hekmatyar is believed to have aided and perhaps organized the attack--just the latest ominous sign of what one senior U.S. military official in Kabul calls his increasing activity in the provinces north and east of Kabul. But, while Hekmatyar shares his fellow insurgents’ rhetoric about defeating the Americans, he is not as doctrinaire. A lifelong deal-maker, he cares most about one thing: power. “He wants to ensure he has a role in the government,” says the military official.

A thirst for power has driven Hekmatyar for more than 30 years. Indeed, he once nearly ruled Afghanistan. Born to a Pashtun family, he attended a military high school and then Kabul University’s prestigious College of Engineering. But he gave up his studies to join Kabul’s Islamic youth movement, which vehemently opposed the Soviet-backed communists then taking over Afghanistan’s government. In 1972, Hekmatyar murdered a Maoist student, an act that landed him in prison for two years. After his release, he sought refuge in Pakistan, where he founded Hezb-e-Islami in 1975 and developed ties with the ISI. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Pakistan was in a high Islamist phase and felt deeply threatened by the godless communists on its border. Hekmatyar became the ISI’s chief proxy warrior against the Soviets--with the help of what would eventually be some $600 million in U.S. aid.

He proved a brutally effective warrior. “To the Soviets,” writes George Crile in Charlie Wilson’s War, “he was the bogeyman behind the most unspeakable torture of their captured soldiers. Invariably his name was invoked with new arrivals to keep them from wandering off base unaccompanied, lest they fall into the hands of this depraved fanatic whose specialty, they claimed, was skinning infidels alive.” More effective than such terror, however, was his men’s use of U.S. Stinger missiles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers to destroy countless Soviet tanks and helicopters.

After the Soviets completed their withdrawal in 1989, Hekmatyar expected to rule the country. But so did other mujahedin leaders, and vicious fighting ensued. From 1992 to 1994, the Afghan capital became a battleground as Hekmatyar, still in possession of a U.S.-supplied arsenal, wantonly shelled the city. “He was sitting in the suburbs of Kabul, and he was sending rockets, regardless of where they would land. Thousands of Afghans died,” says Ali Jalali, who served as Afghanistan’s interior minister from 2003 to 2005. (In a strange historical footnote, one rocket struck a compound where Hamid Karzai was being held captive by political rivals, allowing him to escape and then flee the country.) “We have already had one and a half million martyrs,” Hekmatyar remorselessly explained in 1992. “We are ready to offer as many to establish a true Islamic republic.” But the Afghan people disagreed. Hekmatyar’s brutality marginalized him, and he was no match for the anti-warlord Taliban movement. Unable to hold his ground militarily when the Taliban stormed Kabul in 1996, Hekmatyar fled to Iran.

He was far from finished. After the United States ousted the Taliban in 2001, Hekmatyar was not invited to join the Karzai government, and he resentfully called for a new jihad. Iran expelled him soon after, and he quickly rejoined the fight. Hekmatyar linked up with Al Qaeda--he claims to have helped Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora--and, in 2002, took credit for an attempt to kill Karzai. He also likely renewed his ties with the ISI, which, at minimum, has allowed HIG unhindered use of the Shamshatoo refugee camp southeast of Peshawar as a logistics and recruiting hub.

Though his profile has waxed and waned during the war, Hekmatyar has recently re-emerged with a vengeance. He takes credit for a 2008 attack on a military parade that nearly killed Karzai and is also thought to be responsible for an August 2008 ambush near Kabul that left ten French soldiers dead and some of the bodies reportedly mutilated. And then, there was the vicious attack in Nuristan. Most ominously, perhaps, Hekmatyar has found common ground with his old Taliban rivals. As the Afghanistan-based academic Sippi Moghaddam writes in the compilation Decoding the New Taliban, the employment of Hekmatyar’s network “is of tremendous advantage to the Taliban in their activities in the northeast.”

Obama administration officials don’t expect to crush the Afghan insurgency militarily. The current U.S. surge aims to turn the momentum of the war and then attempt a political “reconciliation” with elements of the insurgency. The effort will be aimed primarily at low-level combatants and local leaders who fight more for money and parochial reasons than for grand ideology. Senior insurgent leaders, like the Haqqanis and top Quetta Shura Taliban members, are probably just too fanatical to deal with. But Hekmatyar is another story. During the Afghan civil war, he was notorious for casually shifting allegiances, even if it meant allying with blood rivals. “This is a man who has switched sides his whole life,” says the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel, who led the Obama administration’s first Afghanistan review.

