Is the Russian counter-terrorist experience applicable against the current form of political terrorism?
GONCHAROV: Deep in our Soviet past, a drunken collective farmer assaulting his boss qualified as a political terrorist. In the 1970s, dissidents who could not escape from behind the Iron Curtain any other way started hijacking planes this was the beginning of air piracy. In post-Soviet Russia, many a murder has been construed as a political terror act but was purely criminal. The only real political terrorism we have known is tied to Chechnya. TIME: So Russia does not have much to offer in this context? GONCHAROV: We do have experience, because we have taken part in many covert operations fighting undesirable regimes all over the globe. Let’s be frank. When the Americans were fighting in Vietnam, we did all we could to have maximum losses inflicted on them by the Vietnamese. When we entered Afghanistan, the U.S. did the same to us. Whose creation is bin Laden? The terrorists we have trained now operate in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia. Both sides armed them, bred them to fight our cold w