Hekmatyar has flirted with peace talks for years, but it’s clear that both sides have a keener interest than before. “It’s gotten considerably more serious than it was even a year ago,” says Candace Rondeaux, a Kabul-based analyst for The International Crisis Group. Even though the State Department has officially designates Hekmatyar a wanted terrorist, last April, a Hekmatyar emissary met with an aide to Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In January, Hekmatyar’s son attended unofficial reconciliation talks in the Maldives with a group of Afghan legislators.

A deal with Hekmatyar could give Obama’s prospects in Afghanistan a huge boost. Even now, American troops are hard-pressed to pacify southern Afghanistan, and the United States can ill afford to see the north slip any further into chaos. Disarming Hekmatyar’s fighters, sometimes estimated to number in the thousands, would be a major strategic boost. And, if a hardened anti-American warlord like Hekmatyar were to renounce violence, that could set an example for his Pashtun admirers throughout the region.

What does he want? Hekmatyar insists that foreign troops must leave Afghanistan within 18 months. But he may be flexible if it means getting a taste of power. It helps that Hekmatyar already has a toe in politics: HIG’s nonviolent political arm--which claims not to take cues from Hekmatyar, though few believe it--already holds 19 of 246 seats in the Afghan parliament, and the country’s economic minister is a member. Hekmatyar recently asserted that 70 percent of Afghans support his party. That’s doubtful; but the claim was a sign that the warlord may still cling to his dream of ruling Afghanistan. (A case in point: Last year, a reputed plan that would have granted Hekmatyar’s party more control of the government but exiled him to Saudi Arabia for three years went nowhere.) It also helps that, after 30 years of fighting, Hekmatyar may simply be tiring of jihad. “I have dedicated my whole life to struggle,” he wrote in a spring 2008 letter to Karzai offering to talk, “but I am old.”

Still, cutting a deal with Hekmatyar that grants him legitimized power could amount to a horrendous moral compromise. The Afghan people remember well the blood on Hekmatyar’s hands. “In the urban part of the civil society, it will be like a bomb that will destroy the image of the government,” says Riccardo Redaelli, an Italian academic who studies Afghan politics. Nor is empowering a man who advocates strict Islamic law likely to play well in the United States. “Hekmatyar is a pretty difficult character to sell to the American people,” says Riedel.

But these are desperate times. Hamid Karzai is embattled, paranoid, and desperate to shore up his political base. Barack Obama, meanwhile, seems less interested in the political composition of Afghanistan than in reducing violence to a level that will allow for a U.S. withdrawal. “At the end of the day, we’ll take what we can get,” says Riedel. The engineer was right to flatter himself.

Michael Crowley is a senior editor of The New Republic.

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What were two members of a violent Basque separatist group doing with 11 members of Colombia's narco-Marxist insurgency in a remote corner of southwestern Venezuela in August 2007? According to a blockbuster indictment handed down by a Spanish judge last week, they were participating in a kind of intercontinental terrorist training camp held under the aegis of the Venezuelan military.  

More specifically, the two members of ETA, or "Basque Homeland and Freedom," were teaching the rebels from FARC, or "Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia," how to use plastic explosives and urban guerrilla tactics, such as rigging cell phones to work as bomb fuses. This unlikely alliance between FARC, a peasant-based Marxist movement financed by a massive drug-trafficking operation, and ETA, a nationalist group that specializes in shooting Spanish policemen, civil servants, and local politicians in the back of the head, dates back as far as 1993. According to the indictment, beginning in 2000, ETA plotted with FARC to murder a range of leading Colombian political figures when they traveled to Spain, including sitting president Alvaro Uribe.

But it's Venezuela's alleged involvement with two of the Spanish-speaking world's most notorious terror groups that has set off a political firestorm in Spain, where the center-left government enjoys a close relationship with the Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chávez. The indictment, which is the culmination of several years of investigation by Spanish and Colombian police, claims that Chavez's soldiers and a military intelligence officer escorted the FARC members to their August 2007 training site. What's more, among the seven FARC and six ETA members charged with conspiracy to murder and holding explosives in collaboration with a terrorist group is Arturo Cubillas Fontán, a longtime ETA leader who emigrated to Venezuela in 1989. According to El Pais, he works as head of security for Venezuela's ministry of Agriculture. (Venezuelan government sources have refused to clarify his position.) And his wife has worked in a variety of public roles throughout the Chavez administration including, currently, as head of public relations for the Agriculture ministry.

By exposing a possible link between the Chávez government and an international terror conspiracy, the indictment is a particularly hot potato in the lap of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose warm relations with Venezuela's strong man have yielded invaluable commercial advantages for Spanish multinationals. As U.S.-Venezuelan ties have worsened over the past ten years, Spanish firms have swarmed to do business in Venezuela. Today, 55 percent of Venezuela's third-largest bank is owned by Spain's sprawling BBVA bank; the country's leading mobile phone network is owned by Telefónica, Spain's privatized telecoms giant; the largest of its new electric power plants are being built by Spanish energy companies Iberdrola and Elecnor; and some of its biggest new oil contracts are going to Spanish oil giant Repsol.

Additionally, in a quirk of timing, the Venezuelan Navy received the first of four military patrol ships from Spanish shipbuilder Navantia just one day after the ETA-FARC indictment was handed down. In effect, Spain is now selling military hardware to a country whose government allegedly sponsors a terrorist group plotting aggression against the Spanish state.

No issue is as politically sensitive in Spain as Basque terrorism, so it's hardly surprising that opposition conservatives have wasted no time slamming the Zapatero government. Jorge Moragas, foreign affairs spokesman for the conservative People’s Party, decried the “excessive closeness between” Venezuela and Spain, and the party’s secretary general has called on Zapatero to consider breaking diplomatic relations with Venezuela.

But such a move would likely spur Venezuela to expropriate Spanish investments, which would freeze the profits of Madrid's multinationals (we're talking billions of euros) in Caracas. It wouldn’t be the first time Chávez has muscled his international business partners: Two years ago, his government shut down most commerce with Colombia over Uribe’s allegation that Venezuela was funding Marxist guerillas, and launched a wave of expropriations against its neighbor that continues to this day. In other words, Chávez has leverage with Spain, he knows it, and he's not afraid to use it.

This might explain why Madrid has treaded so carefully on the indictment crisis. Zapatero has mildly said he would seek “explanations” from the Venezuelan government and proceed accordingly. But even that formulation drew an angry response from the bombastic Chávez. He blustered in a recent speech, "I don’t have to explain anything, not to Zapatero or anyone!” 

In response, Spain’s foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, hurried to note that Spanish authorities were merely seeking “information” in the case, not “explanations.” But this deference left Zapatero's government exposed to fire on the domestic front. Conservative leader Mariano Rajoy called his country's virtual apology to Chávez “absolutely grotesque.”

This paints a vivid picture of the political corner Zapatero’s government has backed itself into: Protect Spanish investment in Venezuela, and you’re soft on ETA, but make a principled stand, and you put hundreds of Spanish jobs at risk. Signs so far indicate the government will swallow hard and continue to placate Venezuela. But what happens if, next week (or next month, or next year), a high-profile Colombian public figure takes a trip to Spain and gets shot in the back of the head?

Francisco Toro blogs about Venezuela in the Chávez era at Caracas Chronicles.

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Sunday is election day in Iraq—the second national parliamentary vote since the American-led invasion in 2003. U.S. officials maintained this week that Obama’s plan to withdraw all American combat troops by September 1st is still on track, but that’s almost certainly untrue if the elections don’t go smoothly. On the whole, there are reasons to hope that Iraq is finally getting on its feet: violence levels are way down—attacks have dropped from an average of 220 per day in 2007 to less than 20 a day over the last six months—and the political alliances that have formed don’t fall neatly along ethnic and religious lines. Yet there are also serious concerns that, just like in 2005, the elections could heighten sectarian tensions and send the country back towards violence and anarchy. The top American military commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, has already drawn up a contingency plan to keep certain brigades in Iraq past the deadline if the need arises. So what should we be on the lookout for on Sunday? Here’s a breakdown of the election’s biggest players, along with some of the toughest hurdles that will have to be cleared in order to solidify Iraq’s democratic status and enable a successful U.S. drawdown in the fall.

Key Players  

Nuri Kamal al-Maliki—The current Prime Minister of Iraq, Maliki is seeking a second term. After getting off to a shaky start, the PM’s popularity has been buoyed by the decrease in violence and uptick in commercial activity in Iraq over the last two years. He leads the State of Law Coalition, which includes 40 smaller parties that span Iraq’s ethnic and religious spectrum but remains dominated by Dawa, his own largely Shiite party.  

His pitch: Caught between the competing influences of Iran and the United States, Maliki decided last year to break away from his more conservative Shiite allies who ran with him in 2005. He is now attempting to walk a tightrope by fashioning a largely secular, nationalist message about improved Iraqi security and good governance that nonetheless affirms the Shiite identity of his base. 

Ibrahim al-Jaafari—Iraq’s first democratically chosen Prime Minister in 2005, Jaafari was replaced (in part due to American prodding) by Maliki as head of the governing Dawa party in 2006. Jaafari is a Shiite physician who had lived in exile for decades before returning to Iraq after the invasion. He is now Maliki’s bitter rival and a leading candidate of the conservative Iraqi National Alliance. 

His pitch: Jaafari’s split with Maliki pushed him into the arms of an openly religious Shiite alliance that also includes Ahmed Chalabi and the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, both of whom possess ties to Iran. (Another leading candidate, Hakim al-Zamili, is widely accused of having run death squads during the height of Iraq’s sectarian violence.) In recent weeks they’ve demagogued the de-Baathification ruling and played up fears of Sunni violence in an attempt to rally the country’s Shiite majority to their side.

Ayad Allawi—Elected unanimously by the Governing Council to become the first interim prime minister of Iraq, Allawi, a Shiite, is attempting a political rebirth by once again vying for the top position. A former Baath party member, Allawi broke with the party in the 1970s and was forced into exile in England. This time around, Allawi has teamed up with Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi to form Iraqiya, a Sunni-Shiite coalition.  

His pitch: Like Maliki, Allawi has campaigned on the promise of improved security. Unlike him, he’s garnered significant Sunni buy-in and called for Iraqi reintegration into the Arab world. His recent visit to Saudi Arabia underscored that message but also riled some wary Shiites. Despite the disqualification of many of its candidates—including the popular Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlaq—for alleged Baath party ties, Allawi’s Iraqiya has emerged as a serious contender in Sunday’s election. 

Reasons for Pessimism 

The Row Over De-Baathification—The Maliki government’s January decision to disqualify about 500 candidates for alleged Baath party ties has provoked a wave of suspicion and outrage throughout the country, especially in Sunni-dominated provinces. Ahmed Chalabi, who sits on the commission that made the call, has maintained that he’s simply upholding the constitution’s ban on all members of Saddam Hussein’s former party from electoral politics. Yet many Iraqis, along with nervous American officials, argue the statute is being exploited by the Shiite-dominated government for political gain. Several of the disqualified candidates were standing members of Parliament who had run without incident in the 2005 elections, making the sudden announcement all the more dubious. So far, most affected candidates have fought the ruling in the courts and not the streets, but with only one in five blacklisted candidates ultimately successful in overturning their disqualification, it’s become a lighting rod issue among opponents of the government, who view it as a symbol of widespread corruption. 

The Question of Legitimacy—The recent disqualifications, coupled with what an American intelligence briefing paper described as the “continued, pervasive, and biased targeting by the Iraqi Security Force” of Sunnis, has raised the specter of another Sunni boycott. This is a bone-chilling possibility for most Iraqis who seek to avoid a scenario like the one in 2005, when widespread boycotts helped delegitimize the elections and accelerated the country’s slide towards civil war. This time around, most Sunnis seem prepared to vote, but that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily be willing to accept the outcome. Ayad Allawi has already spoken out about the possibility of electoral “irregularities,” threatening to boycott parliament if he feels the elections were fixed. What’s more, General Odierno has publicly criticized the close ties between the Iranian regime and Ahmed Chalabi, the man largely responsible for the disqualifications. Hardly in need of an excuse to cry foul about Iranian influence, many Sunni parties have latched onto the general’s words, stoking paranoia and the possibility of post-election violence. “In the West, when your right is robbed, you go to the courts,” warned Anbar province First Deputy Governor Hikmat Jasim Zaidan. “But in Iraq, it's different—when your right is robbed, [you] resort to violence.” 

The Problem of What Comes Next—While polling in Iraq is notoriously unreliable, surveys taken by Iraqi political groups and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad suggest that Maliki’s State of Law coalition will capture 30 percent of seats, while Allawi’s Iraqiya will win 22 percent and the conservative Shiite Iraqi National Alliance will pick up 17 percent. This means that even if elections go off without a hitch and all sides accept them as legitimate, there’s still the uncertain task of forming a government. This could be made all the more difficult if Maliki’s party indeed captures the most seats and is tasked with assembling a governing coalition, as neither of the other two leading parties say they are willing to stomach his renomination as prime minister. In 2005, the Kurds were able to play kingmaker by aligning with Maliki’s party to form a majority coalition. But with a divided Shiite base in 2010, even support from the Kurdish parties may not be enough to push him over the required threshold. That makes a rapprochement between the two Shiite-dominated parties the greatest likelihood, but attaching himself to the hard-line religious establishment that he’s been trying to buck could alienate Iraq’s minorities and do serious damage to Maliki’s centrist image. 

Jesse Zwick is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.

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Is the Green Movement finished? That is what the Iranian government wants the world to believe. And it has recently been trumpeting a few pieces of evidence to make its case.

First came a statement by Mir Hossein Mousavi on New Year’s Eve, which offered five conditions for ending the current impasse. But because it did not directly repeat Mousavi’s oft-quoted notion that the June elections were rigged, Kayhan and Rajanews—the two news outlets closest to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad—tried to claim the statement as a major victory for the regime.